Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
-------------------------
Hey everyone!

Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!

@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.

Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!

p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!

Customer: IT is completely useless! I’m getting PORN ADS on my work computer!? This is ridiculous!!!

Friend: Oh that’s not good, perhaps your computer has a virus of some sort let me take a look!

Friend takes a look and sees that the porn ads were all provided by google ad service, they weren’t related to a virus.

Friend: so, you don’t have a virus, but so that you know google gathers metrics on the sites you visit so that it can target ads at you better. Looks like that’s what’s happening here.

Customer: .............

HR: I need a Kotlin guy to fix something quick (in a room with 7 people)

First Koltin guy: I can do it tomorrow, I have a delivery today, maybe he can do it? (me)

HR to me: you a Kotlin guy? Can you do it?

Me: yeah sure, what is "it"?

HR: ffs don't ask too many questions, "it" is Kotlin, can you do it?

Me: ok fine, what team? project? who do I need to speak to so I can get details?

HR: omg you ask so many questions!! Fuck it I'll ask someone else!

Me: How am I supposed to fix "it" if I have no idea what "it" is?

HR: leaves the room

Me: ???

Fucking useless piece of shit!

"Oh no this platform is serverless"

I hate this "serverless" term.

How does a cloud platform run serverless?

HOW?!

"yeah but like we don't have to run updates and manage the underlying stuff and can thus deploy stuff serverless"

NO.

THERE ARE ACTUAL SERVERS RUNNING IN ORDER TO RUN THIS PLATFORM.

YOU CANT RUN THIS FUCKING PLATFORM WITHOUT ACTUAL SERVERS.

HOW WOULD IT RUN THEN, ON FUCKING STARDUST?!

IT. IS. NOT. SERVERLESS. AS. LONG. AS. SERVERS. ARE. INVOLVED. AT. SOME. LEVEL.

The spam denier
_____

An old phone conversation with a client:

Me : Hello

Client : My website and server are suspended? why is that?

Me : Your server sends spam messages.

Client : We do not send spam messages, we are on vacation, there is none in the office.

Me : Yes, but it is not necessarily you, according to our logs, your server sent spam messages in Chinese and Russian, so someone from Russia or China....etc.

Client : I do not believe you, we do not speak russian or chinese, how could we then write spam messages in those languages?

Me : I told you, maybe someone exploited some vulnerability in your website or server firewall. And if you want to activate your services, please check with your webmaster and sysadmin to secure your ....

Client: I tell you my son, because I am old and I have more life experience than you ... I am 60 years old and I tell you, spam does not exist, and YOU suspended my website and server, and created issues to sell me more of your solutions and services.

I won't check my server, I won't hire a webmaster or a sysadmin, AND YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY SERVER NOW !

(I suddenly realized that I am talking to a wall, so I switched to a robotic tone).

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services..

Client : YOU WILL ACTIVATE MY S...

Me : Please resolve the issue to activate your services...

Client : WHAT IS THIS SPAM STORY ANYWAY, I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU ...

Me : Please google that word and you will understand what is spam is...

Client : YOU ARE F**ING LIARS, SPAM DOES NOT EXIST... ACTIVATE MY WEBSITE N.... Beeeep !

I hang up.

Well, I thought about configuring an automatic response for this client, or a for-loop.

His voice was really unpleasant, as if he is a heavy smoker.

Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.

Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.

Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.

Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.

Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).

Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!

Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*

Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.

Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.

Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.

Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).

I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!

Story time!

This is “Güero” (Blondie), the only cat I know who can use a computer.

I was at university. I couldn’t take my laptop to class because it was too huge, so I had to use remote connection.

One day, I connected to my laptop from the library, and everything was ok except that I couldn’t move the mouse! 😱 It was like somebody on the other side was using the mousepad. There was nobody in my house, just Blondie.

My solution? I called to my house. The cat heard the ring and left my laptop. It sounds stupid but, believe it or not, it worked! 😂

Blondie, the informatic cat.

I plan to write a book about my previous company because I had such a magical experience in that fairy land. I spent three years with indigenous tribes out of touch from the modern human civilization. They take pride in their culture and their use of MS Excel and SVN technologies.

Over the years, these tribes discovered how to organize a queuing system through Skype group chats. If a tribe member wants to update the spreadsheet, they will enter their name in the group chat until it forms a queue (name1 > name2 and so on..) and once they're done, they enter "Done" in the group chat.

It's amazing how these tribes came up with such an efficient and systematic approach of wasting their lives! Researchers are baffled with this newly uncovered secret that some of them believe it could be the work of an advanced alien civilization. There's just no way humans could have thought of that.

These tribes have a lot to teach us. Hell, I know it taught me some knowledge I wouldn't otherwise find in the modern world. During my stay there, I learned the following:

1. Why hell is good after all.
2. How to fake a coma.
3. How to recover from a stroke in 5 minutes.
4. The art of astral projection during a meeting.
5. Is that a subliminal message or are you passive aggressive?
6. What clients want = anal fisting.
7. How to stealthily check your pulse when talking to someone really stupid.
8. "Sent emails will be received" - a tribe member.
9. Hardcoding a dollar sign + shell command to make it work.
10. How to make a scrum meeting last for two hours.
11. How to collect bus tickets like a peasant for transportation reimbursement.
12. What's that smell and why does he keep sniffing it? A colleague's expired lunch.
13. Why it's wrong to confront a colleague who's always three hours late.
14. How to play Nintendo Switch in two big screens and a projector in the boardroom with glass walls.
15. Pretending this life is virtual reality.
16. Why you're not in GTA and running everyone over with your car is bad.
17. Vivisection for dummies.
18. Summoning the devil for entertainment.
19. Devil worship during working sessions.
20. The kama sutra of assasination.
21. How to speed up the dying process.
22. Is it a stiff client or rigor mortis?
23. How to control your laughter when someone is crying.
24. How to control your laughter when someone just died.
25. Your manager is not a pocket pussy, stop it.
26. Why some clients don't die of old age.
27. Easy occult symbols for your bullet journal.
28. How to insert subliminal messages for mass suicide in your members' Trello boards.
29. 82 handy methods of torture.
30. Can you get a maternity and paternity leave at the same time if you're a single parent?
31. How to reason with your inner demons.
32. That laptop costs too much to break it on someone's face.
33. Masturbation while working from home.
34. "Honesty system" = We don't have the resources to automate this.
35. How to get reincarnated as a cockroach.
36. That creature with a tiny voice is human too. Yep, she's a team member.
37. Why does that Hodor look-alike keep touching you?
38. Gee. That IT bitch's face is shaped like a half moon.
39. How to program by clicking buttons.
40. Does your manager count as a human sacrifice?
41. How to encourage your colleagues to sacrifice a Chinese co-worker to an active volcano on their outing.
42. Playing porn in a colleague's wireless bluetooth speaker.
43. Tinder swiping during meetings.
44. Using a ticket management system in the dev environment.
45. How to estimate and then change that estimate later on to fit your actual hours.
46. How to shoot down that ungrateful fuck.
47. How to dissolve your team after you've disappeared.
48. How to tell if you're actually dead.
49. How to plan a massacre for some mental stimulation.
50. Eating with a one liter bottle of muriatic acid on your desk and convincing your colleagues that it burns fat and they should try mixing it with their coffee.

And so much more. My heart is still heavy from all these wonderful experiences that I decided to write a book about it. The world should know about this.

Testivus On Test Coverage

Early one morning, a programmer asked the great master:

“I am ready to write some unit tests. What code coverage should I aim for?”

The great master replied:

“Don’t worry about coverage, just write some good tests.”

The programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

Later that day, a second programmer asked the same question.

The great master pointed at a pot of boiling water and said:

“How many grains of rice should I put in that pot?”

The programmer, looking puzzled, replied:

“How can I possibly tell you? It depends on how many people you need to feed, how hungry they are, what other food you are serving, how much rice you have available, and so on.”

“Exactly,” said the great master.

The second programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

Toward the end of the day, a third programmer came and asked the same question about code coverage.

“Eighty percent and no less!” Replied the master in a stern voice, pounding his fist on the table.

The third programmer smiled, bowed, and left.

...

After this last reply, a young apprentice approached the great master:

“Great master, today I overheard you answer the same question about code coverage with three different answers. Why?”

The great master stood up from his chair:

“Come get some fresh tea with me and let’s talk about it.”

After they filled their cups with smoking hot green tea, the great master began to answer:

“The first programmer is new and just getting started with testing. Right now he has a lot of code and no tests. He has a long way to go; focusing on code coverage at this time would be depressing and quite useless. He’s better off just getting used to writing and running some tests. He can worry about coverage later.”

“The second programmer, on the other hand, is quite experience both at programming and testing. When I replied by asking her how many grains of rice I should put in a pot, I helped her realize that the amount of testing necessary depends on a number of factors, and she knows those factors better than I do – it’s her code after all. There is no single, simple, answer, and she’s smart enough to handle the truth and work with that.”

“I see,” said the young apprentice, “but if there is no single simple answer, then why did you answer the third programmer ‘Eighty percent and no less’?”

The great master laughed so hard and loud that his belly, evidence that he drank more than just green tea, flopped up and down.

“The third programmer wants only simple answers – even when there are no simple answers … and then does not follow them anyway.”

The young apprentice and the grizzled great master finished drinking their tea in contemplative silence.

Found on stack overflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

Yep. I worked at a place where my director and manager were true mysogynists. One day the director walks behind one of my subordinates and knees her in the back of the knees to make her fall back so that he can catch her. He does this in front the whole office. I told her that I had her back if she chose to complain. We went to our CO and laid everything out, and he was forced to take action. I was pulled aside and told that I would ruin my career if I went durn this path. I told them that it was more important to me to do the right thing. The director was forced to resign, the manager was reassigned to another location, and yes, my career suffered, especially in the area of promotion. But you know what? I'd do it again, because it was the right thing to do.

First internship (ranted about it before).

- Had to google translate their entire internal crm.
- pointed out major security flaws and got a speech saying that "I shouldn't think so high of myself and I didn't have the fucking right to criticize their products"
- every time the boss came to the office after a failed sales presentation, we (interns) got called the most nasty stuff. Yes. We didn't have anything to do with that at all.
- I had "hygiene issues": window to the south with 35-40 degrees (Celsius) feeling temperature and no airco. Deo didn't really make a difference but wasn't allowed to use it there anyways. Details: I have a transpiration issue so I sweat shitloads more than other people, that didn't help at all.
- nearly got fired because I had to to to the doctor in company time for a serious health issue.
- was (no kidding) REQUIRES to use internet explorer and we were monitored constantly.

Self esteem dropped through the fucking ground there.

A company that I can only describe as North Korea. The team if full of fresh graduates who started their career there, worships the manager, and have never seen the outside world. Every company has politics and minor annoyances but this one stands out as absolutely ridiculous.

Here, frequent emotional abuse and humiliation is common and is right. New hires are taught that the only way to be a good leader is to verbally abuse their subordinates to the point of crying. The cream of the crop in this company would be considered complete morons in other companies. The skill of typing in the right keywords to the search engine and copy/pasting code makes them MVPs.

In this company, even system admins don't know how to "grep". Developers just click buttons in an IBM suite, write some Python script to compute something, and call themselves developers. They are so proud of themselves and believe they can take over the world because they are highly competent.

Professional hires are not valued and considered threats because they question and stand up to the supreme leader. Team leads, managers, and senior managers obsess about an employee's Twitter activity and gossip about what time they came in the office and left.

So much time is spent on estimations that wouldn't matter anyway because they will be adjusted to fit the actual hours to make the company look good. Everything is pointless and loud power trips are encouraged. The measure of competency is not based on technical prowess and effective communication, it's about how loud and verbally abusive you can be.

Tribe members suck each other's souls and bully who they consider as outsiders to feel better about themselves. Very few professional hires and even fresh graduates reach the six month mark before submitting their immediate resignation letters or just disappearing completely.

The smartest ones leave while the dumb ones stay. What option do they have? This is the only place where they can feel smart. This leads to a high concentration of naive juniors with huge egos running around like the next Torvalds. Overtime is admired when more often than not, it's unnecessary and shows inefficiency rather than hardwork.

Here, cunt whore leads and managers can arrange a meeting to have an audience for their useless power trips. A random ass bitch can turn a 15 minute scrum into two hours and suggest all 50+ developers to write MOMs without getting laughed out, otherwise the scent of her vagina meat will explode to everyone's faces.

Here, juniors are entitled and complain about their salaries despite having no technical skills. Intellectuals are passive aggresively picked on with the assumption that they think they're too smart.

Whoever questions the supreme leader and their current delusions are demonized. This includes a very intelligent and reasonable manager who quit because he was not provided anyone to manager because the supreme leader refuses to share power. The only to survive is to caress the supreme leader's ego while doing damage from the inside.

Everyone else have an epic slave mentality. No one says no to the client and everyone comes to work whenever they are told to. When you instruct them not to accomodate any more requests, they look at you like you lost your sanity. The only way to reform anything or anyone is to get the supreme leader on your side.

All that manipulation games were fun while they lasted. But team members crying to you and hugging you on their last days because you were the only one who stood up to them takes a toll on your mental health.

Dark times ahead for the internet.. looks like Article 13 got accepted into law. I know who I'll be voting to get more of into those chairs next year. Pirate Party, Julia Reda and the Internet lost the battle today, but the war ain't over yet. We need more Pirates into those MEP chairs. And those 348 old senile fucks who voted this into law.. begone!!!

Edit: link to Tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/Senficon...
Hopefully the link tax doesn't apply yet.

Me: hey dev, my in-app purchase isn't reflected on other phones with your app
Dev: *cricket noises*
About a week later...
Google Play: an update for this app is available
20 minutes later...
Dev: nope, that isn't an issue.

You updated the app minutes ago after being silent for so long. No mention of it being fixed in the changelog, no mention of it being fixed in the reply.. nothing. But I'll eat my hat if you didn't silently add it in and shoved it under the rug. Dickhead.

At least the issue doesn't exist.. anymore.

Please don't be like that...

Client: "Can we have a call? I think there's a missing functionality in the application."

Me: "Okay."

Client: *shares his screen*
"As you can see, I'm trying to update this but I can't. How do I save it?"

Me: "Ah, there's supposed to be a save button below that."

Client: *hovers over the area and it turns out, his dock was covering it*
"Yeah, but yesterday I couldn't see it. Did you just fix it now?"

Me: "Nope."

Me after the call:
*double checks modified date*
"Nope."

"Welcome to everybody's favorite show: Did It Break!?!"

"Here's our first contestant, Alex Brooklyn!"

* Audience claps *

''Tell us Alex, what command did you use?!"

ls -la

"And did it break production?!"

Not yet..., the website is still up, even checked without cache and on a different network, I haven't had any calls in half an hour and Sentry reports nothing

"Great to hear! On to round 2!"

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

Considerations when looking for a tech video course:

5%: Does it have good ratings
5%: Is it priced reasonably
90%: Does the narrator have a smooth soothing voice with an intonation which keeps me dreamy & enchanted, yet with an energized articulation, like a cup of Jasmin tea with clover honey on a dreary Sunday afternoon.

The content may be very good, but if I have to sit through 30 hours of material, you better tickle my ears the right way.

Had a client on the phone with an extremely heavy Turkish (I think so, not entirely sure) accent who was hardly understandable but I kept polite and tried really hard to understand his questions.

Didn't go so well and he started to get annoyed and rude as well and asked me why I kept asking him to repeat his questions.

Told him that due to his heavy accent I had some trouble understanding him but that we'd take it slow and that I was trying my best.

He didn't take that well and called me a fucking racist (or, a 'cancer racist (dutch: 'kanker racist') but this sounds nicer).

C: (remember, heavy accent) "Ben jij kanker racist ofzo?" (are you cancer racist or something?)

Me: sorry, kan je dat herhalen? Ik verstond je niet helemaal goed door het accent, excuses! (Sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't quite get that due to the heavy accent, apologies!)

*BOOOOOOOM*

Client exploded in my ear xD.

Totally worth it! I'm all for helping and tried my best but if you're going to disrespect me, fuck off.