1. The quality of the coffee and toilet paper you encounter during an interview tells you more than promises about table tennis or fruit baskets.

2. Try to determine who their primary client is: subscribers, app buyers, advertisers, etc. It's a major influence on the company dynamic.

3. Before an interview, you can just say: "I would like to sit down with a PO and run through one backlog feature and one bug, to get a feel for the type of tasks at the company". Such an activity immediately reveals team structure, whether they have product owners & scrum masters, what a sprint looks like, how they prioritize tasks, and how organized/chaotic your work experience will be.

Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

TL;DR: German politicians want to make TOR illegal.

Fuck it. I’m done. EU sucks. Germany sucks. It’s time to get outta here.

Context: German politicians explained during the European police congress that they want to make TOR illegal in Germany. According to them, whoever uses TOR has malevolent intentions and the darknet has no use in a democratic system.
A different politician literally praised China for ignoring the right to privacy while analyzing their citizens. What is wrong in these people’s heads? Apparently they don’t understand that TOR != darknet, so in order to get rid of illegal activity on the darknet, they want make the entire service illegal altogether. Idiots.

Now, this is far from reality yet, they just mentioned this during a speech, but it is indeed alarming.

Source (it’s German unfortunately, i couldn’t find an English source yet): https://heise.de/newsticker/...

I go to unlock my car, but the button I usually use is gone. Instead now it unlocks by long-pressing the car handle.

Ok, got it.

Then my ignition isn't there? Oh, it's in the middle of the steering wheel now? Ok.. but it doesn't work? Oh I have to sign in with Google or Facebook, alright...

Wait, where's my odometer? Oh this is "card" view, and I guess I want "compact" view, huh. Is there a dark theme? Guess not.

Why can't I shift? Oh the stick is a hamburger button now, weird. Um, and reverse is in a sub-menu? That's going to get annoying.

Alright just need to look in the mirror to see if.. wtf? You call this "responsive" or something? I can't see out that tiny window.

I'm very disappointed in all this, I wonder if I can roll back. Oh WHERE ARE THE BRAKES OH GOD

UX DESIGNERS

HAVE

FUCKING

KILLED ME

WHY DID WE TRUST THEM AND THEIR GODFORSAKEN UPDATES

What the flying fuck is happening on the EU with the fucking GDPR corsairs!!

I made two - TWO - entirely static websites, hand-made, 100% cookie-free!! I didn't even need to store a goddam boolean cookie! No third-party content is EVER invoked, called or summoned! I hosted a small video to avoid Youtube! Facebook and twitter share buttons are links!! I DID ALL OF THIS ON PURPOSE AND INFORMED THE FUCKING CLIENT.

And THEN (and, of course, unsolicited), the fucking lawyers of an asshole GDPR corsair office came and scared the shit out of my clients and convinced BOTH of them to put the goddam GDPR cookie consent popup on the fucking websites!! And they took their bribe, of course...

In order to avoid billionaire fines because of the NON EXISTENT cookies of the SMALLEST, SIMPLEST, 2KB MINIFIED HTML page on the Internet.

Anybody else is suffering from this kind of behavior??

Professor in college: We have our fest coming up. We need some volunteers for technical team to build website and android app.

*She says that and looks towards guys. Some guys raise hands saying they were interested.*

She didn't look towards girls even though some girls were raising their hands too.

Then she looked at girls finally....and she said "Oh you girls are interested too? We have cultural and decoration team. You can join that. "

I was triggered to next level.

I stood up and asked "Can't girls be part of technical team?"

She said "oh...yeah sure...." With not much hope that I would get into technical team.

But I ended up passing the screening round and got into technical team. She realised at that time that I knew my shit.....

There was even a time when I was in HODs office and she pointed at me and went "She is my student." trying to take credit for me being so Awesome ;)

LOL!

She was my guide for final year project too. We ended up writing a research paper and won best project award as well.

This was a year back. I have graduated and now I am working....
Just remembered....

Just decided to try brave browser. Not to actually try it out but to see if it calls home or not and what the default search engine is.

As for a browser which advertises itself as very privacy friendly, I would expect it to not call home and have at least duckuckgo or searx as default search engine.

5-6 calls home every damn time I open it and google is the default search engine.

How the fuck would you call that privacy friendly?!

-When they ask for your current/previous salary in a job interview, tell them that you don't find that relevant or that you don't want to tell. If they insist on you telling your salary, GTFO

- When they are overenthusiasticly telling about all the latest technologies they're using without staying one word about legacy projects, GTFO. It's a trap.

- If you walk trough the developer room(s) and everybody is extremely focused and just programming like a zombie, GTFO.

- If they cannot tell you one single downside of the company, it's probably too good to be true.

That's about everything I can think of at the moment

First time my laptop acted as a CV.

I've been in a personal project with my pal for like a three months. We meet sometimes at a cafe which is a very nice workplace, we often see more people with laptops, so we are not the only ones that thinks so.

My pal was waiting for me, he got a table early and then I arrived. there was a guy nearby us.

Me: (this guy has a newest new macbook pro, fucking riche)

-- I sit, put my laptop and start to work with my pal --

The guy starts looking at my stickers without hiding his doing at all. I noticed that instantly

Me: (Crap, he's gonna ask something :( )

-- I kept discussing stuff with my pal for like 5 minutes and then it happened. the guy stands up and... --

Guy: hey! how are you? sorry for bother, are you perhaps developers? I'm asking because I saw your stickers

Me: mmm yes

Guy: Do you have a job currently?

Me: We are in a project (No need to mention this is personal project and I got my full time job)

Guy: Oh, ok, no problem, you see I got a company, and currently we are looking for people to work with us, we want frontend developers with javascript skills preferable, but anything is welcome. Interviews starts next week, so if you are interested or know someone that could be, I'll give you my card and please write me at my mail if anything.

Me: got it, no problem.

-- I tried my best to hide my displeasure face(but I think I showed it a little), for him to being a riche with a new macbook pro, and you know, the interruption, I wanted to be focused while working in da project --

-- I got the card, I read it a bit, didn't dig into too much, there was stuff to do at the moment. the guy already returned to his chair and my friend --

Pal: Excuse me Mr Guy, what's the job tittle?

Me: (FUCK! dude!, we're working in our shit, don't give him more reason to try to scout us. we are behind the schedule and I need to explain this shit to you FFS)

Guy: Oh yes, will be frontend developer(again), but if you are a full stack that will be a plus too, we got some stuff with angular 1.x(ugh), and sencha touch(ugh) and ...(don't remember what else was it)

Pal: Ok and the job is full time in site? or are you open to work remotely

Me: (ok man, you sound interested, that makes me look interested too >:( )

Guy: preferable in site, but we would consider remotely depending on the person.

Pal: Good! thank you very much Mr. X

Guy: cool

-- Later on, like two hours, my friend goes to the counter for more coffee --

-- I text him: dude, I feel the guy will kidnap me or something --
-- then the guy start looking again at my laptop and... ---

Guy: hey! Jhon was your name right? Do you have experience with devops? I see your aws stickers

Me: yes

Guy: do you have experience with microservices?

Me: yes, a bit with lambda, also I've done some stuff with kubernetes, opsworks, rds and whatnot. no biggie

Guy: oh cool! we have a devops job too, there is a migration we need to do for an app to micro services. again if you are interested or know someone that it does. please mail me :)

Me: gotcha

There were no further interactions with Mr. Guy the rest of the day.

I'll be thrilled if someone ask me about my bee and puppycat sticker

Roommate: "Hey, man, uh, I know you use computers a lot or something; do you know off the top of your head how to use the touch screen on my computer?"

Me: "Uh, your laptop doesn't have a touch screen."

Roommate: "Yeah, but I thought you might know how to use it as a touchscreen."

Me: "...Your laptop does not have a touch screen."

I swear, this is the dumbest man I have ever come into contact with.

That'd be fine if this was a one-off type of thing, but he seriously has approx. 209.8 brain cells in total.

Once, with no argumentative basis, he told me that, if Mickey Mouse got enough votes as a write-in candidate, he could win the Presidency of the United States. I showed him Article II of our Constitution, and he said "why does that even matter here?"

Three more months, school'll be done, and I never have to see him again.

In the spirit of true randomness, I like to speculate about aliens. What’s your favorite theory about them? Anything’s fair game: whether they actually exist, methods of propulsion, origins, exobiology, exopolitics, eyewitness reports by credible reporters (pilots, military, air traffic controllers, high-profile political leaders, etc.) whether abductions are real and, if so, why they do it, etc. If you’ve had an encounter, I’d love to hear about it.

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

Avoiding bad companies starts at the job interview. Remember that the job interview is not only for them to evaluate you, but also the other way around. Make sure to ask a lot of questions. What are they doing, how are they working, what help is there if you get stuck, are they doing code reviews, what will you be doing etc.

The job interview is the opportunity for you to get an inside view of the company. Don’t just accept any job because you are desperate. Luckily qualifies devs are much needed in companies.

Also, make sure to go to multiple job interviews so you can see the differences. I think it can be difficult to avoid in the beginning, but as you get more experience, you can sort of tell whether it’s a good or bad company at the job interview.

Though sometimes you are just unlucky. In that situation: leave. It is so good damn easy to get a job in this field.

I had a dream that I was installing some sort of package and the PM warned that it was a known malicious package and I was like "This must be a mistake, no it isn't" so I installed it anyways and then an ASCII-Art Michael Jackson started dancing on my screen to loud music and I shut down the computer and woke up and panicked because I didn't have any backups

Chinese powerbanks are so fucking dangerous. Cheap price = cheap quality. Alright, I get it, but that's not my point.
Today my dad gave me his powerbank and wanted me to upgrade it.
A 50k mAh powerbank, but it is far away from 50k mAh. He bought 12 6000mAh rechargeable batteries.
Before I started replacing it and resoldering the powerbank, I decided to open up the Chinese 50k mAh battery. A lot of aluminum foils covering the batteries. That's not great. A very high chance for a short circuit to happen.
Anyways, I carefully took the aluminum cover halfway out.
I took a (plier?) with plastic handles and grabbed the pack of batteries with it to not put myself into danger.
And BOOM! A short circuit.

Btw. It smelled very weird when I took the aluminum cover off of the pack.

Last October, I was feeling really lost as a student. I posted a rant here (https://devrant.com/rants/1812123/...) as I had no one to talk to. I got a little support, but the advice I got really meant a lot to me.

I buckled up, did some learning and a small project, and today I am the NLP intern at an Organization that has really reputed clients.

Thank you devrant. Thanks everyone.

So apparently I got added to a Python dev group by a random person.
I thought okay cool I might learn new things and connect with some great people in the industry.
Turned out that it was just a bunch of noobs.

When I gave an honest response to a question asked by the admin (who turned out to be a noob as well), he kicked me out.
I honestly don't know if there's any official certification for Python other that the one I said.

Me: I need more programmers for the project.
Boss: You have 4 people, that's enough.
Me: I have 3 juniors taking 50% of time of a senior (me) contributing less than a medior and rest of my time goes to managing project. I know that in 6 months time invested in them will start paying off, but right now I need more people. Also I don't have me, by that logic, cleaning lady comes to the office every day and we couldn't work witout her, so there's 5 people, at least.
Boss: You'll manage.
Inner me: I would if I was working 8 hours as programmer without tutoring and managing.
Me: Sigh.

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.