Somehow being able to make perfect sense out of the meaningless and vague requirements pushed down from upper management.

Gotta love it when you turn down a recruiter and they ask you if you know any friends who might be interested.

"Potentially, what's my commission if I do your job for you?!"

🤨

Dealing with a Salesforce (what else,heh) bug that caused batch payment requests to be fired off at seemingly random intervals. Pretty big consequences to that one.

Of course, the problem is that no-one assumes it's a Salesforce bug, and you have to spend an eternity proving that it's not your fault...

Everyone talks about crappy categories of user on Stackoverflow - help vampires, rep whores, etc. - but the category of "people who don't care about the stupid mind games, politics or internet points and just want to help others" is so small people apparently don't even think it can exist.

I mean sheesh, I answer on there in my free time to just lend a hand to people, usually in a couple of niche tags that have very little info elsewhere, even for beginners. Of course there's questions that are beyond salvaging and just random homework dumps, but the majority are from genuinely confused users who simply don't know the correct terms to search for.

A question is not inherently evil just because its asker has misunderstood a key concept.

I'm not even asking you to help the poor sods, I'm just asking you to allow me to help without calling me a rep whore or a moron who'd be better talking to bots on reddit 🙄

I get it, Java is an old language that's verbose as the day is long. But damn, please don't make it *even more verbose* than it needs to be. We've got the tools now to make it at least somewhat tolerable.

I mean, come on, we've got lombok, we've got streams, and we've had Comparator.comparing since Java 8. That's the best part of a decade you've had the luxury of writing single line comparator implementations out the box, but noooo, certain people have to pretend they're stuck in the 90's by thinking these multiple if / else statements are somehow still the best way of doing things.

Dahhh. Skill up people. This is not an industry where you can just do everything how you did it 20 years ago and call it good.

Companies really need to re-evaluate what they ask as security questions.

If I know your name and your approximate date of birth (to the month) then, here in the UK at least, I have a very good chance of being able to find out your parents names, your mother's maiden name, your address, your parents address (i.e. probably where you grew up and what school you went to), your parents ages, when they got married, etc. - and all from publicly available info, not illegal crap you find on Tor or social media stalking.

This isn't hard to find if you know where to look - the problem is that people think that it's all private, and behave as such - and companies encourage it. The typical "internet safety courses" don't even touch on it, and even more tech savvy people I know often don't have a clue this is possible.

cat log | grep blah

Ted, Akka is a damn Scala library. Yeah yeah, I know you can fit it into your Java project if you really want to, but damn, you just end up with ugly Java syntax that tries and fails to be Scala. Just bloody well use Scala. Or use something more Java-esque like reactor if you *really* want to do async stuff and stay in Java land. But please, please don't use Akka in Java. The thing is a mess. I know it's asynchronous which in fairness does help in this application, but seriously just....

Wait... hang on... WHAT?! You're using the whole thing in an asynchronous reactive chain then just calling join() on everything?! What do you mean it's "mostly asynchronous but just blocks at the end?!?!" Do you like watching people suffer for no purpose, Ted? Do you?

Goldman Sachs analysts - hey, please could we stop working 95 hour weeks? It's really getting silly.

David Solomon - Hey, I'm really glad you brought this up! But screw you. Work harder.

...yeah. Even ignoring the morality of the situation, that was a commercially stupid move. I can't think of a single person that would now want to apply there, analyst or not. Can't help but feeling they've lost a lot of potentially great dev talent over the coming months & years.

Grumpy old git warning.

What's with this fad of calling everything a "hack"?! Not just in the dev world (though articles like "the 5 greatest Python hacks that will save you time!" grind my gears too.) But no, we've also got "gardening hacks", "life hacks", "recipe hacks"...

Dude, they're just "gardening tips". They're just "useful suggestions". Or in the case of "recipe hacks", THEY'RE JUST BLOODY RECIPES.

Eurgh.

Talk about scaremongering. This is the best thing to happen in the academic community in eons.

https://bbc.co.uk/news/...

On my annoying radar today - devs who learn one language and then *insist* on using it for everything, even when it makes absolutely zero sense.

"Ooh I'd like to do some microcontroller development. But I only know Java. How do you run Java on a microcontroller?"

"...You don't."

"...but I heard a talk where someone did it. Look, there's this microjava page. How do I use it?"

"It's an interesting technical demo, but that's it. Dude, just learn C. It's not hard, Java has C style syntax anyway and this way you can...."

"...but I only want to use modern programming languages. C is irrelevant these days, it's pointless me learning it."

"It's definitely still relevant if you want to program a microcontroller."

"...but I want to do that in Java."

🤦‍♂️

Can't stand it when devs who never bother to do anything / don't pull their weight etc. suddenly come out with:

"Ooh I'm really feeling the imposter syndrome right now, I feel like everyone around me is just leagues ahead of me and I shouldn't be here"

...then wait for everyone to tell them how amazing they are, how they're a critical part of the team etc.

No mate, imposter syndrome is a thing, but so is being a genuine waste of everyone's time. I'm not talking about having bad days, I'm talking about your work output being practically zilch for the past half a year or so because you're "not too familiar with the framework", then going after this pity party approach. As a senior dev, it's kinda insulting to all the great junior and mid level devs who do a better job while being paid considerably less.

Am I the only one happy that no-one can post images anymore? Kinda refreshing that all the crappy memes are gone 😂

PLEASE DON'T ENGAGE THE SPAMBOTS. Seriously, the number of obvious spam posts I see with (usually the same few) users underneath posting things like "No, fuck you and your sunglasses Kyle" or similar is 🤦‍♂️.

Guys, you're helping them. They feed off it, they note it as engagement, and they're more likely to continue posting. (Not just on devrant, but everywhere.) Just downvote / report as spam and move on.

Don't get stuck maintaining legacy stuff.

If you move to new, preferably greenfield dev every so often then you'll naturally keep with the times (at least if you're working in a vaguely decent team.) If you stick in one place too long and get stuck maintaining legacy crap, then that will be your focus, and that will be where your knowledge sticks.

You guys choose your specialities? I just find myself falling into them, and occasionally being interested in them. If the two line up, bingo.

Occasionally I get a reputation for being good at something I can't stand to work with though, which is never a particularly fun combination.

Every time I hear the word "trailblazing" I throw up a little. Even beats "synergy" as a useless, demonic corporate buzzword.

!Dev

Can't stand it when you excitedly mention the Mars rover (or anything space related) to someone and they say "Yeah but what's the point you could be feeding the poor or sorting out the environment with that money instead"

...yeah, you could. Or you could be doing that with money from the army instead. Or football. Or any other popular sport. Or yaknow, you could personally be doing that rather than spending all your salary on crappy clothes you're going to throw away in a few months anyway.

And that's not even mentioning the jobs it creates, the people it inspires to go into science + tech fields, the scientific advances it makes for humanity, etc. If you're that against scientific advancement then please, by all means surrender your possessions and just go live in a cave somewhere.

"I keep complaining to you guys every day about this bug and nothing happens!"

Firstly, it ain't a bug. Secondly, you're not complaining, you're whining. Thirdly, complaining is a bloody limited resource. If you do it once a year, everyone's going to sit up and take notice. If you do it daily, it's just "Duncan having another moan", and the only thing anyone will do is play "what time of day will Duncan rant" sweepstakes.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Bollocks. Really decent guy in our team just left unexpectedly 😟

At the end of each day, work out exactly what you need to do next, and then...

...don't do it. Seriously. Make a note of it, save it, then walk away. Then you know *exactly* what you're getting started with the next day, and by the time you've done that you're in the swing of things. (Especially helpful if you're not a morning person like me. Much, much easier to get started if you know exactly what you're doing.)

Our entire grad program has just been cancelled by management because the intake isn't "diverse enough" - and this is after we've interviewed everyone, taken them through assessment centre days, and decided who we wanted to hire.

It's ok guys, you can waste hundreds of man hours of employee time, and shun all the great candidates who put time and effort in (some of whom were the very minorities they're trying to supposedly encourage) - as long as you do it in the name of diversity. Anyone disagrees, you can just call them a massive dick for apparently wanting an all white male workplace 😠

Myself and a fellow coworker both joined post-covid, so we've never been into the office.

Considering our voices aren't a million miles apart, we're both rather tempted to introduce ourselves as the other person when we eventually go back to the office, just to see if anyone cottons on 😁

I get the whole anger at robinhood and the stock market, I really do.

But on the other hand - what did you expect? A bunch of people on Reddit could *genuinely* cause hedge funds to lose billions without them pulling strings to fight back?! They don't care if it's illegal or immoral. They know the worst they'll get is a fine that's way, way less than they stand to make.

Don't get me wrong, the anger here is justified completely. The surprise however, that's really not.

I like model railways. I also like embedded electronics.

I therefore enjoy combining the two in my free time quite a bit - putting arm processors on trains and getting them to do cool stuff. I'm also happy to dish out electronics advice to other model railway guys, a lot of whom are older and have literally no clue (but will create stunningly realistic scenes that are a million miles away from my lowly efforts.)

But bloody hell - is it hard to do so without being drowned out by incompetent sods who think they know it all because... reasons. I think I may just stop attempting to help beyond this point. This is the latest nugget I've had to contend against - I guess he's heard about skin effect, but since DCC works at around 8Khz and using anything more than 1.5mm core cable is ridiculous for a model railway, even that is complete baloney.

Other electrical nuggets I've heard from this group include "only washing machines run on AC, everything else is DC", "the colour of the wire matters otherwise it could short circuit", and "driving your old trains with a DCC signal will make them run better, because it's more modern". 😬

Being responsible for a massive breach of personal & financial data.

Seriously, that crap scares me way more than any amount of downtime does.

Talking to a second year student about what they've learnt so far, and what they should learn next:

"Cool, so what general topics would you say you know really thoroughly at the moment?"

"Oh, I've now learnt Java, C#, C, C++, Rust, Javascript, node.js, HTML, CSS, Angular, Vue, Erlang and probably a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. What do you think I should concentrate on next?"

"Hmm. Probably best to take just one of those and learn it really thoroughly."

"...but I already know them all really thoroughly."

"Ok. Can you explain what an abstract class is in say Java, C# or C++?"

"Sure, I can create a new class called abstract and then use it for abstraction. I do that loads."

...🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

First lesson: Stop BS'ing. Might work for flexing to non-devs, but that's about it.

I wish everyone would move away from code coverage as a metric and towards some kind of mutation framework.

There seem to be increasing numbers of devs getting themselves off on their "shiny 95% coverage" and patting themselves on the back for covering everything but the 5% of the codebase that actually needs thorough testing.

Oh, and that's ignoring the tests that just assert an exception isn't thrown, or don't assert anything at all. Completely bloody useless, but hey, you just carry on boasting how great all your tests are because you've got a higher coverage than the team next door 😤🙄