A column of some Soviet newspaper. Top to bottom:

The Atheist’s Page
“The oldest profession”
(Ukrainian tale)

Three people argued over whose profession was the oldest. One of them said:
— Surgeons: without them, god wouldn’t have pulled Adam’s rib out to make Eve.
— Engineers, — the other one interrupted him. — Without them, god wouldn’t have made light.
The third one thought for a while and said:
— No, mine’s older: in the beginning there was darkness, and who spreads darkness? I do!

The third one was a priest.

I am looking for a job. Ok, alright. This woman calls me with her phone. After a bit of a coordination effort, she proceeds to give me the most pyramid scheme speech that could pyramid scheme. And she said I was fucking chosen because of my IT knowledge... Which I feel fucking insulted about.

This is not my first time brushing against pyramid schemes. Oriflame, if you've heard of it, is another one of the pyramid schemes that, confusingly enough, has product.

But my whole point is, they literally hunted me down because of my age, asked about my goddamn zodiac sign which is always a really good sign (/s), asked me shit like if I have children etc. Like, really. And left no space not to answer most of these.

The whole pyramid scheme industry is basically marketing itself to usually stay-at-home moms, promises an opportunity, etc and they are hard to weed out because they are making their way to normal job hunting websites. Which is how I ran into my first one.

I feel insulted that they'd do this stuff to me but here we are. At least I get the choice of blocking and maybe reporting.

But it really discourages me that that is how things are...

Merry Christmas 🎄

I decided to do a daily Blender render just as a creative challenge for myself. I was so excited because I built an awesome computer this year and was eager to put it to use, only to be hit with seemingly random BSODs and crashes a couple seconds into the render.

As it turns out, my CPU cooler is woefully inadequate to handle 32 threads running at once, which was the cause of my crashes. Turning the render threads down to 8 keeps the temps low enough to finish the render.

In a way, it's a relief because the alternative was a problem with my $900 GPU. I've ordered a bigger CPU cooler and well reviewed heatsink paste which will hopefully fix it. If not, I'm going to have to go water-cooled, which I really don't want to do.

Data scientist: we need to whitelist a pod to connect to a database
Me: Whitelist? We don't use whitelists on private databases
DS: It's the new data warehouse database
Me: is it on <X> VPC?
DS: I'm not sure what that means but its ip is <real world ipv4>
Me: Are you hosting a publicly accessible database with all our end users information?!
DS: ...
Me: There goes our SOC2 audit controls...
DS: how long until you can white list it?
Me: I won't be whitelisting it. You need to put it on a private VPC and peer with the cluster, you'll have to rebuild all the Terraform and redeploy
DS: We didn't use Terraform because it takes too long, just white list the pods IP.
Me: No. I'm contacting the CISO and CTO...

On today's episode of Fucked Up Office Drama-Rama: useless project manager finally gets her desired outcome after 6 months of whining to her boss about a team member being "difficult to work with". She has only been with us for a year and is the only one that has had any "issues" with him, and the problem has simply been that he has called her out when her lack of planning, lack of effort, lack of common sense and lack of technical understanding has caused the team extra work and pressure. His contract gets terminated, she stays on, and on top of it all she's managed to hire a replacement without consulting anyone and therefore has the complete wrong skills compared to what we need. We needed someone with frontend skills, she decided on a senior backend / architect arrogant fuck that after only a few weeks is already showing us it's not going to be fun.

Fuck my life. Time to look for a new client.

Gather around folks, I'll paint you a nice picture based on a true story, back from my sysadmin days. Listen up.
It's about HP and their Solaris 5.4/6 support.

- Yet another Prod Solaris dinosaur crashed
- Connected to console, found a dead system disk; for some reason it was not booting on the remaining redundant disk...
- Logged an HP vendor case. Sev1. SLA for response is 30 minutes, SLA for a fix is <24 hours
- It took them 2 days to respond to our Prod server outage due to failed system disks (responses "we are looking into this" do not count)
- it took another day for them to find an engineer who could attend the server in the DC
- The field engineer came to the DC 4 hours before the agreed time, so he had to wait (DC was 4-5 hours of driving away from HP centre)
- Turns out, he came to the wrong datacentre and was not let in even when the time came

- We had to reschedule for two days later. Prod is still down
- The engg came to the DC on time. He confirmed he had the FRU on him. Looks promising
- He entered the Hall
- He replaced the disk on the Solaris server
- It was the wrong disk he replaced. So now the server is beyond rebuild. It has to be built anew... but only after he comes back and replaces the actually faulty disk.
- He replaced that disk on the wrong Solaris server

I don't get it. Bethesda managed to make the best temporal antialiasing solution to ever grace this planet with TSSAA in Doom 2016 and then manage to fuck it up by removing it in favor of forced TAA in Doom Eternal which looks like complete dogshit

WHYYYYYYYY

The graphics were /literally/ the reason I bought the damn game. I just finished Doom 2016 and it was so inspirational for my own game engine, giving me motivation by seen what I can achieve. Doom Eternal is fucking depressing from a technical standpoint

Well at least I know now that my own AA solution is viable and that I can do better than a AAA studio :emotionless-shrug-guy:

I closed my work laptop yesterday around noon and dumped water on it. I was just so fed up.

Some spilled off onto my desk, though, so i gently moved (read: threw) the offending piece of plastic frustration onto the floor and carefully dried my desk.

On my way to the trash can, i stepped on the laptop. I stepped on it again on the way back, and later, on my way out the door.

I came in to get something half an hour later, and stepped on it again. It remained a stepping stone for the rest of the day, and accrued considerable foot traffic.

I spent the day drinking peach whiskey and playing with my children instead of working on reports. It was a good day.

Don't worry: my laptop still worked this morning, though I declined to.

At an office job I worked at (2018), one day we were told to drop everything we were doing for the day and gather around, because there was a lady (about 70 years old) who had stopped by to give us "Life Advice".

The lady started her speech with this statement:

"In 1974, I lived in a mansion with 7 servants at my service and 4 cars".

I'm not making this up.

Then she rambled on for 15 mins about how she faced difficulties in her life, starting from studying in a boarding school in Switzerland, then coming back to India to work at the Taj Hotel (Mumbai) under a team of world-renowned chefs who were mean to her, at her internship which paid her about $2500 USD a month in 1985.

But the point she made was, in spite of all her difficulties, she never gave up and kept working.

When she was finally done, NOBODY clapped. She felt awkward as hell and we saw it on her face.

I still chuckle when I think about that incident.

Testing demands a “bug” fixed. It isn’t a bug. It is a limit where as the amount of records updated in a single request overloads the RAM on the pod overloads and the request fails. I say, “That isn’t a bug, it fits within the engineering spec, is known and accepted by the PO, and the service sending requests never has a case for that scale. We can make an improvement ticket and let the PO prioritize the work.

Testing says, “IF IT BREAKS IT BUG. END STORY”

Your hubcaps stay on your car at 100km/h? Have you tried them at 500km/h? Did something else fail before you got to 500km/h? Operating specs are not bugs.

Magritte was making modern memes way before they existed. I mean this pic is a solid meme even by today’s standards. And this painting is from 1936!

Have you ever worked on a project, for which you felt absolutely zero motivation, and every fiber in your body opposed any productive effort on it? What kind of project was that, and how did it end up?

Hours spent figuring how a select (dropdown) was created plus the whole flow of an app.

Me: "They won't be so stupid to get the whole html via ajax"
Me: *facepalms" they did
Me: Discovers the ajax call is handle via a giant switch statement
Me: All html is handled in memory

Me: Discovers the now Director of Development did it

Me: *Dev Rants*

You: Check my previous rant and confirm it

I have a huge deadline coming up. It's important for the future of the project that we show a mostly complete version of the product to the client that day.

They ask if I can do it. I say yes, but it will be very taxing. And by taxing, I mean it's going to use up the remaining energy and motivation I have for anything. And I've made that clear to everyone.

Coworker:
Here's an unrelated task that will take 6.75 hours of your day and I will hound the boss until he makes you do it. And I am going to send you messages after work that foreshadow another day of doing things that aren't deadline related.

So when deadline day comes around and I have to present something that has two work days of work missing, they're going to look at me like I failed. And not that I had two of my days stolen from me doing miscellaneous chores that could have waited.

An army general is newly stationed in a desert post. On his first day, he calls for a soldier to show him around. While doing this, he notices a camel randomly tied to a tent.

He asks the soldier, “Soldier, why is that camel tied to the tent?”

The soldier looks awkward and answers, “Er, well Sir, as you know there are no women on the base so er, the camel is there for when the men get certain…um…urges”

The general nods in understanding And says, “Well I don’t condone this behaviour, but I suppose I understand”

A few weeks into the post, the general starts feelings these urges himself. He calls for the soldier to bring the camel to his tent. He then goes outside, gets a stool, and has wild animal sex with the camel.

After he’s finished, he climbs confidently off of the stool and sees the soldier staring at him, wide-eyed.

“So” the general says with a grin, “Is that how you boys do it here?”

The soldier answers, still wide-eyed, “No Sir, we usually just ride the camel into the nearby town where the women are”

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

Shit just got legal

There's the lead dev, I'll call him John. John is not from the US, Europe, or any of those developed countries. The rest of management are from developed countries.

John found himself in the US for personal reasons, on a non-work visa, and his visa will expire soon. In the meantime, management found an opportunity to raise capital in the US, and they want John to be there because it'll look better in the presentation.

John: Oh but that's a month after my visa expires. You'll have to provide me a work visa.

Management was uncomfortable, because we're not registered in the US. and coz they don't wanna spend money.

The French: Don't worry, the US allows you to come in for 3 months without a visa.

The other management seemed to agree with the French. John had to explain that, no, only very few privileged countries have that right, and for the rest the US border is very, very hard to cross, and the visa process takes months. Most US embassies abroad have a year-long waitlist, though you can pay a (hefty) extra fee for it to be expedited. Fucking management was seriously surprised by this.

The Canadian: Don't worry, I own have an apartment in the East Coast. I could give you the keys and you could stay there for this month until the presentation.

So management wants John to stay in the US illegally for a month because they don't wanna pay for a work visa and the expedition fee.

Me: Boss, i am not qualified for this. This is something totally different that what i do.
Boss: Just do what you can.
* Me does something which seems to work*
-- A few months or even years later:
Boss: Our distributed systems don't longer work. What happened?
Me, after checking different system: Oh, there is a key that expired. I didn't know this key had an expire date. So they can no longer connect.

Turns out we have to visit every remote system (driving distance of a few 100's km) and set a new key. We couldn't do it remotely since we lost access.

Maybe, just maybe, when your employee says he isn't qualified for a task, listen and search someone that know what he is doing.

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows

1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.

And so on.

Guess their budget for the above.

200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!

My stomach hurt that day from laughing.

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

FML, I hate projects where managers (and other developers, too!) irrationally think that the only thing to do in the codebase is delivering new features and fulfilling change requests.

After 5 years of such approach, the code is bloated, and has hack-on-hack done against the original architecture, and management complains on the time to delivery a change, however asking them to get some time to "refactor" meets a deny every single fucking time because "we don't have budget".

Decided to leave the team. Any reason to stay there longer?

currently having one. the new company gave an offer letter even though my notice period is 60 days , but things went downhill from there.

during these 60 days whenever i got a mail from new company, i acted upon it, and u was expecting things to go smoothly. they use some sap software for getting onboarding info.

today, on my joining date, am getting to know that i have not yet submitted some personal and legal details, so i cannot join today :/

why had i not submitted them? i had told them 7 days ago that there's some issue with the software as its not showing the section for uploading anything on my profile, but they ignored that. and today they are sending me an instruction pdf with super outdated images :///

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

*In teams meeting with client*

Manager: Yes we can do all of that and it will be actioned very quickly. We will make all of these feature requests top priority. We will set aside everything we are currently working on in order to get this done!

Dev: ...Are you writing any of this down?

Manager: I don't need to, I always remember everything!

Dev: Just so you are aware, I'm not writing anything down. You're going to need to create a ticket with requirements spelled out for each one of these promises you're making otherwise they won't get actioned by the team.

Manager: I know that!

Dev: ...

*Later that day*

Ticket Title: Action client feature requests TOP PRIORITY!!!

Ticket Description: *empty*

Dev: ...

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

Third World country: *has power outage because of corrupt government*

Our outsourced devs: Hey sorry boss, we will not be able to work today because there was a power outage. We'll make it up for it during the weekend! We're saving up for a power generator so this doesn't happen again!

Manager: These lazy @#$@ (racial slur) are so lazy and stupid!

I love my gf but she broke her leg 4 weeks ago and since then both of us are stuck in home WFH. I feel like my soul is being sucked out, I am being suffocated with the neediness, responsibilities and I alone have to take care of everything in home including taking care of our dog, food on the table and running errands. Its hard to even force myself to have sex anymore since my hormones are fucked up and Im in a constant state of stress that I rely on now just to get through the day.

During the day to numb myself emotionally I cope with coffee and smoking. During the evening to relax I cope with alcohol and nettlix and to sleep I take a xanax. Staying until 3-4am kinda became my alone getaway time.

I pray that in 2-3 weeks her leg heals and she goes back to the office and then I will again have my daily 10-11 hours of uninterrupted work/personal time again.

Were together for 4 years already and she expects me to propose to her and make babies soon. I dont know if I am capable of having a family if Im thinking of breaking up after 4 weeks of taking care of her. Idk what I will do but for now it is what it is.