PM at my last job on a project I wasn't involved in (fortunately) told the team that they needed to implement this fully custom video chat system with vague requirements. It was a feature that needed to be demo-ready in a month, on top of other features and fixes in the pipeline. They managed to get it done in time, did the presentation, only to realize that the PM just decided on their own that this would be something useful and the client refused to pay for it, then they tried to play it off as "I don't know why the team did this."

No, this really happened.

"I'm leaving"
"We'll offer you 70k"
"They offered me 90k"
"....71k."

"It works on my machine"

The clients who get enraged that their website that launched two days ago doesn't look 'quite right' on a device that came out yesterday that less than 1,000 people will ever own still get to me sometimes, though.

@T33th I had a friend in college who had a baby, single mom, still got through college with a perfect GPA and went on to get a Master's degree. I have NO IDEA how she did it!! I have so much respect for people who balance work, day-to-day life, and children.

@mradulovic988 Congrats! Also, my condolences.

@HitWRight I miss the finality of the day I felt with the ritual of jumping into my car and plowing the hell out of the parking lot

@ostream I think if I tried to do ten push-ups every time I get frustrated with work, I'd just end up crying on the floor for 15 minutes like @phat-lasagna

I think that the role of the front-end dev changes so much that it means something different every three years. At least in my small town, it's becoming harder for a self-taught person to break into the market.
Here, you still get the very basic breakdown of front-end and back-end with a novel length list of responsibilities that overlap both for lower pay.
That being said, change is good, technology evolves. Growth is a must.

Web development will shift to some other evolution. That just means that its current incarnation will die.

-- But in a small town like this, .NET will remain king for years to come. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

I was just talking to someone yesterday about how it's a privacy concern to just have a Linkedin profile out there...
It just feels more and more like a Linkedin profile is a necessary evil to get a job.

"Have you tried clearing your cache before you waste my time with your nonsense?"

Do you have WSL2 set up? I had to change some motherboard settings and reformat my boot drive to get WSL2 to work properly, and before that my computer was booting extremely slowly...I'm by no means an expert when it comes to this kind of stuff. More like the dog in the labcoat meme with the "I don't know what I'm doing" text above it.

@mincedsheep Same. This is what I've been dealing with over the last few years: I'm just terrible at setting boundaries and expectations, to the point where I just go home and keep working, even on weekends. I just never feel like I'm doing enough or know enough.

I've been trying to find ways to either stay motivated or get more work done more quickly. My new year's resolution for 2021 is to be 100% done with *work* at 5PM. Completely off (maybe on call if I have to be, but ugh...)

The 5PM goal for me is so I know when I get home, I'm going to have that hour to work on the project I've wanted to do. That's all I want to freaking achieve for this year, just being done at 5PM.

You're a college student, so do you really have time for a project this big? Are they going to be flexible in their expectations? Sorry, I'm not sure what would be a realistic amount to ask for. I'd be more concerned about time.

When I did freelance in college, I learned fast to ask a percentage up-front or say no. I wasted a lot of time stupidly letting people walk away from half-finished projects without any compensation, and with more time lost that I could have spent on school.

Also learned to never, ever disclose to anyone at work that I worked as a barista between two dev jobs because people want to make it out to be a bad thing and will never let it go.

I quit an extremely stressful and over-demanding dev job and worked a bit as a barista while taking college courses. I was even more busy than before, but I felt like I was actually investing in myself. It was a nice change at the time, met a lot of interesting people, but I wouldn't do it again. I came out of realizing how lazy and impractical I was about money, I learned to force a smile, and I still struggle with setting realistic expectations at work but not as much. I still have no idea how people survive on that level of pay...They can't.

I came out of that experience with gratitude toward having a dev job that I didn't realize I lacked, and a disgust for people who treat service industry workers like dirt. I have more flexibility afforded and definitely don't take it for granted anymore.

How important do you think it is for a PM to understand the technical side of a project?

It seems like PMs with actual PM experience is rare, even rarer to find one that has experience on the technical side of things. I feel like it would make a world of difference if there were more PMs striving for that PMP license.

At my current job, there is a PM with another team, who is overseeing a Wordpress site, but they're applying software-level principals to their management. They're micromanaging the other team with tasks that aren't really useful to getting something as basic as a Wordpress site done. But that's the way that PM understands tech, so they're stuck with that paradigm and fighting questions like, "Why haven't you written unit tests for these Wordpress templates yet?" and "Who is doing QA on the default post type?" So glad I'm not with their team...

@h4xx3r I did the same thing!! I chose Nomad and got double-jump immediately. As far as double-jump goes, there are a LOOOOT of places they didn't mean for people to double-jump to, but it's hilarious.

I'm pretty envious of PC players, as far as how the game looks. I still have a 970, so I assumed it would be potato-level on my PC. It seems like the last patch for console fixed the rendering quite a bit.

The rumor is that Sony's QA team that approves games for the store just sort of took CDPR's word for it and didn't even test it. It was rough when I first booted it up, but it's a lot better now (fifth patch! aaaah). I'm looking forward to future updates. I know a lot of people who are planning to just wait it out until the game is 'actually ready.' I don't blame people for wanting refunds or waiting. I hope CDPR survives. The rumor is that their investors are suing them... It's really unfortunate because there's so much potential in this game.

I just want to make fancy keycaps.

I love Cyberpunk 2077, and I'm even playing it on a PS4 Pro. Should CDPR have delayed the game? Absolutely, but I'm having a great time so far. I'm really concerned that the game might not reach its full potential with all the backlash now.

After the most recent patch on PS4 Pro, I feel like the biggest problems I had have almost disappeared, but weird stuff does still happen. Maybe Bethesda has brainwashed me into being okay with bugs, because I loved Fallout 76 too.

I'm almost inclined to believe that CDPR never intended to release the game on older consoles, but probably in the last year since COVID the projected impact of sales on next-gen consoles (nearly no one has one) caused them to shift gears at the last second and make a rushed version that would work on older consoles. They should have released it on PC only, but hindsight is 2020.

There are a LOT of Glassdoor reviews about crunch and CDPR's structure. But even the bad reviews claim the cafeteria food there was amazing.

@yehaaw I agree. "Not giving a shit" doesn't work for me either. I thought that was the key for a long time. I've recently realized (partly thanks to this site) that I'm not setting clear boundaries at work about how far I'd be willing to bend for the job and I've been allowing myself to get angry. Setting boundaries comes in many forms. That could be something worth exploring, too: if there's a place where an expectation isn't clearly enough defined and is taxing you too much.

I think the most frustration I've seen in my senior devs is the perceived obligation to be the 'mom' of the group with junior devs and interns who seemingly never listen to instructions. Or the PM who thinks their job is to whip their dev team and lie about deadlines. Or maybe it's that new tech that a higher up wants to adopt but is essentially a square peg for a round hole. Deciding how to deal with this kind of stuff is part of setting healthy realistic boundaries, too.

I hope you find a way to be happy and disconnect from the things that are stirring anger in you, whether it be a mindset or the job itself. The therapist kinda helped. But...yeah...nobody else understands what I mean by "git clusterfuck"

What was the realization moment?

I started to have major anger problems at a previous job at my fourth year mark. I'd like to believe that I did everything any article you google online said to do in those situations: meditate, exercise, eat healthy, change how you phrase things, keep a stress journal (more like stress NOVEL!), talk to a therapist, etc. Yes, I even went to a therapist where 95% of everything I said was about my job. I was so embarrassed of myself when I realized that was ALL I would ever talk about to anyone. The other dev I looked up to the most would say things like, "Have you tried just *not giving a shit*?" I couldn't do it. People would insult this guy to his face and he'd just stare with his smile unwavering and say, "Whatever." It was a very depressing feeling. "Why am I like this?! Why do I give a shit?! Why can't I just walk in and do my 9 to 5 and be done like everyone else?!" I quit as soon as I got another job.

It turned out to be the job. Who knew...

@sheriffderek Thanks for the advice. You're absolutely right. I'm not doing a good job at setting boundaries. If I set better boundaries, I'd likely have more time to make at least some relevant things for my portfolio.

@Devnergy lol, emancipated from parents at 16. Just my money that I'd be living off of.

@Oktokolo @sheriffderek I'm not learning anything new at this current job. Well, I take that back: I've improved on my old way of doing things when I get time to breath because I want this contract to go as well as it can. I know in my heart that I love development, but I never want to touch php or servers again. It's wearing me out fixing 'old shit' all the time.

I left an o.k. job for a very high paying contract where everything is due yesterday. It ends in February and I am burned out. I want to stop neglecting javascript frameworks, and I have dead Unity (C#) projects that I've neglected that I really miss working on. I'm not skilled enough to get anything related to my passion. But I'm ready to take a risk to build toward trying again while the job market is somewhat dead. I don't know if I'm being stupid doing that.

Prof once told me in school that if I hated C++, I might like Perl. I did not.

ThIs WaS aLrEaDy AnSwErEd In AnOtHeR tHrEaD [link that is only vaguely relevant to question]

Smoking = oddly unquestioned entitlement to breaks every hour or so when you're at the office. "Was [dev] just on a 30 minute smoke break? I dunno, man. He's gotta smoke. Don't bother him."

Meanwhile, the new guy takes a five minute walk every few hours and everyone loses it.

AWESOME!!!!