Rant: I felt very pleased with my submission to /r/WritingPrompts, and didn't get very many internet points :(

Ranting here, because it's vaguely dev related https://old.reddit.com/r/...

lol what? My company offers $5k for referring full time employees... and $10k for referring female technologists.

As a female software engineer, makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Why do Haskell/Scala/Lisp/Clojure develops do crossfit?

Because they like their fitness how they like their programming paradigms: functional!

Do we have any C# devs who have switched to Scala?

I've got a very sweet job offer... at a company that develops in Scala. On the one hand, I'm pretty pleased with my depth of C# knowledge, for a variety of reasons. And I've been targeting .Net shops in my job search.

They know Scala devs are rare, so they are aware they need to train new employees, which is nice. But I don't have strong opinions yet on whether this is a language I want to pivot to.

Does anyone have any thoughts/opinions/experiences?

Me, whenever I attempt to use eyeliner...

(real talk, this is why I don't bother trying to use eyeliner)

Hilarious. I've got an on-site interview tomorrow. My schedule has a list of long meetings with men with titles and... 15 minutes of girl time, with two women who's job title isn't included? I have NO IDEA what to make of this!

A connection was looking for a developer in the city my brother-in-law recently moved to (for my sister's career), so I connected them. They exchanged a couple of emails, and he has an on-site interview tomorrow!

He and I are both .Net developers, and I'm older/more experienced, so I offered to rearrange my schedule to help him with some interview prep tonight.

He said no, that he's pretty confident about things, that he'll do some studying and research on his own.

Good for him and his confidence, but I'm kinda salty that he didn't take me up on my offer. I'm pretty damn clever. How dare someone reject my offer for assistance?? I hope the interview goes well of course but if it doesn't I'm very much going to feel some silent "I told you so!"

Our team just got the best email from our client hahaha

Someone call an arborist because these branches are fucked.

My SO got a promotion, and with it he's going to be out of town about every other week.

I told him I'm excited for him, that even though I'll miss him it's a sacrifice I'm happy and willing to make because it's so good for his career, and our future. I don't want him to distracted during his work trips about worries about my unhappiness.

But I miss him and this is so hard actually 😔

FUCK. This person who I have to avoid at social gatherings because I find him insufferably annoying is applying to my workplace and oh my God I hope I never have to work with him, at least the company is 700 people so the odds are relatively low?

Uggggg he's the worst. And I'm so easy going. There's like two people I feel this way about (fortunately the other lives in a different city).

Rant: there's people in the world who don't properly venerate Elon Musk and they are wrong and it's a tragedy and there's even those who dislike him and I find that absolutely abhorrent.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

Reminder that you shouldn't trust head hunters.

I reached out to one a month or two back, because I knew they had worked with Company X in the past, and I figured they might get me a more direct line to HR.

They said company X wasn't hiring, that I should apply to Y and Z.

I started working at company X on Monday. They only wanted me to apply to Y and Z because those are the positions that recruiter was specifically trying to fill.

Recruiters are not your friend. They do not have your best interests at heart. They can be useful, but don't trust them.

DAMN IT JUST SEND ME SOME FLOWERS

Started a new job yesterday, and rather than making my partner work to pick up hints I have said explicitly a few times that I want him to send me flowers at work, because

1) Yay flowers!
2) Displays dominance over other women at work because it demonstrates I have a caring partner
3) Did I mention pretty flowers?
4) Let's the dudes at work know I'm in a relationship so that means we can all just focus on being colleagues

FFS I even sent a link to a site that does local same day delivery for no extra charge, and pointed out the three bouquet styles I like best. So easy.

But he has yet to send me any.

And as I'm filling out the W-4, learning that I have to pay an extra $10k in taxes, because we eloped a week ago and apparently that's what happens when two high earners file jointly and it's making me want to rant because THE COST OF FLOWERS IS INSIGNIFICANT TO MY TAX BURDEN SO SEND ME THE DAMN FLOWERS.

(and yes technically it's "our" tax burden and yes the money spent on a bouquet would only add to our shared house expenses but I don't care; I'm generally anti flower but there's a time and a place and this is the time and the place)

And if he sends them late in the week, a significant portion of their prime blooming time will be during the weekend which is just wasteful so ugh.

</rant>

!Rant

I'm going to be teaching my roommate how to "code" soon. Or rather, I'll be teaching her how to use Scratch, so she can have a leg up when she applies to work at a children's code academy that uses a Scratch-like environment. Should be fun!

I love that Scratch exists. Such an accessible way to teach basic concepts like loops, conditional statements, etc, with results that are way more fun than "oh look I output the fibinacci sequence"

!rant

I know it's not that impressive in the dev world, but I'm finally making six figures (the lowest six figure value possible but STILL) and I can't really brag to my friends about dollar amounts so HURRAH. Accepted the offer yesterday, and I'm quite pleased about it.

Annoyed that it took so long (I'm 29), but I did have a two year long career break for a family medical issue/travel/quarter life crisis, so so it goes.

Learned over Xmas, my brother-in-law works at a company with NO CENTRALIZED VERSION CONTROL. They just... pass around zip files of the latest code? Or something? Like jfc, even as a student we at least used TortoiseSVN!

I was ok with their marriage last summer, but now I feel that my sister deserves better. Can't imagine a company like that attracts the best and brightest. Here's hoping he actually exceeds the expectations, and leads the company into a glorious, gitty future.

How often do women bring up their own gender in tech interviews? I've never done it, and I've never interviewed anyone, but I'm curious about whether it's ever explicitly mentioned (beyond a, "I'm in a women in tech group" or "I mentor young girls in my free time").

I don't want to start any debates. Just curious about what people on the Other Side of the Table see.

Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).

The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.

I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.

First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).

Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.

I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.

Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?

Get a DateTime. Convert to a string. Convert back to a DateTime. Use that DateTime to build a string.

WHY.

(it's red because I refactored it; snipped copied from our version control)

Dear coworker: oh my god we aren't in highschool algebra; using "x" as the name of a parameter makes me want to cut you.

why would you do this to our codebase, dear teammate?

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

After 30 minutes of trying to figure out why a guid is empty, I realize it's because it is initialized, but not assigned.

I'm not ready for Monday.

"No merge conflicts, ready to commit."

Such sweet words from TortoiseHg, and it's not even valentine's day!

If you're going to host a Women in Tech Breakfast, there needs to be more than one samovar of coffee (even if it's being constantly refilled). Clearly the hosts have no experience in distributed computing.

When your stand up meeting update is just, "yesterday I was lost in merge hell".

💰💰💰💰💰💰💰

And to quote Terry Pratchett, "it's indoor work with no heavy lifting. Do you really want to be a ploughman like your father?"

My boyfriend.

He's an amazing software developer, has a few more years of experience with me, and because he's not a colleague, I feel comfortable asking him dumb questions. Combined with his patience and willingness to explain things very thoroughly, it's helped my post college learning immensely.

I love that I can cook him dinner, and then go to him with a code smell that I found at work, and spend the meal discussing ways to make cleaner code. I'm not sure who the real winner is in that situation. Probably my employer, haha.