(Time to actually code feature + time to debug it + time for unit tests to pass/add) * 1.5

Works great in my case unless there are some big major road blocks

I have a genuine question for y’all folks: How do you define what’s your next job going to be ? As in what you set your mind to, I guess. I’ve been through multiple stages of thoughts during the past two years and I find myself stuck.

On the one hand I work at a decent company and I have a great team with a lot of benefits and an OK salary but on the other hand I want change, more challenges and to get a little bit more of 💰(I’m not complaining about what I have but I’m clearly on the low tiers of the salary range for a software engineer).

At first I thought I wanted to completely change my work area and go for music, then I thought I wanted to work for the biggest IT players (Google, Microsoft, etc…). Turns out none of these two ideas really suit me. I also don’t want to work in a startup, I’ve only had bad experiences so far and don’t seek to reproduce them yet again.

So I guess a more precise question is: If you were in my shoes, with all that in mind, what would you do?

As for the reasoning as to why I’m asking here: devRant is literally the only place I know with so many people that work in the same field, but that also have a lot of different experiences and background 😁

Why is it that EVERYTIME before going on vacations I am loaded with work, that production problems are sent to me and must be fixed ASAP, and that everyone needs me right away all the time. Manage your time stop sucking out mine 😤

Music producing, working out, gaming, clothing to some degree and a moderated interest in good whiskey especially the Japanese brands

Today once again, Windows has lost my wallpaper and I am back in black.

I will never understand the need people have to lie about their knowledge or make shit up. Seriously am I the only one to despise that ?!

If you don’t know about something stop trying to make shit up on the go, it’s useless and it will give the wrong idea to people listening to you thinking you know what you’re talking about.

Last example in date:
Me: Here’s this cool repo I found, it’s a discord client implemented in cpp, so it runs natively
Techbro: oh cool, hey @everyone you should download this, it runs natively so there will be no leaks like the normal client

😤

How is it that 4 years after the start of this project we still have to tell people that their dedicated cloud storage is for their projects and not their 8TB server backups or 600000+ vacation pictures…
We literally have processes sending you mails that keep telling you should sort your crap and you still manage not to listen. And then we get support tickets like “cloud storage abnormally slow” “bug in performances” etc… The last gem being a small company CEO that contacted our CEO about this “problem”, he had syncd his entire workstation and told his employees to do the same…

I’m not sure how to convey the stack of feelings I have regarding all of this. I want not to care but I can’t. I want to get angry but what’s the point.

Annddd… it gets worse. Double down corporate cringe let’s go! 😵‍💫😬

To those working in the US as software engineers, is it worth it? Would you recommend it ? If not, why ? And did you live all your life in the US or are you coming from somewhere else ?

A team in our company has spent a few weeks building an application where we would pick what days we are remote and where we are going to work.

Now today, manager decided that on top of regularly updating that remote schedule we’d also have to ANNOUNCE in a channel on Teams that we’re remote on that day………. Supposedly for good moods and work life, this is such a waste of time I can’t even….

I should complete that the application let’s you see if anyone in the company is remote and where they can be found 🙄

How do I make my manager understand that something isn’t doable no matter how much effort, time and perseverance are put into it?

———context———
I’ve been tasked in optimizing a process that goes through a list of sites using the api that manage said sites. The main bottle neck of the process are the requests made to the api. I went as far as making multiple accounts to have multiple tokens fetch the data, balance the loads on the different accounts, make requests in parallel, make dedicated sub processes for each chunks. All of this doesn’t even help that much considering we end up getting rate limited anyway. As for the maintainer of the API, it’s a straight no-can-do if we ask to decrease the rate limit for us.

Essentially I did everything you could possibly do to optimize the process and yet… That’s not enough, it doesn’t fit the 2 days max process time spec that was given to me. So I decided I would tell them that the specs wouldn’t match what’s possible but they insist on 2 days.

I’ve even proposed a valid alternative but they don’t like it either, admittedly it’s not the best as it’s marked as “depreciated” but it would allow us to process data in real time instead of iterating each site.

I am so sick and tired of hearing “AI” everywhere all the time. Yeah how about we integrate some AI into your super smart toaster so that it knows when to start preparing for when you put toasts in it in the morning.

Not even mentioning all these idiots being like “oh yeah AI is becoming sentient. Oh yeah AI is gonna take over the world”.

Brother the current state of AI is just machine learning, it’s a stupid pattern detector and generator it doesn’t have thoughts, emotions. Please just stop it.

Very vague and large question but: How do you become better in terms of software development / engineering?

For context my current job is pretty good but sometimes it lacks challenges, I’m interested in how people become better out of the work scope I guess.

Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?

- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?

Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.

I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.

This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.

I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?

Kind of a vague question but has anyone done the Google and Microsoft tech interviews ? I’m preparing for them at the moment and I’m curious how hard these would be

Quick question for you all: How do you deal with a problem in production that you cannot fix, even over an extended period of time (say 2 months)?

For context I feel like I’m losing my sanity here, we’ve had this problem on our production API since the beginning of March this year. I’ve done so much testing, got in contact with various teams of my company to try to figure out any potential candidate that would explain the bug, but none worked out. No need to say I’ve spent a considerable amount of time searching on the internet for others with the same problem or similar… We’ve even opened a ticket with the cloud host to see if they would have more details about the problem without success. So how do you deal with that ?

GitKraken is a piece of shit, there’s no other way to word it.

I’ve been working on a branch on my own for a while committed most things I did except the very last things. Since the branch was quite old I decided to rebase onto develop to be more up to date. So for the modifications I didn’t commit I stashed them, then I started rebase, thinking it was done I poped my stash. Then I saw there were rebase conflict so I pressed cancel rebase thinking it would just revert to the state before the rebase. BUT GOOD LORD NO, YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG…

No it just deleted my stash in the process as well 🤦‍♂️

Today is the release of one of the projects I’ve been working on. It was a chaotic project, where I’ve had to contact many people just to get pieces of information necessary to complete the project. Anyway, today the manager ask what the URL of the web app is to give it to the client except I already warned him prior that since we don’t have the domain name for the web app it wouldn’t go past the authentication. But guess what happened? Yep that’s right it’s my fault yet again.

I keep warning my manager about potential issues with the projects I’m working on but they fall on deaf ears, and when the actual problem happens it’s all my fault because I didn’t check it earlier, I didn’t make a mail, I shouldn’t use Teams to tell him about it, I should monitor more closely, etc, despite having no time allocated whatsoever.

In short I work 7 hours a day but should have 9 to even get close to what I need to do, and I’m blamed with problems that I warn about

So I’ve been working on a tool to do offline domain joining in an active directory for about a month in my company, and so far everything is functional and done EXCEPT that one thing.

Essentially to do an offline domain junction, you need an AD account that has sufficient privileges on the domain controller. It will then generate a key that you can use on the client machine to make the junction to the domain.

I have tried literally every possible option that I could think of and I cannot for the life of me figure out why the client machine does not accept the generated key. I’m using methods from the Netapi32.dll which are barely documented anywhere, I even searched on GitHub code references and I couldn’t find much… Theres also a tool called djoin.exe that supposedly does that, I’ve tried with that tool too, to no avail.

This is the last thing missing for the project to be complete, and it’s pretty essential as well…

So close yet so far….

If anybody here knows anything about that kind of stuff (admittedly very niche) I’ll take anything.

Note: I think I’ve browsed all the websites and forums referencing to these functions and the tool now…

I guess this is more of a work environment question than a dev one. Are you friends with your teammates/ coworkers at work ?

I’ve had some bad experiences and now I’m in a much saner environment and despite everyone being nice, some afterworks and out of work events, I still can’t quite give my full trust. Should I ? I can’t shake the feeling something is gonna go wrong if I do…

EDIT: For additional context, I work in a big company where my interactions with my colleagues are not really followed closely like they would be in a startup I guess.

Figuring a way out of the industry to do what I love.

So we have this cycle of releases once every month for the products I work on at my company. Yesterday we started deploying a new version of one of our products on azure. Surprisingly it seems like none of the new features are working, and after two days of tweaking the code, deleting, moving, and re-publishing azure web jobs, rechecking the test environments, making sure every queue was used by the right webjobs… It turns out someone had published said webjob in 15 instances on a resource that we barely use and so the azure queue was being used by these outdated webjob instances…

Motherfucker, two days wasted for that :(

I guess this is not necessarily a dev question but ...

To those who had a burnout / depression how did you manage to pull through ? How long was the process for you ?

I want proper holidays but pandemic.

I didn’t really choose, I just happened to learn C# as one of the 3 first languages I learnt back then. It landed me multiple jobs and that’s about it really 🤷‍♂️

Do you guys have any passive or semi-passive income going ? How much and what is it ?

Looking to build myself a safe situation, any advice is worth taking, cheers.

All hail database backups.

Today my worst development related nightmare happened, I managed to screw a production database at work.

Thankfully we had a backup from 2 hours ago, I’ve never been so thankful to scheduled backups.

Take it from me, do backup your databases even if it’s annoying to do.

Piece and merry Christmas ✌️

Deadlines tomorrow and as per company policies admin rights on our PCs are getting reset every now and then. Today is the third time I ask the IT support for a new admin password, and it’s the third time in a row they give me the wrong password. I cannot debug the apps I’m working on without admin rights.

Getting a little tense over here...

I know this is needed for extra quality but god do I hate having to validate everything I do by so many coworkers before actually being able to do something else. It would be fine if I could get another task while waiting for that validation but nooo, I have to wait until they’re done “validating” to actually move on.

It really feels like I’m losing so much time waiting for people...

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..