I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

How long do you think code reviews should be? Ours can run from anywhere between 10 minutes to 4 hours

When somebody submits an issue to your backlog that not even Software Development Jesus himself could fix

I hate Skype for Business with a passion. It's the most garbage useless chat program imaginable. It can barely send basic text chats without throwing an error, and it can almost never send an image without the upload failing. The fact that it can't even save conversation history for each of your chats within Skype is ridiculous -- it fucking saves the conversation as an email draft in Outlook. Come on Microsoft, why do I have to open a completely separate program to view conversation history?! Skype conversation history should be saved IN SKYPE! Fucking AIM was able to save conversation history. I've tried multiple times to get the company to move to Slack or Teams, and for some reason they think that Skype is a good program and they ignore the fact that it's completely useless. It's 2019, why are we using a program that's built like it's 2009? I swear they haven't updated Skype at all in the last decade

Spent a couple hours writing a new feature yesterday, and finished it only to discover that somebody lazily wrote the global method that my feature was utilizing. Emailed them and told them that I completed the feature and asked them to fix the bad method. Figured that I wouldn't commit my code changes until he fixed his method. He proceeds to fix the method, and then completely redoes the feature I ALREADY TOLD HIM THAT I FINISHED. He removed me from the backlog story that I was assigned to and did the feature the exact same way I did. Motherfucker I already told you that it was done, you just needed to fix your lazy shitty global method. You did twice the work and wasted my time. If you wanted credit for your work, that's fine -- you could've created a new story to fix your method. Now I've wasted hours of my time writing a feature and then reverting the changes because you couldn't follow directions

You're casually scrolling through code and then suddenly you see it...

What's the longest code review meeting you've ever had? We're about 3 hours into this code review so far, and it doesn't sound like we're going to be done anytime soon

The person sitting next to me in scrum is literally eating honey roasted peanuts out of a cereal bowl with a spoon

A coworker during scrum today: "Last week, I worked on the new feature. Also, I have an announcement for everyone: I'm going through a divorce so I moved in with my parents and will be working remotely for a while. I have no blockers...except for the divorce."

During scrum, we have a remote QA Engineer who literally includes what she and her child do during her lunch breaks.

"Yesterday during lunch, little Jimmy and I went clothes shopping during lunch and I got him some new shirts and they're 100% cotton"

NOBODY FUCKING CARES!!

SCRUMS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE 15 MINUTES, NOT FUCKING 1.5 HOURS

People who like hearing themselves talk shouldn't be in charge of meetings. We can't get the work done if you keep having meetings to talk about us getting the work done.

Am I the only one who feels like morning scrum meetings are a complete waste of time? At least in the way that my team does them. It's 30 minutes of "I did this thing yesterday, and I will continue to do that same thing today." All of this information can be sent in an email, but we insist on meeting every morning to say the same exact things.

For the past 3 weeks, the majority of the team has said the same exact things during scrum: "I continued to work on this big feature yesterday. Thank you." Like how does a detailed retelling of what this person did yesterday pertain to the rest of the team? It's just meeting for the sake of meeting, and talking for the sake of talking.

If you have this little technical issue that only pertains to work that this single person is doing, then meet with that person separately and discuss it. There's no reason to make everybody else sit and listen to information that will never be useful to them.

And most of the time, this scrum stems into spontaneous unplanned longer meetings afterwards. So suddenly this "quick" 30 minute scrum turns in 2-hours of meetings and a morning wasted on information that could've easily been discussed over email instead

I met with the CTO of a local tech company today for a beer, at the recommendation of a friend who currently works at the company. They're looking for Software Engineers and wanted to see if I'd be a good fit.

I'm not actively looking to leave my current job, as I love it there. I was just curious to see what other opportunities were out there.

After the beer, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot for $30,000 to $40,000 more than my current salary, along with benefits. When I asked if there was any sort of technical interview, he said that this meeting was actually the technical interview, and that by the time he had finished his first beer, he could already tell that I would be a good fit. He wants me to meet with his Lead Architect and CEO soon just to see if we all click and then we'll go from there.

The only problem is that I really love my current company. I love the work, the atmosphere, the autonomy, and my coworkers. But an extra $30k to $40k per year is a lot of money.

If everything works out and they give me an official written offer, I'm going to see if my current job will counteroffer. I know my boss would happily counteroffer if he's given authorization from the higher-ups, it's just a matter of exactly how much they're able to counteroffer.

!dev-related

The charging port on my Galaxy S8 is messed up and is constantly disconnecting while charging, which results in the phone either slow charging or just got charging at all.

I thought I got the monthly phone insurance through Verizon and I was just gonna pay the deductible and get the phone replaced, but apparently I don't actually have the insurance even though I could've sworn I did. So that option is out the window.

So now I'm left with 3 other options:

1.) Pay $100 to get the charging port repaired at a local repair shop
2.) Pay off the remaining $200 I owe on the phone and get a phone upgrade from Verizon (because I am due for an upgrade)
3.) Get the upgrade but still keep my current phone on my plan and just pay the remaining $200 off monthly like I have been since I got the phone, except I'd also be paying for a second phone. Which is fine, because either way I'd be paying the $200. It's just a question of paying it in a lump sum or paying it monthly. Either works for me, it's $200 both ways

The downside of upgrading now is that I wouldn't be able to get the Galaxy S10 when that comes out, and that's what I've been waiting for as I prefer the smaller Galaxy S phones over the Galaxy Notes.

I suppose I could trade in whichever phone I get when the S10 comes out, but that would be a huge hassle and I'd have to pay at least 50% of the phone off in order for it to be eligible for trade-in

Decisions decisions.

What's the best scrum team name that you've heard?

My favorite is "Colonel Panic" (Kernel panic)

We had a major core router hardware failure in our LA datacenter today and every one of our services has been down since 6am, including all production servers. We have about 15,000 sites down across our entire platform. Our manager came over and told us to just go home because we need to replace the hardware and the process is expected to take all day, and we can't do any work until then because all the production servers are down. So you could say that it's been a pretty easy Friday so far! I'm headed home to play Spider-Man

We've been working on a big application on-and-off for the last year (whenever we had time.) It was 99% working, and we left it to work on some other apps. We come back to it, only to find that some big features have magically stopped working. We dig into it and find thT some other dev team completely changed the functionality of one of the existing off-application microservices were utilizing without telling us, and then we had to spend days reverse-engineering what they did so we could retrofit our application to communicate with the microservice again.

We were able to get it fixed, but I just know that they're going to change something else in the future without telling us and it's gonna break again. A little interdepartmental communication would be greeeeaaaat!

Dual 27" Dell 4K HDR monitors, plus a Samsung 1080p and the retina display. My poor 2015 MacBook Pro with a Radeon R9 M370X 2GB can barely handle it. But there's just so much resolution that it's totally worth it!

A few days ago, the Senior Director of our department came over to the dev team and asked the senior developers to gather around, and she informed us that a competitor was talking shit about our company's websites on Twitter, and she asked us to tear the competitor's site apart and find everything wrong with it from a technical standpoint so she could retaliate. We ripped the competitor's site apart and found that they were using a stock WordPress template that they purchased for $50. And here they were talking shit about OUR websites!

She took our findings and reached out to the competitor, politely suggesting that they take can their stock WordPress site and shove it.

They promptly deleted their Twitter post.

For about 1.5 years on and off, we've been developing a system to rate tickets/requests sent to our team. We wrote it in Angular, and it turned into this feature-rich gorgeous application with custom-built graphical statistic tracking, in-app social networking capabilities, robust user profiles, etc.

Eventually, we no longer had time to work on it along with all the other applications we're developing. So we passed ownership of the app over to a couple of other developers on our team. You'd think that they'd just work off what we already built and keep the robust environment we created for them. But nope, instead of keeping everything we already built, they scrapped it all and started from scratch using React instead of Angular, and removed all of those robust features and turned the app into a shell of its former self. No more statistic tracking, no more social networking capabilities, no more fancy user profiles. Just a single page with a number representing how many "Good" tickets you've sent to us, and how many "Bad" tickets you've sent.

1.5 years and hundreds of hours worth of work, all gone and replaced with the most rudimentary basic React app ever.

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

Just the fact that you wrote your simple single page "contact us" website in React shows that you have no idea what you're doing, nor do you have any idea what the actual benefits of React are and in what situations it actually shines. You're just jumping on the React bandwagon for the sake of saying "I wrote it in React," and your decision to use React for that simple website is going to effectively increase It's development time without adding any additional benefits.

Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages. It's worth it to pay attention to these advantages/disadvantage, and choose the best framework to fit your needs. Don't just use a particular framework because it's the hot new craze. Use a framework because it's the right choice from a technical standpoint, and presents you with advantages that fit your application needs.

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

All those fingerprints... I am TRIGGERED. It's like he stuck his fingers into a philly cheese steak and then smeared them all over the screen.

NaNaNaNaNaNaN BATMAN!

Found in one of our internal version control tools today. The Dark Knight is among us.

There are few things that annoy me more than an app with unneeded transition animations between menus. An example of this would be the Xbox app on Android. Whenever you navigate to a new menu, it always has a stupid slow fade-in animation. Why do we need an animation every time we switch between menus?! It adds that much more time before we can actually use that section of the app, just because we need to wait for this stupid unneeded animation to run. It's like whoever wrote the app was browsing a generic animation library and discovered the fade-in animation, and thought to themselves "Woah this is so cool, it'll make the app go whooooooosh every time they change menus, they're gonna be so impressed!!"

This might just be me and my OCD talking, but am I the only one who gets super annoyed with sloppy CSS formatting?

So like, if somebody writes a sloppily formatted rule like this without spacing out each property and value:

#signUpButton {color:#FFF;background:#000;float:right;clear:both;padding:5px;position:absolute;top:5px;right:20px;height:100px;width:45px;}

As opposed to something like this, which just looks much cleaner:

#signUpButton { color: #FFF; background; #000; float: right; clear: both; padding: 5px; }

The formatting makes no difference in how the CSS is evaluated and rendered, but I find the spaceless style so ugly and difficult to read/edit, whereas the spaced out style is much more appealing to the eyes and easier to read

I find myself reformatting other people's CSS that works perfectly fine just so it will be easier to read/edit for anybody else that looks at it in the future

Pls respond

We have people from all different types of backgrounds here on DevRant, and I feel like lots of us just kind of spontaneously discovered the dev world without really planning on it.

That makes me wonder, what did you major in during college, and is it related to what you're doing now? Did you major is Computer Science/Software Engineering/Web Development, or something completely different?

I double-majored in Algebraic Geometry and Astrophysics, and while my math background does come in handy as a developer, I'm very rarely applying what I actually specialized in to my dev work

My team has 1-on-1 check-up meetings with our boss about once a month.

My 1-on-1 today consisted solely of him saying "So I bought a new Porsche, want to see a picture?"

It was a pretty productive meeting, if I do say so myself!