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An entirely typical exchange at work:
PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?
ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?
PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.
ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.
PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.
ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.
6 hours later…
ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.
PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.
ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?
PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.
ME: Babelsets?
PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.
ME: There are users!?
PM: Of course!
ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.
PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?
ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?
PM: Yeah.
6 days later…
ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?
PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.
ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!
1 hour later…
ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.
PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?
ME: What cron?
…
ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.
PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.
ME: Right. I’ll change it...
PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.
ME: What visual?
...53 -
My dumb CEO just hired an even dumber CTO. The new CTO asked me the following questions...
1. What is GitHub?
2. What is JSON?
3. What’s an array?
4. What is Get and what is Post?
5. When an iPhone is offline, can it call an API on our server to tell us it’s offline?
6. I know you’ve spent 11 month the writing this backend in PHP but can you change it to Java now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because it’s better.
Me: How?
Dumb CTO: because it is.
7. I know you’ve started to rewrite this codebase I Java but can you convert it to Node.JS now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because Facebook uses it.
8. What is MySQL? Why aren’t you using a database instead?
9. What does NULL mean?
Somehow, I doubt that asshole is remotely qualified for the job.
Fakin shyt for brains.180 -
Looking for a job as a deveoper be like:
Job title: car driver
Job requirements: professional skills in driving normal- and heavy-freight cars, buses and trucks, trolley buses, trams, subways, tractors, shovel diggers, contemporary light and heavy tanks currently in use by NATO countries.
Skills in rally and extreme driving are obligatory!
Formula-1 driving experience is a plus.
Knowledge and experience in repairing of piston and rotor/Wankel engines, automatic and manual transmissions, ignition systems, board computer, ABS, ABD, GPS and car-audio systems by world-known manufacturers - obligatory!
Experience with car-painting and tinsmith tasks is a plus.
The applicants must have certificates by BMW, General Motors and Bosch, but not older than two years.
Compensation: $15-$20/hour, depends on the interview result.
Education requirements: Bachelor's Degree of Engineering.41 -
2days into changes in our team, so now I'm the only developer
client: so can you give me contact of another person while you're on vacation?
me: well, unfortunately I'm the only developer...
client: (ರ_ರ)
me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯3 -
Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.
"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"
"Uh... look at my beard"
"What"
"Just look at this beard!"
"Uh.... OK"
"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"
"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"
"You don't have to lie"
She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.
"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"
"Yeah"
"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."
She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"
Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."
Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.
Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"
"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"
Joanna: "No I already took care of it"
"How?"
"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"
Me: "I do miss shaving though"68 -
Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"
So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.
First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.
So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.
Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?
I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.
Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?
"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"
So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.
More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!
I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.
And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.
"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."
You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!
"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."
I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.
So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.
You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.105 -
A bit of backstory...
I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.
Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.
1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.
2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)
3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)
4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.
5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.
Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄3 -
My friend silently quited his job. He simply stopped coming to work and that is OK, because his contract expired last Monday. He worked for very bad company, where everyone was braging about how awesome dev they are and know everything better than him. Since company forgot to talk with him about contract renewal or to find a replacement, they are now in big troubles because braggers broke production and none know how to fix it :)6
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*Working on app for client*
After review - “Can you make that font bigger?”
*Makes font larger*
After review a week later - “Can you make that font smaller?”
*Puts font back to original size*
Another review later on - “Can you make that font bigger?”
*Keeps font at same size and changes nothing*
Next review - “That new font size is perfect!”2 -
Me, a junior dev: * reports an important issue and a possible fix *
Senior dev 1: nah, it'll do just fine.
Senior dev 2: that won't be an issue, don't you see? It's under control, man.
Senior 3: why are you even here? Why are you even talking?
Manager: yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
* a year after releasing the product, one of the seniors got fired and another one was hired *
New senior: this thing is bananas, code is inconsistent and there's memory leaks everywhere, how does that even work?
Me: nobody believed me when I said that.
Manager: it did work very well, where's the issue?
Me: it's everywhere, goddammit! Don't you see?
New senior: junior dev is right.
Me: I've been a WHOLE YEAR saying that!
Manager: did you? Really? Nah, you didn't.
...
I'm tired of this shit.15 -
Boss: if I could put together a counter offer, is that something you might be interested in?
Me: eh, no. I’ve accepted an offer for slightly less money than I’m on
Boss: oh ... oh ok. Right so there’s nothing I can do?
Me: afraid not. You can’t offer me a role not dealing with those people in the states, having to use their shitty custom tools or having to follow their bad practises all day.
Boss: ok ..... shit9 -
Not mine, found this on Reddit, still a good read
========
I work in IT as a lead developer, as in I run the department. One of my team leads is female, let's call her Ripley. She is young, smart, and a great dev.
Today she met with a new customer to discuss a big project. Project management sent a male project manager (Hicks).
It started perfectly with Customer asking Ripley for coffee. He's informed about her status and mutters something like an apology. He is visibly unhappy.
He then proceeds to ask Hicks technical questions despite having been told that Ripley will answer all the technical stuff. Ripley tries to answer questions. Customer ignores Ripley and continues talking to Hicks.
Hicks tells him politely that Ripley is the one to talk to, since he is not a dev and unable to help him. Ripley tries again to explain stuff.
Customer gets angry and demands another developer, since Ripley is "obviously far too young for a project of this complexity". Ripley rolls her eyes and leaves. Not the first time this happens.
Hicks smoothes the waves and tells the customer that the senior lead developer will personally answer all his questions. Customer is satisfied.
I walk in and calmly introduce myself.
The customer - now far less satisfied - was forced to discuss all his questions with yours truly, the 47 year old female IT nerd. I was very professional, friendly, and businesslike, he was visibly uncomfortable and irritated by the situation.
It's petty and stupid, but man, it felt great watching his face fall when I entered. I've been in Ripley's shoes far too often and today I heard 23 old me cheering me on.
Ripley loved it as well. She made sure to smile extra brightly at customer when she walked past the meeting room on her way to the coffee machine.
======
https://reddit.com/r/...18 -
Project manager: We have 13weeks for this project. We have promised the client.
Me: okay, why wasnt I consulted on that commitment?
Project Manager: yeah.... we have to do it
Me: okay, if we have 2 dedicated backend and one full time frontend - ONLY on this project.
Project manager: (with the face of lies) yes yes sure we can do that.
6 weeks later, after continuous interruptions. Frontend is behind because he was only on the project to an amount of 2 weeks of the 6 weeks.
Project manager: Are we still on time?
Me: *looks around for prank cameras* no the f#*k we not
Project manager: can we put in weekends?
Me: its 2019 bro, that ain't happening
*But because I am a nice guy, and dont like taking Ls, we will have it ready. Just not gonna tell the project manager, he deserves a few sleepless nights *7 -
Fullstack dev: Hey I need your help with one of this method in the service layer (We use Java).
Me: Sure. What’s up!
Fullstack dev: When you get a user ....blah blah blah...
Me (typing code):
if (user != null) { ... }
Fullstack dev: Wait! This won’t work. You need to write this:
if (null != user) { ... }
In Java, you write like this. In JS it’ll work, not in Java.
Me: (also fuck this guy)
He’s among the famous devs in the company - (A very very very famous European bank).
I checked his commits for the frontend (React Native)
switch (some_expr) {
case foo:
return stuff()
break // <— note this
case bar:
return moreStuff()
break // <— note this
// more cases here with break after return statements
}
Me: Hey if you’re returning from a case why are you using a break. It’s dead code.
Fullstack dev: It’ll fall through otherwise.
———————
You’re a fucking dunce! Please drink a litre of Carborane in a rusty HIV infested container! Cheers!
PS More to come!33 -
“Fullstack dev continues to unleash his terror.”
We were in a meeting the other day discussing how we can integrate our React component with other existing systems easily — other React apps, Ionic, Angular, Vue and vanilla HTML.
All of a sudden, he opens his mouth.
Fullstack dev: So the thing is... it’s like...ummm... (he always starts after with these words. Always) since Ionic and Vue are both “angular-based”. It shouldn’t be a problem.
Me: excuse me! What do you mean vue is “angular-based”? What’s vue gotta do with angular?
Fullstack dev: You need angular installed to run vue apps and you have data binding in vue and in angular.
Me: (fuck me dead) I don’t know what that means, but I know what the Rock is cookin’. (My exact words in the meeting)
They flew him in from India and they keep extending his stay. He’s been working on the project for 2+ years now.
More to come!26 -
Me: You're looking rested - the vacation does you good, it seems.
Co-worker: I didn't have vacation?!
Me: but our PM does.
Co-worker: ...2