First project at new company ended up shit as clients kept using the backlog to define and refine their business requirements. Did not go to production.

Second project at same company ended up the same way, except it had more infrastructure issues than technical debt (and an asshole for a project manager).

Basically I'm scoring 2 for 2, and totally expecting my next project to be doomed too for a 3 score. Maybe I'll build up enough rep as that guy who dooms projects to just sit on my ass and collect my paycheck while I work on my personal stuff.

A little background on project fubar:

Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.

That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.

I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.

Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.

Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?

Why include a linter if you're just going to ignore it!

I just "inherited" an angular app from a year ago for a project that was put on hold, and after opening it in VS Code practically every TS file went red. Almost every rule in the config was not followed. Might as well have just disabled the darn thing?

The original developer is MIA so I can't contact him and ask him why either.

Most frustrating? Anything involving IE, but that's a safe answer. No, my most frustrating experience (to this day) is getting tables to behave responsively on mobile screens. Not easy when the tables in questions contain dozens of columns with hundreds of rows and mostly rely on fixed widths to render the text the way the client wants. So if you have a client who doesn't understand how hyphenation and word break work, I know how you feel.

!rant

It's been months since I last posted in here, but I finally get to share good news for once!

I quit my current job and took an offer at a much better company in a senior developer role.

I no longer have to put up with an idiot tech lead who cannot either prioritize tasks or follow simple processes, a self-absorbed senior developer who keeps deleting my code for his because he prefers tables over divs for layouts, and an incompetent HR manager who is more concerned about his image than the welfare of us employees.

I felt pure bliss when I handed in my resignation. I feel focused and ready to tackle my next challenges at my new job in January. I can't wait.

My personal learning here is that while good things come to those who wait, it still needs you to take that first step yourself and without hesitation.

Sooooo our department boss (the CTO) just announced his resignation, handing over his responsibilities to the lapdog of the CEO (who is very fickle on process micromanagement). Seeing as our offshore team was the CTO's idea, we're kinda expecting retrenchment to hit us in a few months once said lapdog starts throwing out our (soon-to-be-former) CTO's initiatives and projects for her own...

Quite frankly, I wish we'd get redundated now instead of later. I'm starting to hate my job (an increase from before, when I simply began to dislike it) because of my team lead's incompetence (she can't even attend a meeting without hijacking it for some other unrelated topic/issue) and lack of transparency (she never shares everything, keeps a lot of critical knowledge to herself). You can smell her lack of trust from miles away.

Anyways, yeah, I'd like to get retrenched/redundated please. I could use the money, honestly.

You know something's truly off when you're being challenged for all the wrong reasons. When all it seems you ever do is apply a band-aid every time instead of making the time to fix it properly and for good. Or when the people who should be making your work easier to do instead suggest new tools and features to integrate into your workflow or project because they plug the holes in their management process and can ignore the leaks for the time being.

I need to push myself out of this place and ramp up my skills and update my personal projects so I can prove myself capable and move on to a better employer. Because I'm starting to hate the stopgap short-term approach that keeps getting shoehorned into our work, and only proceeds to make us look bad even if it's the whims of our bosses causing it in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

To the people who keep overwriting our meeting room bookings in Outlook, fuck you and I hope you all die in a fire.

Got a few Jira tickets reassigned to me because the dev who was supposed to work on them got stuck on another project. It's fine, that happens.

I open the tickets. No descriptions for all of them. No screenshots for those reported as bugs, nor any replication steps. No attached test cases or, well, ANY useful information.

I talk to our BA, he says that all information I need are in OTHER tickets on ANOTHER BOARD that business manages but I DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO. Honestly, these shitfucks could've just done simple copy/paste. But nooooo...

So I reassign all the tickets back to their original reporters (business testers) with comments requesting more information.

It's been a week. Now I have no idea what to put in my time sheet.

Who the hell hardcodes their localhost ports in a web.config without updating the release config to the correct production URLs? And why doesn't our ops team pick up on this shit before clicking their fancy deploy button? And why in holy heaven do we even have a pre-production server if it isn't an exact mirror of production?

God help me, I need a drink.

!rant

Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:

"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"

So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.

On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!

DOS and Wordstar, I was one of the few kids who submitted assignments on printouts from a dot matrix printer while everyone else was using typewriters. But what really got me hooked on computers? SimEarth and SimCity.

Sooooo I came in to work yesterday and the first thing I see is that our client can't log on to the cms I set up for her a month ago. I go log in with my admin credentials and check the audit logs.

It says the last person to access it was me, the date and time exactly when we first deployed it to production.

One month ago.

I fired a calm email to our project managers (who've yet to even read the client complaint!) to check with ops if the cms production database had been touched by the ops team responsible for the sql servers. Because it was definitely not a code issue, and the audit logs never lie.

Later in the day, the audit log updated itself with additional entries - apparently someone in ops had the foresight to back up the database - but it was still missing a good couple weeks of content, meaning the backup db was not recent.

Fucking idiots.

Thought I'd post this for my friend in QA, because she's been having a horrible week at work.

So we were supposed to have production deployments last night (Tuesday) and tonight (Wednesday). We were told these dates a week ago, which is fine. The QA support cleared their after-office schedules on those dates to accommodate, since the deployments would be happening at 10pm.

Last Monday they moved the deployments to Thursday and Friday, because our "project managers" want to cram as many fixes and resolutions as possible. So of course, we devs are being rushed to speed these additional tasks through to being included (bypassing a LOT of quality checks).

Of course, the QA team finds defects (we devs were expecting that, so no big) and the PMs start blaming them for the delays. Which is just stupid. And my QA friend? They're trying to make her a scapegoat by throwing her under the bus with business.

Fortunately, she's a smart cookie and not only has all communications with the PMs documented, she also has the other QAs backing her up by running the same tests.

tldr; Fuck those project managers who suck up to business and don't give a shit about the people who do the actual work. May they burn in hell and their souls rot in a cesspool of acidic farts for all eternity.

Reading. And not just a couple of genres, I mean as much as possible on as many topics as you can deem interesting. Classical literature, epics, poetry, contemporary criticism, post-modernism, every pretentious piece of work you can get your hands on.

Because the greater your vocabulary and the wider your understanding, the more efficient and proficient you become in learning new things.

Also, it makes you a better writer when you finally find yourself needing to put together some technical documentation for that content management system you whipped together in a fortnight.

So that coworker of mine who got promoted to manager keeps continuing on abusing her new power. She convinced upper management to implement a new policy where you would be disqualified from your monthly performance incentives if you take 2 total sick days a month. She says this is to reduce the number of sick days people take, which of course upper management loved hearing.

By the way, since she's a manager now, this particular policy doesn't affect her - it only applies to us in the trenches. She can still take as many sick days as she wants, since being a manager she can work from home.

Needless to say, save for a couple of suck-ups, she's lost a lot of friends and made a number of enemies in our department, particularly on our dev team.

Good recruiters do not ask who are the other companies or recruiters who contacted you.

Good recruiters understand that potential applicants have greater needs than purely monetary compensation in their offers.

Good recruiters do not threaten you with a hard deadline to decide whether or not you'll accept their offer.

Good recruiters do not ask for referrals if you turn them down.

I've yet to meet a good recruiter.

No, you cannot ask us to move our tech meeting elsewhere because we're being "loud", for the same reason we don't ask you to leave the area because your non-work-related chatter is distracting us from our said meeting. It's the only video conferencing system in the joint, and it's not our fault you and your people sit nearby. How dare you go past us and complain to our boss as if we're nothing to you - just because you were recently promoted, don't act like you were never in the trenches with the rest of us. It's like you have no respect for us now that you've gone a step up the ladder. The next time you or your team members try to fuck with us like that over petty shit like this, we're going to bring the hammer down on your asses and burn every last vestige of self-worth you have by making sure you never get a moment's peace. It's bad enough you and your team suck each other off during our bi-weekly department meeting by patting yourselves on the back for doing what's supposed to be your fucking jobs - don't you dare try to drag us down to make yourselves look like fucking saints. That is where I cross the goddamn line.

Can anyone recommend cheap Windows-based hosting, ideally to run a couple of Umbraco instances for personal projects? I'm currently looking at the Cloud One Tier of asphostportal.com which has some good reviews, but if anyone knows of a better/cheaper hosting provider that'd be super helpful 😁

"Can you put my site as the first result on google?"

I can add SEO to your site, just give me your preferred keywords, a description, and let's make sure we follow white hat best practices etc.

"No call someone at google and ask how much to go to the top of the list"

So you want to pay for ads or..?

"No get a figure I can pay to get to first page"
"Or can you just edit the google"

... And so I never renewed that contract ever again, the end.

I wish I could get our technical lead fired for incompetence. No transparency about deadlines (it's always "Oh and we need it today"), always overpromises to business ("I told them you can deliver this in two days" - we estimated a week's worth of work), and she never documents anything except through email (she never uses Jira, which we use for our task logging - we end up creating the tickets ourselves, which she never reads or updates either when there are blockers she needs to address).

Dozens of retrospectives later trying to find a solution to her poor organizational skills have failed to produce anything remotely close to an answer. She just stubbornly refuses to change or improve. I'm at my wits' end just dealing with this on a daily basis to the point I can't wait to clock out and go home.

It's a Friday tomorrow. I intend to slack off and just put in a couple hours of work because fuck her and fuck this company and its inability to fix itself.

Just happened today!

So since this morning we've been trying to get our website ready for UAT deployment Monday next week, even though we only were told of it yesterday. Since we had some critical merge conflicts to unscrew on our dev branch for promoting to UAT, we sent a warning to everyone on our hipchat group

Dev team: @all please don't commit anything to the repo for an hour or so while we get the branch good for dev and uat build

Tech lead: ok

That should be enough warning, right? Surely our tech lead, who has been piling up our scope creep trying to please our stakeholders, understands well enough not to do a single goddamn thing on our repo until we sort it out, right?

Nope.

10 minutes later our tech lead pushes several changes that not only break our builds but also remove all our configuration transformations. I just stormed out of the office to avoid sending her on a one-way ticket to slapsville and fuckyoutown. Geez goddamn louise.

So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.

Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!

So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.

That was such a fun Friday afternoon.

Remaking my portfolio site using VueJS. Finish that character design sketchbook I started years ago. And move out of my parents' house.

I graduated college with double degrees in literature and marketing management. Web and software development and design was a hobby that became my way of life and eventual career path. I guess it's more of a challenge than a hurdle, not having a formal IT education as a foundation, but I'm happy to have learned a lot from my colleagues over the years to better myself as a dev in practice, if not in academics.

So me and some colleagues joined a hackathon. We already agreed on our project architecture, UI design, and features to build and showcase. Halfway through development new features kept getting added without my inputs, I said to myself it's ok maybe they're just small insertions. But nope, they kept breaking my CSS and UI design and kept causing merge issues on our repo because, well, no one could seem to agree on the project scope. The last straw was, with a couple of hours left, someone went and added new screens and changed the application flow entirely, which entailed some rather nasty rework of my code to fix. Fuck that, I decided to just stop and let them sort the mess.

When it was our turn to present our project, the fucking cunts assumed I would do all the talking - even if they never sent over the slides they put together. Why the fuck am I going to present something drastically different from the initial, agreed-upon scope? I told them to do it themselves and I remained silent throughout the entire debacle.

Of course, we lost. But I wasn't surprised. The guys who presented kept on contradicting each other and were not unified in their vision. I'm never teaming up with them ever again. Fucking asshole douchebag fucks.

Just got made regular at my current employer, but the last month or so I've been threading the needle on whether or not to take it (unfortunately, financial woes made the decision for me, but I digress). Thing is the company culture rewards dishonesty and is slightly toxic with middling managers, even if the work is good.

That said, given the circumstances above, how long would you consider it reasonable to stay at such a company before resigning or interviewing for a new job? Give it a year, or six months, or wait for a dealbreaker like a delayed paycheck?

I don't want to be a jerk just because I work for jerks, but the lack of positive change in our workplace is just demoralizing. Being offshore as well doesn't make it easier.

What do you do when another dev overwrites/changes your working code without telling you, only because s/he cannot understand how your code works?

And your code was working fine, mind you, no bugs or anything, and is following recommended guidelines/standards. It's just that this other dev has a different coding style and prefers to rewrite everything his/her way even if it means breaking up otherwise sound logic.

Anyone else here suffering under a tech lead who instead functions as a business analyst and ignores their dev process in favor of stakeholder demands?

Case in point: our tech lead actually said in our latest retrospective (yes, we're running on Agile) that we should align our schedule to business. So wtf are we even doing Agile sprints for effs sake (this we did not say for fear of losing our jobs)