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AboutAudio, Games, Web
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SkillsC++, C#, Tcl, JS
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Locationno
Joined devRant on 8/25/2018
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Late night after everyone has slept, switching on all the 3 monitors, reclining on a comfortable chair, fetching some snacks and coffee by the table gives me the perfect mood to code!
There is silence all around 😌2 -
Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).23 -
Toilets and race conditions!
A co-worker asked me what issues multi-threading and shared memory can have. So I explained him that stuff with the lock. He wasn't quite sure whether he got it.
Me: imagine you go to the toilet. You check whether there's enough toilet paper in the stall, and it is. BUT now someone else comes in, does business and uses up all paper. CPUs can do shit very fast, can't they? Yeah and now you're sitting on the bowl, and BAMM out of paper. This wouldn't have happened if you had locked the stall, right?
Him: yeah. And with a single thread?
Me: well if you're alone at home in your appartment, there's no reason to lock the door because there's nobody to interfere.
Him: ah, I see. And if I have two threads, but no shared memory, then it is as if my wife and me are at home with each a toilet of our own, then we don't need to lock either.
Me: exactly!12 -
Client : We have performance issues on <this> page.
US : Testing with their data on : Xeon : All good, Core i7 : all good, Core i5 : all good, A smartphone : all good, core i5 UM version from 5 years ago (You know, 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, not 4) : all good.
US : Could you share your screen and show us ?
Client : Sure ! Shares his screen. Chrome is already opened. Refreshes the page, after 15 seconds, chrome : Would you like to stop script on this page ?”
US with mic on mute : “WTF?! It cannot happen here. It’s only a list of about 500 rows!”.
US : “Hello, could you open a tasks manager?”
Client : “ Sure, but I need to do it through here”
Some random VID interface popping up. Opens tasks manager with a beautiful “48 vCPUs detected”.
I have no idea how their virtualization is settled, but it seems to be messed up. Tomorrow going to be fun. I have a call at 9am to explain them their problem. Their IT will hate me forever.
If anyone has tips on Chrome through virtualization, please tell me.
EDIT : Yes 48. Not 4-8. It's not an error6 -
Fucking hell. Today we reviewed candidates for a web dev position. I already fucking know that here we ain't gonna get a top motherfucker, i already know that the person selected will have to be rigorously trained AND THAT IS FUCKING FINE WITH ME.
The thing is, fucking head of the departmen was hellbent on just grabbing people with the highest education possible setting aside lack of experience. I would not have minded if it weren't because we have a secretary that applied...that got her degree in our very own institution and that has worked with our CMS admin creating web stuff. She is smart and has the drive man, and i don't even like her, but i could see her being in the position, being trained and doing good.
Hod said no, because of her lack of education and experience.....BRUH she got her associate's at OUR SCHOOL wtf do we have students go through it if we ain't gonna hire them if they intend on applying to work with us like wtf might as well advertise that: the degree provided by this institution is not good enough to work with us :D that would be 3000 for those two classes thank u.
Holy fuck i was beyond upset man, if i am to train these fuckers might as well be someone that i know will give it her all and studied with us. Dude quoted favoritism and i said that i was just going by the data that i have on her holy fuck.11 -
WHOA
My grandpa just gave me 100$ for fixing his TV:
-And here is you paycheck son...
-What? Noo, it was literally 2 minutes factory reset, I don't need this :D
-Oh come on. I'm not paying you because you because you pressed some buttons. I pay you, because you exactly knew which buttons to press. Now, take it!
Truly, the man of honor...12 -
Today my current company fuck itself.
We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.
And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".
30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.
This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.
And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...
Funny day :)
Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...36 -
Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.6 -
When the new guy on the team uses click bait titles on his PRs... that’s when you realise this guys going to go far.
12 -
First post, woo!
So I just decided to create a simple coming soon page, slowly getting to grips with javascript finally (I think) but I like just diving into the code and see what comes out at the end of it.
Demo: https://coming-soon-template.netlify.com/...2 -
I want to try out the dvorak layout but I'm a bit unsure if it's worth it. Anyone who has changed from qwerty to dvorak who could tell me about their experience? Is it faster than qwerty? Is it easy to learn?4
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Just got a call from recruiter. I was asked what amounts of € would make me consider switching. I named an amount that seemed surreal. I think I heard attempts to control chuckling, followed by 'well almost all our clients could offer that much'
shit. I think I'm underpaid...12 -
Just got a job offer for a SysAdmin job at CERN! :D
A big fuck you to the italian philosophy of hiring newly graduated students with shitty contracts and a big win for a simple student that wants to learn from the best :)24 -
This guy at an internship who only wanted to use anything Microsoft.
It was fine for his own use but he also wanted it for a high security prod environment and tried to push that through.
Luckily, the (very competent) team lead refused to use closed source stuff for high security environments.
"listen (team lead to that guy), it's not going to happen. We're simply not using software from a US based company which is closed source for high security stuff.
Why? The US is one of the biggest surveillance powers in this world, we just can't be sure what's in the software if it's US based. Now you can say that that's paranoid but whether or not it is, the surveillance part is a fact, deal with it. That you want to use it, fine, but NOT. IN. HIGH. SECURITY. PROD. (or prod at all really).
He continued to try and convert colleagues to windows and other Microsoft stuff for the rest of his internship.28 -
A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.
So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.
Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.
Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.
Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.
Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.
Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.
Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.
Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".
FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.
Adventures will be continued.26
