Source - Twitter

Got about 6 hours of work done in 2. Where's my fucking prize?

Six months ago I got hired for the first time in a company.

Before that, I thought that I was somewhat able to do programming.

A few weeks in, and I realized that I know shit.

Luckily, my colleagues are very patient and very skilled. I have learnt a lot more in this six months than years of self teaching.

Anyone like me?

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

this is the state of hiring tests:

1. can you take an english sentence, and without a tutorial, write a for loop?

2. okay now write a full parser. but not in the language we want to hire you in.

also we can afford to pay you in bananas, experience, and exposure.

p.s. we also need you to do this backend test because this is a backend job even though the ad is for front end and you specified an hour ago when the interview started that you only trained for front.

on the positive side, we have a ping pong table and a bean bag chair. and a two hour commute. Think of the benefits!

There's always a moment when your entire codebase starts breaking up piece by piece and you just wonder why did you choose this job, why you are a programmer, why you don't work at a bar or something like that

Long time no see!

I'm thinking about creating a Youtube channel to create some funny dev projects.

The first one is going to be: "Creating the DevOps nightmare", where I'll create a server health-checker to run on my raspberry-pi, and if the checked fails it'll trigger an API to call him with the voice of my boss, saying that if he doesn't fix that, he will be fired.

What do you guys think?

Machine learning

-- What if JavaScript never existed?
-- What if HTML was a programming language?
-- What if our data online isn't abstract but physical?
-- What if geeks have their own country?
-- What if humans exist and we are the aliens?
-- What if the internet is state-owned?
-- What if we could download food just like every other downloadables?
-- What if my VSCode won't kill me when switched to light theme?
-- What if there was no gender and the word "female" is just an alias for "male"?
-- What if bugs could find and fix themselves?
-- What if there's no need for an account password?
-- What if Linux was owned by Microsoft?
-- **What if I could tell my boss that I'm tired of his fucking job without actually telling my boss? This is the actual what if.**

Wow Mozilla published an infographic instead of an actual blog post and didn't include an alt-tag. Let's just ignore the fact that blind users exist and use screenreaders, articles about privacy don't apply to them right?

Ever just open up notepad and run

@echo off
:imbored
start cmd.exe
goto imbored

as a .bat and watch how the world burns

I just remembered the first time I set up a Linux-Server. It was a simple Apache webserver at my first internship anf I didnt have a clue about literally anything.

My mentor guided me through and gave me literal step-by-step instructions (alright, now type... and now type...).

At the end he told me "OK, now run 'sudo rm -rf /*' to finish setting up". Me, being the naive and clueless motherfucker I am, happily nuked the everloving shit out of my newly setup server. I was like "Alright, WTF just happened??" He then told me "Now that you know how it works, do the entire thing again all by yourself. And you just learned an important lesson: NEVER exexute commands you dont know what theyre doing". I really did learn a lot on that day and still follow that lesson :D

Pet peeve #91847 - when your non technical manager routinely forwards you articles about technical subjects, usually written by non technical idiots, and says "please see if this is something we should be using".

Yeah, I get that your business manager friend has heard Blockchain is amazing, Rsocket is revolutionary, and everyone should now be using Kafka, but none of that makes any sense for our use case.

The clincher had to be telling me to look at AWS groundstation though. And no, we don't have anything to do with satellites...

Fuck maven. For fucks sake. If you want to install something in js project, you do yarn add ... and shit works. If you want to install on linux you do apt-get ... If you want to install ANYTHING on windows in fuckin 2020 you download it and it has an .exe.

But not maven. Oh nooooo. You need to do all the bullshit with configuration, set shitty paths and just pray for someone to shoot you.

Don't punish me for Windows. It's a God damn corporate policy not my sane choice...

We hired a developer and he has very minimal experience. I feel most of our conversations end up going something like this.

New Guy: I'm not sure how to do this obvious task and I'm incapable of searching Google.

Me: Give me your hand so I can hold it and walk you through the process of copying and pasting code from stack overflow.

New Guy: Ok...give you my hand...right...how do I do that?

FML

Please just stop...

Some days I get bored with programming and I think I have no talent and I wish I had a different job. But someday I love programming and I want to code all day.
Is it normal? Do you have these mix feelings?

So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵

Keep it simple.

I was watching this fantastic talk on coding through refactoring:
https://m.youtube.com/watch/...

Highly recommended....
And it got me all enthusiastic about coding again and then I realised, at my last work place, the "we value code quality" corporate hellhole you'd be criticised for taking too long by management and for changing too much code by coworkers.

And a month later, you'd come back to the code and some other coworker would have jammed in a bunch of extra if statements and absolutely fucked your nice structure....

And that's how Infinity War started

How do you guys deal with PRs where things just don't go in and you're always making the same comments and suggestions?

We have a fairly experienced guy in the team who doesn't seem that familiar with the language (Kotlin), despite having now used it for almost a year. We're constantly making the same comments on code not using the correct syntax (basic things like val vs var) or following the style guide and after a lot of grumbling the changes are made, but the same issues are present in the next PR.

He also keeps doing things their own way, even if as a team we've reached consensus on a particular design pattern to follow, or way to solve a problem. When you mention this, you just get a "Hmm okay" but nothing changes. It's like things just go in one ear and out the other.

Even as the reviewer this is really frustrating and demoralising. PRs have loads of comments which makes you feel like you're being picky, and they take forever to get approved and merged.

I even often find myself effectively feeling bullied into approving once most of the main comments are addressed, because you're talking the brick wall that isn't yielding - and none of us are happy with the quality of the code going in. A couple of us are even starting to think "I'm just going to have to accept this and then fix it myself later", which is just not a healthy approach.

Now I'm blessed with an amazing manager who is well aware of the problem and knows from his own experience that this guy is genuinely problematic to work with. We're working towards a solution but I was wondering if anyone here has had a similar experience and how you worked towards solving it?

I'm a little at my wit's end :/

If you think laravel is easy, try to modify your json response in a way that's not too nested.

Not all language have built-in null-checking capabilities. We have a hard time in the front-end to do null checking if there are any nested(level 3 or more) JSON Response.

Meme is a meme!

Hahaha

Ohhhh 😂

When I'm tired, I can't do a damned thing. If it takes effort or concentration, I'm useless. Games are just frustrating. If it's something enjoyable, I simply can't care enough to enjoy it. If I read a book, I can't focus on the words, and won't remember anything I read. If its mindless like watching Netflix, I won't remember the next day, or rather I'll remember just enough to ruin it for myself.

So why not sleep?

Because I've been feeling like this every day, all day long for months. No, that vile liquid called coffee doesn't help. If I rest my eyes and stop thinking for a few minutes, I wake up a little and can function normally for a minute or two before passing out again. I'm not depressed, or at least I don't think I am. I feel like my brain died or got replaced with a lizard's.

And this sucks because I'm still during the probation period at work, and learning the sprawling and intricate codebase is actually challenging. And they're giving me large tickets because I was a dummy and impressed them too much.

Idk what's wrong with me, but I hope it stops soon.
I miss being able to think and plan and do anything besides just struggle to stay awake. 😞

Last week
Customer: I want <totally useless app idea that already exists>, how long will it take to build it?
Me: I think such an app already exists, but according to your requirements I believe we could finish it around May 6th.
Customer: OK, but our app will be so much better.
-finishes meeting and signs contract-

Monday
Customer: will the app be done soon?
Me: as we discussed in the meeting last week, it won’t be done until May 6th.

Tuesday
Customer: will the app be done soon, when will it be in the app stores?
Me: As I explained yesterday, it won’t be finished before May 6th.

Wtf????

Company: your hired, lead our X dev team.
Me: yay.

-- three months later --

Company: we arent supporting X anymore.
Company: gonna offload all X clients in 90 days.
Me: oh.
Company: but you should stay around, learn new tech
Me: is this a charity case?
Company: yes, but we both win.
Me: how?
Company: you can keep your salary.
Me: deal.

If you are looking for a new job elsewhere, how open and honest about thos would you be with current company/colleages? I’m a bit tired of making up excuses about this...