Me this morning: just got a small ticket, should only take a couple of hours. I’ll be done by lunchtime.

1 hour later: this class is a bit of a mess, I’ll just do a bit of refactoring

3 hours later: why the fuck didn’t I just leave this alone. This is going to take days to finish!!!

3 1/2 hours later: git undo and pretend it didn’t happen

Completely lost all my confidence in dev. Spent a few years as a solo dev, sometimes with just one junior. Was quite happy getting requirements, making design decisions, just getting on with it.

I knew I was lacking in a few skills but was given no time to learn anything, so decided to leave for a more structured company.

Got a job with a great company 18 months ago, good devs, proper development lifecycle in place etc.

I just feel completely lost. I’ve felt stressed since I started, feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I’m not confident in anything I write. I just feel stuck and a complete idiot. I kind of expected it when I started but 18 months later and it’s not getting any better.

Have no idea how to fix this, maybe there isn’t a way. Maybe I’m just done with this career and I need something new. So fed up with it and pissed off with myself.

Sometimes I just want an easy fucking life.

No social media or news for 2 weeks. It was nice to give my brain a break.

Internet people seem even more crazy now than they did before!!

I’m interested to see if anyone has had a complete break from all social media and news for a while and what difference it made to them.

Been feeling increasingly tired and stressed recently and thinking of taking a month off, if I can. All SM and news seem to tell you is how the world is burning today. As much as this doesn’t help me, I still feel compelled to check stuff all the time. There’s absolutely no point as there is literally nothing I can do to make any difference.

So I’m thinking a month off might actually make me feel a bit better. I’m trying to think of downsides but I’m not sure there are any.

I’d have a cafe by the sea and have good coffee and nice homemade cakes.

I actually think about this a lot and then I have to come back to reality and realise I’m not that good at baking and I have bills to pay and there’s a pandemic on so nothing is open anyway.

!dev

Sitting in a vaccination centre waiting for my Covid vaccine.

Not looking forward to it, I hate injections!!!

Things that are pissing me off today, after only 1 1/2 hours of work:

1) Dumb arse questions that ask why stuff isn’t working how they wanted, even though it’s working as per the specifications. Try creating a request once you actually know what you want you fucking moron.

2) Front end. I know some people like it but I don’t. Especially when it’s a complete clusterfuck, spaghetti, several thousand line long JavaScript file that dynamically creates the html, and has functions that run based on css classes.

3) Pointless meetings, I have one later. Arranged by our customer service team, with a client and has something to do with a completed piece of work. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about but half the world seems to have been invited so I’m guessing they want to waste time talking shit about nothing for a while.

I’m seriously considering faking my own death today. Or just being sick as it’s slightly less extreme.

Copied a program out of a magazine to draw a picture of a butterfly on a ZX Spectrum when I was about 7. I was not impressed and decided it was way too much effort.

Got to 19, hated my job and decided to do a part time software development degree. Programming had moved on quite a bit by then :)

What the fuck is wrong with people that feel the need to schedule a meeting to ask me a fucking question.

If something doesn’t work then I’ll need to look into it and you sitting there silently while I look through code is an utterly pointless waste of time.

You can send an email, slack, teams, skype, fucking carrier pigeon, I don’t care. Just stop booking in pointless fucking meetings and learn how to write down a coherent question instead. Lazy fuckers!!

Would anyone like to do my job for me today, I really don’t feel like it. It’ll involve the following:
10 minutes: coffee
20 minutes: find next Jira ticket that is actually ready to be worked on
5 hours: figure out WTF is being requested
2 hours: reconsider life choices, have a small existential crisis
30 minutes: find part of code to change
2 minutes: update code and create PR

That’s it really. Anyone interested?

Asking every other fucking day if your shitty low priority bug has been fixed yet is not going to make me fix it any quicker.
I’ve said I’ll let you know when it’s done, all asking me does is piss me off. Maybe if you had some actual work to do you wouldn’t keep annoying dev with your dumb-ass requests.
Actually I released a fix this morning, I’m just going to keep that information to myself for a while.

Why are some people so incapable of creating a fucking coherent request.
I just need to know the data contract and the endpoint. Not a fucking storyline with random documents that you might have been sent. I’m not interested in picking apart your crap to get to what I actually need.

This is why stuff takes so long!!!

I’m at that point in the sprint where I’m considering if gin will improve things and exactly how much is needed to make it all better.

I sort of understand why they are necessary but I really fucking hate annual reviews.
I can barely remember last week let alone what I’ve contributed in the last year. I’ve got absolutely no interest in talking about my achievements and goals.

My goals are trying not to go insane and earning enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. Beyond that, right now, I really don’t care.

Can’t actually put that on my review documents though so instead I’ll have to make some benign crap up and pretend I’m enthusiastic about my job.

Wish I could just think up this stuff instead of staring angrily at my screen for the last hour.

My family supported me in as far as they happily fucked off out of my life a few years ago.
Neither of my parents were able to accept that I had anything other than ‘a little job in IT’ or that I actually knew more about development than they did. They both like to feel they are massively superior to the majority of other humans on the planet. To be fair to them it probably made me work harder to prove them wrong.

Good to see that some parents were supportive of their kids though. And to the ones that weren’t - it’s their loss!

!dev

Doesn’t matter where you get to in life and what you achieve. Doing the school run will reduce you to the intellect and social awareness of a potato.

Mostly I prefer remote working, today though it’s pissing me off.
I’ve spent most of the day waiting for people to respond to my questions. I’ve got stuff I need to get done today but I’m sitting here waiting on other people to do shit that I could probably do myself by haven’t been shown yet. So fucking frustrating!!!

The futility of working in a bank, or probably any other big corporation.

I was working in a small dev team that made improvements to the applications and processes of the department we were in. I was given the project of creating a small data entry system to track some communications. The comms were currently stored in a spreadsheet and had no validation which made any analysis of the data difficult.

Boring but easy, should have taken about a week.

We had 3 meetings just to define requirements, they took about a month to send me their shitty little spreadsheet so I could actually see what they were recording. Over the next 2 months they kept changing what they wanted. Finally got it finished just before I went on maternity leave.

Went off thinking, that I’ll never have to deal with that clusterfuck again.

Had a baby, went back 9 months later.

First thing I got given was that shitty project back. They hadn’t even tested it - in 9 fucking months! I transferred departments not long after. I have no idea if it ever got done.

And that is on my list of reasons as to why I’ll never work in a large corporate again.

3 days away from some much needed time off. I have stuff that I really need to do but I’ve just been sat staring at the screen for the last hour.
It’s going to be a long 3 days!!

Monday morning. I need to write an API with crap client documentation and we don’t yet have access to the clients API. They don’t really have a clue what they’re doing and create their shit following a script so they can employ people with limited technical knowledge.
Our API is embedded in a system that I don’t fully understand and can’t really test locally.
Fuck this shit, I can’t be arsed and I want to go back to bed.

Every few years I seem to have some sort of breakdown. It slowly builds over months, I get more tired, everything gets more difficult. I’m not able to concentrate, my memory is shit and I struggle with work. I can sit at work staring at a screen for hours not having a fucking clue how to do the job I’ve been doing for the last 14 years. The work builds up, I make more mistakes and this just makes it all worse.
It culminates with me feeling completely detached from reality and wishing I could just stop breathing.
Today was that day, pushed over the edge by my self obsessed, judgemental sister-in-law, who is clueless about when to keep her dumb-ass opinions to herself. Not her fault but was just the last straw!
Luckily I had a therapy session today, which helped a bit.
Just wish it could be done and will fuck off now for another few years and let me get my life back.
Hate this fucking shitty depression. Don’t need replies to this, just needed somewhere to vent.

FFS everything I’ve touched this week has turned to shit. I’ve had to redo so much and I’ve got about half the work done I normally would. Everything I’ve put live has broken even after it was tested.
So this week can fuck the fuck off and keep fucking going when it gets there!!

I like my job at the moment and have nothing to rant about so thought I’d share some of my past frustrations.
I’ll start with one of the most ridiculous requests from a user, this is from about 12 years ago:

‘Please change all the links on the internet so that I have to double click on them to open them. I keep opening them by accident’

I can’t remember the actual response but I do sometimes wonder how she’s managing to cope with life now.

Seen this on a couple of rants this morning. WTF is a 10x developer?

1 1/2 days into homeschool, as well as trying to do my full time job.
Teachers don’t get paid enough. My illusions of my 6 year old being interested for longer than 5 seconds in anything I have to say are well and truely shattered.
Turns out she’s as lazy and awkward as me. FFS!

So this is a rant about myself.

I became a senior dev in a corporate environment, mainly by default. Was there for a few years but with personal commitments and a job that required everything yesterday, my skills kind of stood still.

I knew this and got out. Now I work for a tech company with proper processes, really knowledgeable devs, loads for me to learn and do.

But, I keep fucking up. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to code and I can’t seem to do anything that works or follow their code.

I feel like a complete newbie again and I’ve got no confidence in anything I do. I feel like an idiot everytime I ask for help and I’m sure they probably just sit there rolling their eyes.
I would probably be judging me if I was them.
Has anyone else been through this? I’m just hoping it gets better soon. Maybe I should just do something else!!

6 years working with old, outdated tech. I was so bored.
Now I’ve got a new job, devs are all really knowledgeable, tech is all new and I haven’t got a fucking clue what I’m doing!! Not even sure my brain works anymore.? I guess I’d better start learning again

Does anyone know the magic words to use to stop account managers annoying you?
I’ve tried:
- being nice
- being mean
- ignoring them
- telling them to leave me alone or I can’t do their work
- telling them that stuff won’t be delivered when they want if they keep emailing me stuff to change

I’ve run out of ideas. My next option is making a voodoo doll but I’m not sure if I should google that at work.

If anyone has achieved this, then please share your secret. I’m willing to pay!!

Thanks

Has anyone completely lost their motivation to code but got it back after changing jobs?

After 12 years of mostly web development I really don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of the crappy half arsed wire frames, lack of decent requirements and expectation that I’ll just magically know what the client wants. I’m sick of ancient tech stacks and being expected just to know how to make it all work, with no documentation, code comments and monolithic code.

I’m basically sick of all the bullshit.

My current and last company had these issues.

So I’m looking for a new job but I’m being fussy about it. I’m trying to learn new stuff but it’s really a struggle. I used to be good at this!!

This is my first post here, really need some advice.

I recently left a job in a corporate, soul sucking, hell hole for a job in a slightly smaller company for more money.

All good at the time - I got a weird feeling at the interview but ignored it as I was desperate to get out of where I was.

But, since I started my new job a couple of months ago about 20 people have left - some redundancies, some just hate it. Their tech stack is old, there’s no talk of R&D or doing anything new. They just churn out the same dodgy code for each client. Management are trying to bring in a new low code solution that won’t actually do what they need. I definitely get the impression that they view development as a cost that needs to be reduced. The work environment is noisy as it’s open plan and we share it with sales and marketing.

There are a couple of good points, I like my team and there is currently no pressure on me to complete my current project.

So, do I stay, try and keep out of the politics and use my pressure free time to improve my skills. Or get out before I get sucked in to the bullshit that goes along with incompetent management and continual cost cutting?