How do you cope with genuinely hating your employer? I’ve been fully remote since 2023, and at this point I can’t ignore how badly it’s wrecking my mental health.

What makes it even worse is the company itself. It’s a 5,000+ employee mess built around ancient, proprietary, closed-source “high-security” appliances. Every single day, working in this environment drains whatever motivation I have left. It’s a constant barrage of bureaucracy, cargo-cult security policies, and security-by-obscurity nonsense held together by duct tape and ego.

They love preaching about “security” while running a brittle, opaque infrastructure that actively fights anyone who tries to do things properly. Every meeting, every ticket, every decision just reinforces how little they understand modern software or trust their own engineers.

At this point, even logging in feels exhausting. The disconnect between what they claim to value and what they actually build is demoralizing, and the longer I stay, the harder it gets to care at all.

After all this job searching, I start to wonder: "What the FUCK do companies even want?!".

List of pictures of setups of other ranters: https://devrant.com/search/...

Some are quite impressive. I personally do not like multiple monitors. For me it's just a laptop on a living room table with a normal living room chair.

Wow, apparently when you're authorizing a Github App with your account there's always a "[This app can] Act on your Behalf" permission that you have to agree too

Bro what??? I just want to add https://utteranc.es/ as a comment system on my blog ;_;

Fortunately it doesn't actually mean what it says. It just means that the app can do all the *other* listed permissions *in your name*. I think?

This wording has been criticized by multiple people but apparently GitHub will not fix it for some fucking reason. Great way to scare off literally every single person who want to comment on some random blog. Because there's so many of those in the first place..........

Shortly after joining the $company, I found this issue where if you connect a certain peripheral to the console, you can use it to do weird stuff that isn't really a thing on consoles. I documented my finding by creating a bug report.
...the bug report had been closed by the test lead w/ a message stating 'The game doesn't support the peripheral. Won't Fix'.
Fucking moron. Well... personally I don't give a fuck whether the issue is fixed. For one, though, it's !that tester's call - it's the devs' call. Seconds thing about this is - if the peripheral is !supported, then how about fucking disabling it, instead of letting the game intercept input from it, which can /* && does, as it turns out */ lead to unintended behavior?
I kind of wish the game had an SQL injection vulnerability, so I could create a report of it just to see whether the retard closes that one too w/ 'The game doesn't support code injection. Won't Fix'.
FFS.

Don't you find it annoying when the dev team gives you the worst or less than absolute minimum of time to test a new release?

It's like... that itches with me so hard. Come on.. we're testing a build here. You want me to brush over this? The amount of bugs that might pop up...(oh yeah we just bill the client for those later lolololol)! Especially when no one wrote tests, or just minimal, I... sigh.

lol

Fuck it! IT is too stressfull. I am going to start my own cider microbrewery!

Your wife calls me pangolin.

I'm at a point in my career where I've started to think -

"Have I made it?"

I mean, I make a very good amount of money by freelancing, I have an online presence with my YouTube and I have a wife.

Isn't this all I ever wanted in life? If I push for more at this point, what am I pushing further for?

This question is equally relaxing and terrifying at the same time. It keeps me enlightened and in a state of limbo, at the same time.

JoyRant build 43

You can now see who upvoted your comment.
This works by getting the info from the notifications list so it will not work for old upvotes which aren’t in the notif list anymore.

Forgot to also add this for rants. Will add later.

Complete list of changes:

* notifications from all tabs load at once
* info button about who upvoted my comment
* comments counter for own rants
* no reply button for own comments
* ignore users locally (added in build 42)

Internet freedom is decapitated.
I miss the old internet so much, it was anarchy and today is a corporate globalist blob of control and censorship.
I feel it's lost and there's no alternative anymore, at least not yet.

"We really struggle to find people with this skil set"

So you're going to hire me, pay well, and not be full of shit, right?

- vaguely blonde
- stupid, npc face
- skinny fat
- sloth eyes, think Sid from Ice Age
- a fucking tester that likes unit tests in JS, especially Jest
- talks a lot, but every time she says something everyone just ignores it because there was almost no substance to what she said
- extremely annoying
- interacting with her would be the number one top level displeasure of your day, any day. A day when you wipe the entire prod db is a better day than the day you have to explain something to her

if you guessed jestdotty, you're wrong. that's just one of my ex-coworkers.

Reminder for Europe meet up.

I suggest August 23rd, Amsterdam. Let's meet at centraal and go from there.

... I expect 5 of you to show up, btw, with one being late and one being very very late. 😐

I should’ve became a chemist

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

Just heard that we don’t have testers anymore. There was already a low test capacity and now it’s full focus on clients and not on software building anymore.
Who needs testers any way right?
We need to just do everything right the first time!

Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

Ssooo.. Turns out, I'm starting a new project in less than 2 weeks. Gotta go to Dublin for 2 weeks.

Fuck.
I'm not a traveling kind of a person...

Had a dream that some trans girl fell in love with me here on devRant, then sending a picture with abstract schizo graffiti with my name to me
I woke up in search of evidence. Went through my phone, didn’t find where to look to see my browser history. Then, every button in the bottom bar were replaced with small 32x32 px ad. That’s when I knew it was a dream too, a dream within dream
Woke up again. Was teleported to a huge liminal water park that is also a mall, and then I was like wait, it’s a part of kikiverse, so it must be yet another dream layer
Woke up again. Typing this. See ya

I’m on life support. Here is my life. Support it.

Speed, quality, scope. Why managers dont understand that they can pick only two and expect all three?

These days I'm rocking GNU Guix as my main operating system. You see, I've been using GNU/Linux since 2006, and in 2021 I stumbled unto Emacs, while looking into "complete environments" for writing, editing and possible coding. That made me fall in love with Lisp, even though I did not and still don't understand it. So, around those same times, I found Guix which is written almost entirely with Lisp, including its kernel. But I've always been more of a user and not a coder. I write my books on Emacs, and tinker around from time to time. Until very recently, I decided to start learning Lisp. I got me a book and an IDE, which funnily enough is not Emacs, because I want to follow the book exactly. I'm not sure whether I'll able to stick to it, this is my third time trying to learn code. I have other activities going but coding would be a nice addition on my skillset. Let's see what happens...

God, i fucking HATE tech that involves running it through legal!

Our ex-employee wrote an amazing SQL SELECT-query consisting of 6449 characters. It has 11 JOINS and takes a solid minute to execute.

The table it fetches from has 16 records and the SQL query returns 46857 records and it was production code lmao

Work just keeps surprising me and giving me wtf moments. They want me to finish a course in 1/10th of the time that the industry recommends just because they don't have budget for more time. I'm quite pissed off. Now I have to work 700% faster. Let's do this shit. lol

Never skip leg day.

Stack Overflow has the best April fools prank!

They are doing an 8+ hour database migration on a business day during business hours!

The prank is the fact that it’s not a joke! They really decided this for some reason!

This comic is completely generated by AI. Yes, the new image generator update in GPT-4o is insane! 🚀

OK then