One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.

Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.

I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?

X: (Tells what it is).

I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?

X:: Sure. In interview questions.

I: What?

X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.

I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)

X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?

I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?

X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.

I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?

X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated)  Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?

X: I would, er, Google that.

I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?

X: Google?

I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?

X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?

I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.

X: That’s great, because React came out last year.

I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?

X: 37.

I: What?!

X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.

I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.

X: Everything is there in the resume.

I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?

X: Japanese culture.

I: Interesting. What specifically?

X: Hentai.

I: What’s hentai?

X: It’s an televised art form.

I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?

X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.

I: I meant technical challenge.

X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.

I: Why did you do that?

X: I had nothing better to do.

I: Why did you decide to apply to us?

X: The voices in my head told me.

I: What?

X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?

X: Money, baby!

I: (shocked)

X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.

I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for.  What do you feel about constant overtime?

X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?

I: What is your biggest weakness?

X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.

I: What are your salary expectations?

X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.

I: Great. Any questions for me?

X: No.

I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.

I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...

!rant
About to attend a hackathon with free food and beverages - including alcohol.
And I can't get this xkcd with the ballmer peaking out of my head.
I sincerely hope it won't get as bad as ME...

*Now that's what I call a Hacker*

MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS

This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.

xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"

xxx: You're gonna love this

xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".

xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.

xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those

Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT

The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...

If Programming Languages Were Girls:

Java: Your current girlfriend, you've been going steady for a while now. Things are okay.

Kotlin: The girl Java finds you cheating on, she's just amazing, and you wish you'd met her sooner.

Visual Basic: The girl you accidentally started a relationship with because you didn't know how to say no. But quickly realised your mistake and regretted it.

JavaScript: A childhood friend you occasionally hook up with. But you could never settle for a relationship with them.

Python: A bossy, manipulative girl who quickly turned things sour. But everyone else loves her because of her huge libraries.
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My and a co worker were joking the other day about what programming languages would be like if they were girls. This is what we came up with (Original inspiration: the Distracted Boyfriend meme (Feel free to add your own!)).