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AboutSoftware Engineer
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SkillsGoLang Ruby lang Bashism ECMAScript Java lang or whatever
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Github
Joined devRant on 8/13/2016
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So today our CFO stepped into IT and angrily proclaimed someone using tech@ e-mail and fake name is defrauding company funds buying themselves... "used female lingerie with extra virgin juice" (sic!).
I work for an IPSP, we handle finance for commercial services (think PayPal but smaller). One of our clients is a big platform where girls can sell items like bath water, used socks and more. CFO demanded our admins found out who and when connected to that website, what URLs and so on.
As mentioned, said platform is pretty big, hence, from time to time we help them with their service when they ask us to, that's why we have a tech@ account. Last month there was a minor issue with one of the banks, someone fixed it and, as per usual, made a small payment of €1 topping up the account wallet to make sure everything works. It was an intern whose will to live is still strong and unencumbered with experience so she jokingly wrote "panties juice, extra virgin" in the payment note. What she *didn't know*, however, is that admins on that platform used the very same account to test new billing system they've implemented and our CFO received an invoice.9 -
Dev: I think we should send Dev2 for some training and certification
Manager: We do not train people or have them certified. When you train people and especially if you have them certified they always leave the company for better offers so we no longer do that.
Dev: So the plan is to have a the company operated by a bunch of untrained uncertified people?
Manager: 😡 You are being disrespectful again20 -
Manager: Hey what was that that you closed on your screen just now?
Dev: That popup? That’s NVIDIA letting me know that a new driver for my GPU is available.
Manager: Isn’t that for video games?
Dev: I mean that’s the reason many people opt into having a GPU but It’s not the on—
Manager: You are NOT allowed to play video games on your work computer!
Dev: This is my personal computer. It’s just an older GPU I popped onto this computer since otherwise it was just sitting in a drawer. My work computer is out of commission.
Manager: Well where is your work computer? How come you are not using it?
Dev: …Because of that blue screen of death issue we talked about yesterday.
Manager: Ok but that doesn’t give you permission to play VIDEO GAMES on your *WORK* computer.
Dev: …26 -
Given a couple of lines of code, I can predict with an 80% accuracy which of my team mates wrote it.9
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Manager: I can’t believe you use Linux, that is such an outdated operating system. You need to get with the times and move to a more modern one like Windows or Mac. Literally NOBODY uses Linux anymore, do you still go to Blockbuster Video too? Ha!
Dev: …
I’m starting to realize that 80% of my job is resisting the urge to punch this guy in the face. Thanks goodness for remote work.33 -
Most successful project... What is success?
My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).
More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.
Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.
So obviously my current "project" is more successful.
Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.
So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.2 -
Thinking of starting an OnlyFans where I post all the atrocious shitcode that I find to make my fans miserable….6
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I was today years old when I figured this.
Whoever named the app and designed the logo is an absolute fucking genius.10 -
My first contact with an actual computer was the Sinclair ZX80, a monster with 512 bytes of ram (as in 1/2 kbyte)
It had no storage so you had to enter every program every time and it was programmed in basic using key combinations, you could not just write the commands since it did not have memory enough to keep the full text in memory.
So you pressed the cmd key along with one of the letter keys and possibly shift to enter a command, like cmd+p for print and it stored s byte code.8 -
When I self-published my first indie game on steam and people actually started buying it.
Remember sitting on the floor with a bottle of vodka trying to tell my girlfriend like that lunatic dotconnecting on a whiteboard meme guy, this is really bad because too much people bought it.
They should spend their money on something useful instead of me, I felt like a fraud.
It turned out good in the end tho, made some updates for it that made it better so i felt better about it, plus got a job from a publisher because they liked my game 😃6 -
Be more passive
I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.
I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.
Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.
Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.
But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.
If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.
If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.
*Pours another chocolate milk*
Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.20 -
Dev: Hey our current server is starting to chug a bit. Can I get approved for $1200 additional spend to double the speed?
Manager: *Sharp inhale*. We need this project to cost as little as possible, we really can’t justify spending any additional money for any reason right now.
*2 days later*
Manager: YOU ARE APPROVED FOR $100,000 TO IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT SOMETHING RELATED TO NFTs IN ANY OF OUR APPS. THE BUSINESS NEEDS TO EXPAND INTO THE METAVERSE ASAP IMMEDIATELY. I NEED AN ETA BY EOD AS TO WHEN THIS CAN BE ROLLED OUT.
Dev: …16 -
Tech startups, an analogy:
After 18 years going from help desk teams to NOC teams, telecom engineering and all manner of startups in between I have concluded the following:
Imagine wanting to start an aerospace company because you know how to fold a paper airplane, but not how to actually design and engineer an actual craft that will pass basic air worthiness checks.
That’s 99% of “tech” companies.
Discuss. I’ll make drinks.9 -
This guitar looks heavily worn, yet it’s brand new. It’s called a “relic” — the guitar is artificially aged. Relics always cost crazy amount of money compared to regular guitars.
Relics were invented by Keith Richards, when he said “bash ‘em up a bit” to a guitar master builder from Fender, the guitar company.
With one phrase, Keith created a billion dollar industry.7 -
On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.
Not for the code but for their customers.
But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.
And that was a real deep dive.
Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.
This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.
But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.
That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.
This was of cause never documented in any way.
And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.
Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.
And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.
Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)
It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.
If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.12 -
Rant
Why do shithead clients think they can walk away without paying us once we deliver the project !!!
So, here goes nothing..
Got an online gig to create a dashboard.
Since i had to deal with a lot of shitheads in the past, I told them my rules were simple, 20% advance, 40% on 50% completion and 40% after i complete and send them proof of completion. Once i receive the payment in full, only then i will hand over the code.
They said it was fine and paid 20%.
I got the next 40% also without any effort but they said they also needed me to deploy the code on their AWS account, and they were ready to pay extra for it, so i agreed.
I complete the whole project and sent them the screenshots, asking for the remaining 40% payment. They rejected the request saying my work was not complete as i had not deployed on AWS yet. After a couple of more such exchanges, i agreed to setup their account before the payment. But i could sense something fishy, so i did everything on their AWS account, except registered the domain from my account and set up everything. Once i inform them that its done and ask for the remaining payment.
The reply i got was LOL.
I tried to login to the AWS account, only to find password had been changed.
Database access revoked.
Even my admin account on the app had been removed. Thinking that they have been successful, they even published ads about thier NEW dashboard to their customers.
I sent them a final mail with warning ending with a middle finger emoji. 24 hours later,
I created a github page with the text " This website has been siezed by the government as the owner is found accused in fraud" and redirected the domain to it. Got an apology mail from them 2 hours later begging me to restore the website. i asked for an extra 10% penalty apart from the remaining payment. After i got paid, set an auto-reply of LOL to thier emails and chilled for a week before restoring the domain back to normal.
Dev : 1
Shithead Client: 024 -
Manager: You really shouldn’t be doing that
Dev: It’s in my job description
Manager: Yeah but you still shouldn’t be doing it.
Dev: Who should I hand it off to?
Manager: We don’t have anyone else to hand off that task to.
Dev: Ok, do I stop doing it?
Manager: 😡 Of course not, it needs to get done! I’m just saying you shouldn’t do it.
Dev: ???????????13 -
Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)
Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.
Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common
Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.
Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?
Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?
Him: I don't know
Me: then I am not interested12 -
So the other day I randomly checked out a few job postings on some recruiting agency’s website. Didn’t even sign up or anything.
The very next day I get a call from them. The person on the phone tells me they noticed I had visited their website and was wondering if I was interested in applying to any of the offers. Even as a developer I was totally taken aback as to how they managed to track me down based on a single visit.
I believe I ended up on their website by clicking on a link on LinkedIn. I’m assuming it’s via LinkedIn that the managed to get my info (phone etc.). All in all I’m not extremely surprised. But to me it’s downright creepy and it makes me feel like I’m being stalked. Also it makes recruiters look totally desperate and I’m not sure I would want to entrust them with the responsibility of handling my career4 -
Mon: Ticket A is now low priority, Ticket B is top priority
Tues: Ticket B is now low priority, Ticket C is top priority
Wed: Ticket C is now low priority, Ticket D is top priority
Thurs: Ticket D is now low priority, Ticket E is top priority
Manager (Fri): You haven’t completed a ticket all week! What gives??
Manager (Following Mon): Tickets A, B, C, D AND E ARE TOP PRIORITY!!!!!
Dev: …12 -
Manager: How long until the current set of tickets is complete?
Dev: Based on storyboard points it’ll be 1.5 weeks from now
Manager: That’s unacceptable! Let me take a look at the board and see if I can remove some low priority tickets.
*Later that day*
Manager: Oooo I found a bunch of really exciting tickets in the backlog that I forgot about. I’ve added them to the board.
Dev: Did you remove any?
Manager: Huh? Oh right. No, I looked and it all needs to get done.
Dev: With these new tickets added to the board our new estimate is 4 weeks.
Manager: WHAT?!? BUT I SPENT ALL DAY LOOKING FOR EFFICIENCIES!!
Dev: …15 -
Family reaction story to me being a dev?
- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."17