When rookies start learning new ways to format Python strings...

CEO: What are your plans for these hollidays?

Me: Clean up the house. I haven't had much time because we've had some busy last few months.

CEO: Seriously? Are you joking? (I could see in his eyes, "why would a talented programmer ever waste their time doing menial housework...") I mean, you could be working instead and earning a couple more bucks...

(Fuck him, none of his business...)
Me: I can't delay it this time. My wife has dust allergies.

CEO: Oh. Ok. I get it. When I was a kid, my father and I had some serious dust allergies. The house maid had to clean everything thoroughly at least once a week.

Not surprised...

Me: XYZ library just announced that they will stop support for their version 3. I will update our code to use the latest version. It'll probably take 10 hours because we use it pretty extensively.

Manager: Okay. While it's updating, could you work on the ABC feature?

Me: ... no, because I'll be working updating the library.

Manager: Oh so you gotta work on it? I thought it would get updated overnight like my iPhone.

Conversation I just heard

Manager: How's everyone doing?

Dev: I'm actually really tired. I've been having trouble concentrating and reading. I think I need a vacation.

Manager: Oh but that's good. You see, the brain is like a muscle. Today you lift 30kg, tomorrow you lift 40kg. So you will be able to handle more and more stress as you progress. That's great.

Dev: ...

If a CPU were an employee...

CPU: Hey boss, I'm seeing you are giving me a lot of mathematical tasks that would really profit from splitting into parallel calculations. GPU's are great for that, we should get one.

Boss: But you can still do them, right? If you can do it, I'm pretty sure you can do it at GPU speeds. We gotta save up so I can buy another car!

----------------------

Boss: Why is this taking so long?

CPU: I'm overloaded with work, so I'm overheating. Maybe you could buy a GPU to help me out, or at least a fan...

Boss: You're overheating? Your personal problems should not affect your professional life. Learn to get your shit together or we will hire someone who will

CPU: *melts*

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

Third World country: *has power outage because of corrupt government*

Our outsourced devs: Hey sorry boss, we will not be able to work today because there was a power outage. We'll make it up for it during the weekend! We're saving up for a power generator so this doesn't happen again!

Manager: These lazy @#$@ (racial slur) are so lazy and stupid!

Remembering a university lecture

Prof: "What are some other downsides of using polling instead of interrupts?"

Student: "The process has to wait until it gets polled."

Prof: "Exactly. When you click Ctrl+W, you want that tab to be closed immediately. You don't want the system to wait a few seconds for those keys to get polled and risk your mom looking at that tab."

Two brainfarts that resulted in... a lot of pain

I had been coding all day, ~6hrs. I was in the zone, so I hadn't saved to git. It was all uncommitted changes (you see where this is going...)

Brainfart#1: The code used the "Contact" class, but for some reason my hands typed "Product" in this ONE line.

Brainfart#2: I became aware of Brainfart#1, so I changed the variable from "Product" to "Contact". However, I instinctively pressed F2, "Rename Symbol", instead of just changing the variable I was using. Now ALL of the references to "Product" were to the "Contact" class instead, across all of our code.

I finished coding. I committed and pushed the changes, closed the IDE, and left the desk for a snack. When I came back, the automated tests were failing due to an import error. That's when I noticed my mistake. I couldn't do Ctrl+Z because I had closed the editor. I had to change the names one by one across all of our code. "Contact" and "Product" are probably our two most used classes 😭

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

Boss: misses zoom meeting

9PM: Boss calls me to catch up with the meeting he missed

😡

Boss: Our customer's data is not syncing with XYZ service anynmore!

Me: Ok let me check. Did the tokens not refresh? Hmm the tokens are refreshing fine but the API still says that we do not have permissions. The scopes are fine too. I'll use our test account... its... cancelled? Hey boss, why is our XYZ account cancelled?

Boss: Oh, "I haven’t paid since I didn’t think we needed it" (ad verbatim)

😐

... why was r/devrant banned from Reddit?

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

17,000 USD a year?! That's outrageously high (for a Philippino)!! This dev must either be a god or they're ripping us off!

Sequential Scan goes brrrr

I enter a newspaper website. It shows me the article, but 3s later it blocks the page with "Oops you gotta subscribe!" I disable JavaScript and the popup doesn't show up again.

Cox -Zucker machine

I think YouTube gave up on trying to send me ads.

I have an adblocker in my desktop but not on my phone. In all of my years using YouTube, I've only ever clicked on an add twice on purpose, and maybe a couple of times by accident. By now, even when I'm not using an adblocker, YouTube still doesn't send me ads! And for some reason it's lately been sending me ads of YouTube itself. It's a very annoying 5-second video with just the logo of YouTube. They're really just telling me "I don't have anything to promote to you, so I'll just make you waste 5 secs just cause."

However, every single time I get on incognito, I get one ad or maybe two per video. wtf

How many bugfix branches do you have at a given time?

I'll point names today

Boss: Quick! The Xero integration is not working anymore!
Xero Documentation: place your client secret in the HEADERS
Me: * places client secret in headers *
Xero API: Bad Request!
Me:
*re-reads documentation*
*creates new client secret*
*1 hour of trying*
Hmmmm
* places client secret in request body, not in headers *
Xero API: Ok!

UPDATE YOUR DOCUMENTATION
TELL US ABOUT IT IN THE CHANGELOGS

I sincerely cannot live through another daylight saving time change. I cannot. Please, oh politicans, have mercy upon me. My work deals with 5 different time zones. PLEASE

Customer: You say you connect to XYZ service, but my data is not getting synced!

*checks their account*
Me: I see you have not integrated your two accounts. Go to Settings > Integrations > Connect to XYZ.

C: Why? But you already connect XYZ! You should already know all of my data!

Website: "Here is your PDF! You can download 1 more PDF today. Get unlimited downloads with a PRO account!"

Oh do I?

*deletes cookies and local storage*

*downloads another one*

Website: "Here is your PDF! You can download 1 more PDF today"

Trying to code while being blown is the best sensation in the world 😎

Interviewing candidates for a middle/senior dev position:

Me: Imagine you have this button, but whatever it's doing when you click it, it's taking too long to load. How would you improve the speed performance?

Candidate: Redis!

Me: Okay... but how would you find where the bottleneck is?

C: Redis!

Me: How abo-

C: REDIS!

kinda NSFW

When's the last time you've had to write raw SQL? Can you consider yourselves SQL experts even though you only use it through ORM's?

Why does Window's Taskbar have so many bugs?

!rant

I've been having this idea for a programmer's horror movie. The main villain is this dev (or maybe PM?) whose first program was "Goodbye World" instead of "Hello World", thus cursing all of his code from that moment on.

They write an artificial intelligence library but they don't document it properly so the user ends up creating an evil AI that threatens to destroy the internet.

Any ideas?