We mistakenly think that you need motivation to start something. The reality is that often you just need to start and then the motivation will come. And when it goes away again, you just keep on going. Because while it sure is helpful, you are still capable of doing something without.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

Work keeps getting worse. It seems someone ratted me out to the boss after I complained how it is unfair that I'm going to lose my bonus over an impossible deadline. Ok so I probably shouldn't rant in the workplace but still. Now I'm told my negative attitude affects my co-workers and that I certainly won't succeed if I am so negative. Then I got told I instead need to work overtime to make things happen, and when I argue that I can't do that because I need my spare time because of my health I'm basically put on the spot that either I make it happen or I get booted with a negative reviews. You bet your ass I'm in contact with my union over this, because that is just wrong imo. I know they can fire me any time for any reason, but they need to give reason. But threatening an employee who disclosed health issues to you and claiming you will see it as sabotaging the company? I'm sorry I'm not the superhero dev that you want but it hurts being told you're not good enough because you don't go the extra mile, regardless of if you even can or should.

Tiny little upside though, scored more interviews, speaking to a company tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed hard. There's gotta be sane places out there.

Today is a stark reminder of why i want to leave here. First we couldn't do anything because production was down which blocks dev login. Then support tells me I need to work harder because my bug count keeps going up. But what is in my bugs? Feature requests, global changes, and work that isn't mine. Gee thanks :( Why does support get to comment on my performance anyway by something as dumb as a bug count? Grrr.

So I had two job interviews yesterday. Except they both got cancelled due to the snow. Luckily I got them both rescheduled to next Monday. But I wasn't happy about the weather ruining my carefully crafted plans. Work gets more toxic by the day and I want to get out of here.

I goofed up and forgot the WHERE clause in my UPDATE query. Accidentally all of production possibly updated because we don't do test databases. I think it didn't actually go through because I cancelled it but now I need to restore a backup and compare data. Which means explaining this to the co-owner who can help me with a restore. I'm mortified, more so because it was a stupid thing to do to begin with.

Been put on a personal action plan because I'm not finishing my work fast enough. Work that the team lead dumped on me because he claims to have no time for it. But -I- am going to have my bonus pulled by the boss if I don't finish it by the end of the month. This is ridiculously unfair. Good thing I got a job interview next week at another company. Sooner I get out of here the better. I'm so angry over this unfair bullshit.

Delete data because it's corrupt. Angry call from support that their data is gone but they've managed to recovered it. Try to explain why it was removed only to get told they need that data. Fine whatever but if I see any more bug reports about that unit I'm not solving them because it's the data not the code. This is why I wish they'd test on their own databases, which they have, but somehow don't use.

Every once in a while I'm the stupid one at work. Was wondering why my Google Chart tooltips flickered on hover. Found some bug and a workaround on SO but it kept happening. Then I noticed the container div kept refreshing and I couldn't explain why. Until I commented all my code and by systematically enabling it line by line I noticed my dumb ass used setInterval instead of setTimeout. Well yes if you keep redrawing the chart it is going to flicker! *facepalm*

So we started to get build failures because the build server is full. Team leader asked the co-owner for more space. Got told we should just do less builds. You know stuff is outrageous when even your team leader goes on a rant about how stupid that is and how things are going to crash and burn in the future but nobody gives a damn.

Found out today my boss told the team lead to put an unfinished part of the software that I'm developing into production so the clients 'could look at it already'. Team lead claims he objected but boss insisted. So now our error logs are filling up with lines every time it silently fails, and the pressure is on even harder to make it work asap. This has been going since the start of the week and I found out about it now. Boss told team lead it looks better to the clients this way. Meanwhile I'm just thanking the heavens this at least couldn't cause data loss. Probably. *panic intensifies*

Why fix browser compatibility issues when you can just block what versions users can log in with?

Not sure if junior dev is lying or just really bad at using the search function. He made sweeping changes in code he inherited from me and failed to find all the jQuery selectors that broke because of it. And he didn't think of clicking on all the other buttons on the page to check they are still doing their thing. Of course claiming that there is no time for testing when I pointed out his mistake. Wish he'd stop being such a bad, this is not the first time this has happened!

Atm we're merging everything straight up to production because we only have our first client going live tomorrow. No problem except for the fact boss is using production to give demos to clients already. And so some JavaScript change that broke search made it to production and cropped up during a demo. So what does boss do? Call HR/support and yell at her that everything which works needs to keep working. Which is fair if we were live and we go back to merging to production being rare. So HR/support was in tears during our meeting where we were taking about the new live branch structure. GG boss. We consoled HR/support but really boss man knew how we work but ignored it.

Question for everyone though: what can we use or do to prevent changes to more general JavaScript breaking things around the code? We talked about unit tests and maybe code linters but is there more? Because it seems now might be the time to improve our working and even get budgets for tools.

Not using my period of unemployment to really delve into freelancing. It's much harder to do on the side. But I lacked knowledge and experience back then.

Also not interviewing companies better. Always ask about everything.

HR: "People you got to keep believing in the software so we can succeed. You look like a pack of beaten dogs who have given up the fight".

I can choose to believe in God and that he will bless us with a miracle but that's not going to make it any more real than believing in the software is going to fix all the work still left. 😑

So Thursday our first beta client is supposed to go live. Tomorrow there is a team meeting to discuss the status. Team lead wasn't in at work last Thursday and Friday and gave me his work to finish, which I need to proceed with mine. I hardly made progress on it. So now I have to tell him about that tomorrow. And I'm dreading it so hard. More so because for some reason HR/support sits in on our meetings and will be on my ass again I'm not meeting deadlines. I did say last week it looked like it wouldn't be done in time but I was told it just needs to happen because the release date was already announced. So yeah the coming week is going to suck. And I'm on leave myself this coming Friday so I expect people to explode. I know I should just stop caring and get on with job searching but the whole injustice of being set up for failure by others and then being blamed really makes me mad.

My over promising boss is upset that something that used to work doesn't work now because support decided it had to be changed. We took it apart to rebuild it and it's only partially finished right now. Says he can't show it to clients like this. Well no we told you it wouldn't be ready for the deadline you forced upon us, even before the requested changes, but instead of listening you tell us not to argue and just get it done.

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

!dev

So that new keyboard I bought? They sent me a French azerty instead of a Belgian azerty layout. Meaning the special keys are in the wrong places.

It's from a third party vendor. Here was me thinking I was getting a good deal on a second hand product in a box that had been opened but returned. Think I can guess why that happened.

I contacted support who will contact the third party but I have a bad feeling about this already. Both the third party and website where I ordered this are Dutch and they are used to Qwerty. Guess I should have bought on a Belgian website at full price :(

When the new keyboard you ordered arrives at work (it's for at home) and your team lead remarks 'that is a big dildo you got there'. I did fire back by asking him if he was jealous which led to sudden silence. Still disappointed in him, we do rib each other all the time but this feels sexist and inappropriate. I'm used to it and laugh it off but I'd still expected better of him.

Database is being slow AF again. Team lead is investigating. This is happening more often lately and affects both production and dev because everything is just in one gigantic database. So clients are calling support being angry about the speed they get and us devs get to twiddle our thumbs while waiting for our own data to load.

!dev

Colleague alerted me to the fact I got a flat tire. Won't be able to slip out until my lunch break to check on the damage. It's been an expensive few months including this one so I'm going to have to dip into savings to cover the repairs. It's a small car so I don't have a spare and I don't have a repair kit but hopefully roadside assistance will be able to help. Never been in this situation before so I'm feeling like a dumb newbie.

In recent time my anger comes from a junior dev who keeps saying he's got no time to test and breaks working code leading to others getting the blame and the team leader not addressing the problem.

In the past it was micro managing managers who thought they knew how to make a UI best, and also that one project where they gave a client carte blanche on changes to avoid legal trouble. Nothing more infuriating than multiple people telling you how to change things over and over while you're being passed around in their power struggle.

So I make websites on the side for small time clients for some additional income. And without fail every time I sit down to work on this one site something goes wrong. First there were problems with the hosting, and now the template that the client chose is no longer for sale. I hope I'm not going to lose them over this :( I've sent them a list of alternative templates and contacted the company behind the original template to ask what is up. Real shame because they picked what I considered the favourite too and now I regret waiting to fork over the money to make the purchase.

!rant

When you inherit some code from the job student and you notice how well written and commented it is. I'm glad he is soon returning as a fulltime employee. Hope he will keep this up.

So I have a colleague who never tests and claims to not have time. I've sent him various emails with errors and their solutions, because he keeps breaking my finished code and I'll find out about it by pure luck. I've informed my team lead, I've also informed HR when he got downright nasty in email. But it feels nothing gets done. Today again I get finished code back because the save function is broken. Again changes that weren't tested were made. I'm so sick of this! Do I really have to escalate this to the CEO because nobody takes responsibility? The colleague is a junior in his first role and without a degree. But in the half year I've worked here I've not seen him improve, and he recently had his one year work anniversary :/