This world can fuck right off.

March of 2025. I dove into a depression as a complication of my bipolar 2. Has less mania and more I want to die episodes. I noticed this as losing all interest in everything in my life. I DIDN'T HEED THE WARNING!!!

This results in me being distracted at work and struggling to learn a new platform. It also doesn't help that my supervisor keeps pulling me off the project to work on other shit. ALL OF WHICH I COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. They even gave me a 4% raise in March. Apparently it didn't help my depression.

We get to May and my supervisor takes away the programming tool used to program the platform I am working on (embedded processor). I complain and they say I am not getting it back. In my head I should have seen this as a fucking RED FLAG and pushed back.

Then in July the CTO says I need to have my code finished for the new platform in one month. I tell my supervisor I don't think I can (should have spoke up about the programming tool because I CAN'T TEST ANY FUCKING CODE!) He says: "I think you can do it!"

So I am trying to code blindly on a platform I can't test the code. I get to August and report I am testing code on Linux because I have no way to test on the platform. Apparently the CTO doesn't like this. So he starts sending people to walk by my office to "spy" on me because he suspects a character flaw. I don't realize this is happening until after the fact. Apparently I am on my phone too much (which is not typical, but I suspect my depression fucked me here).

I get called to a meeting with HR and my supervisor. They are firing me for performance and violating policy of using my phone outside of break times. This is August 14th. I am compliant and don't make a scene (it won't help). My supervisor is crying and the CTO made him fire me and sign everything.

The CTO also made a statement about how I was never deserving of the job title because I was never creative enough or good enough or some shit. This is the same guy that praised my past solutions for creativity and unique ways of solving the problems. The dude flat out lied and rewrote history. I even found a review from 2022 saying I was good at the role. Also, the dude gave me the damn job title. Up until this point I respected the guy. Now, I have lost all respect for him. It is one thing to fire for cause. It is another to lie about it sell the point.

On the way out the door my supervisor offered to be a reference for me. Several other people I worked with offered the same and couldn't fathom why I got fired. People I worked with for 7 years.

So I get thrown into the shittiest job market in the last 20 years. I can't find anything online or local. My fucking degree is a shit tech degree. So even though I can write decent software nobody wants to consider me because there hundreds of thousands of out of work SWEs on the market. I was already trying to recover from working at a shitty startup after losing a decent job due to a layoff. This was also affected by my un-diagnosed bipolar at the time. I made poor financial decisions because of some of my rare manic phases.

Unemployment from DOL finds that I was not at fault for being fired. They determined the company applied inconsistent policy on cell phone usage. Which is true to an extent. I have seen people take a lunch for 2 hours watching movies. Saw another dude sleep for 2 hours. Snoring and everything. But unemployment has no power other than giving me unemployment. Which isn't enough.

So now I am 3 months into job search and I find out that as much as 60% of the job postings on LinkedIn are fake. So there is a good chance that all of the jobs I applied for are fake.

My wife has a business, but it won't be enough when savings run out in 6 months. Because of the shit market I can't get a fucking job doing anything it seems.

I am tired, and the bullshit keeps piling up. I realize the only way I can survive is to create some kind of business.

I know, my perception of what happened is my perception. But if I was ever a valued employee they would have asked "What is wrong, and how can we help?" Instead I find out the CTO had harbored ill will toward me and NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME! I had asked for feedback in the past about my work and was told it was good work. I asked: "Am I too slow." The CTO said: "Your a little slow, but I don't have to worry about your code." Yet when they fired me they said I was getting complaints from other departments. But guess what? They NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME. This is the most sadistic way I have ever heard of managing people. Hold them to a standard that you never tell them about. I should have been clued into this when they fired the last guy. They never told anyone he was gone. I asked the CTO why they never told anyone. He said something about that is how that works. This is some serious mind fuck shit.

Love seeing the expected delivery time of a delivery slowly slide from the morning into the afternoon (including the latests at!) -_-

And these guys don't always ring the bell, so I need to listen to a running truck thingy and the beep as they scan the package.

And it's dev related stuff ;p

Based on your experience and knowledge, can you wager a guess on the percentage of dev/production codebases at companies are actual, beautifully written, architecturally sound constructions and not a nightmare of a (spaghetti) mess that keeps requiring new architects/ai engineers/senior devs/whatever to maintain (or rewrite)? In my personal experience... let's see.. about 20% or less of all the companies I worked at. That's sad. lol

The mods are sleeping now. Let's party!

Job spec fallacies and red flags. I will start:

* "Fast-paced environment" = "You will rarely finish something before start something else"
* "Ability to juggle competing priorities" = "our leaders don't align holistically and everything is important"
* "Opportunity to interact with all departments" = "You will accumulate functions"
* "Industry pioneers" = "We didn't research our competition when we started"
* "Leaders in the segment" = "We still haven't researched our competition"
* "Matrixed teams" = "we don't know how to structure our organisation"

Devrant just became fast again!
I hope it‘s not temporary 🥲

Yea of course my company is like family

A dysfunctional family in a mini van everyone is on LSD

The van is driven by a monkey

Note: The monkey is also on LSD

npm === node package malware

Are we overengineering everything in modern frontend dev?

Okay, serious question (but also low-key rant):
How did we go from “just load a page with some content” to entire frontend stacks with build pipelines, 300 dependencies, and five levels of abstraction just to render a freaking button?

Do we really need a separate config for everything (webpack, eslint, prettier, tsconfig, package.json, and don't forget the .babelrc and .env.local)?
Or is it just modern dev trying to look smarter than it is?

Is this the new normal? Or have we lost the plot?

Would love to hear what others think — devs from all backgrounds welcome. Bonus points if you're building sites without frameworks and surviving

Unofficial slogans for programming languages:

Javascript - JustShitting out frameworks every week.

Python - Shit programmers become slightly less shit and call themselves "data scientists" here.

C# - We know we are better than you, and even though we don't need to say it, we will say it anyway.

Pascal - The only recognized version of Pascal is from one single vendor.

Haskell - Stay is school if you want to use this professionally.

Swift - (honestly don't know what to say here, Lensflare can fill in on this one.) Maybe this: The first rule of Swift club is we don't talk about Apple club.

Java/Kotlin - We are in everything, including your mom's vibrator.

C - The rest of the programming world doesn't exist. Especially in embedded. Happily using K & R compilers for 3 decades.

C++ - We will pretend to care about the rest of the programming world, but like C, we will do whatever the fuck we want. or, Being held back by the ABI for at least a decade.

Rust - I feel bad for you for using other programming languages.

These are probably highly inaccurate, mostly just wanted to talk about Java being in your mom's sex toy.

I'm developing a board game and it’s so much fun to come up with structures and logic to implement the rules of the game and make it in a way that is clever and doesn’t require a lot of repetition and explicit definitions which would increase the probability to introduce bugs and make future changes tedious.

This is what I love about programming. The pure joy of thinking about those problems and solving them.
I'd never want to delegate this task to an AI even if I'd be convinced that it would do a good job.

Everything development related I see recently are related to LLMs and I’m starting to get sick of it :(

devrant cert expired

Too early for node_modules joke?

Opened a legacy PHP file from 2008.

No functions.
2,000+ lines.
Inline SQL.
HTML inside echo statements.
A single if (true) wrapping the entire thing like some cursed gift box.

At the top:
// Do not modify. Works perfectly.

At the bottom:
It writes to two databases. Only one exists.

Somewhere in the middle:
It sends an email…
to the client’s ex-wife.

I closed the file.
Rebooted my laptop.
Took a walk.
Still not okay.

You know what I find truly despicable? Consultants who grossly over-sell worthless digital products.

Take a guy who throws together 2 text boxes and a list in Figma and calls it: "The disruptive platform that will solve all your problems at once today!". Are you fucking kidding me? Such an insult to people's intelligence.

There is a saying: "A salesman will sell you a dirty cloth for the price of a house".

Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game

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

Once upon a time, there was a young, clean-shaven dev.
Soon in his career the smooth faced dev realized he had a knack for cloud setup. He understood permissions and network configurations, he could tell apart security groups from access groups, he could get all the information needed for an IPSec VPN in a single breath.
But if things got really tough, if the network layout was really messy, if the security settings too arcane, some older, bearded senior dev would come to solve everything.
Time passed, the junior dev got better at stuff, switched companies many times, solved a million problems, delivered countless projects, attended infinite meetings - twice - and, as often is the case, the senior devs, one by one, left the companies and run ever more scarce each day.

One day, a long, loooong time after his first meeting, the once young dev was solving network problems. Weird ones. Tough security requirements. Poorly documented cloud services. For hours, the dev and his colleagues toiled away, chipping at the problem without getting at its core.
The silence fell in the meeting. Everybody looking at each other, waiting for someone to say something.
Then they all looked at the dev, their eyes crying for help.
And the dev realized that he hadn't shaved in weeks.

-------‐‐-------------------------------
I've shaved since then.
And I did solve the problem. Took many more hours, though.

Client began micromanaging our project :/ . Now we have to log our hours on each task and then replicate that in another time tracking system. Double-accounting...

And we do not get the Jira's Tempo plugin to see a summary of what hours we've logged.

It's reached the point where now I have to create a task to cover for the hour spent for time logging alone :/

damn it. It was a fun project though.

Me and a fellow friend started working as a freelancer.

of 3 projects that we have:

One has a terrible code (like really nasty and over engineered to the maximum). albeit each new feature is a challenge to our sanity... they pay are are somewhat nice.

Another after we did the job they don't want to pay (thankfully we are on a platform that is like the middle man for work, they already have the money so should be "trivial") because they say we did not do what they asked. Brother, the 2 A.M. is not an hour to be called, and we did all the little shitty task they askend AND the original tasks...

And in the last one we hired a team to work with us because we don't have more hours in a day... and they only rename some vars, call it a day, ignoring the task on the sprint and they wanna get paid for the "job"

I just wanna drink a few pints of guinness...

No, thank you.😆

draft a ticket 3-4 months ago, try rereading and don't remember anything

pls stop putting talking into music mixes. you're ruining my jive. I don't wanna hear your opinions. just play the math noises

T'is 'bout the fine things in life

Yes, pdf a’s code of some kind is indeed ends with a space, and that space is mandatory. Who let uncle bob specify anything, anything at all?

Usually I come here to share rants/negativity but this time I wanna share an happy moment I had yesterday as a programmer.

In lots of instances I struggled to work on personal projects: I feel the desire to code cool stuff but I've often self-sabotaged myself by doing stuff like:

- self-enforcing "one man agile methodologies" with tasks, issue boards and lately time tracking
- forcing myself to do long study/research periods about the language/technologies I wanna use before writing the first line of code (and when I was able to actually end my research and get to code most of the stuff I researched was forgotten since cramming information is not effective on the long run)
- forcing myself to stick with all the "best practices" under the sun and to setup countless tools (linters, CI, unit testing...) before even getting a working POC

Usually all these stupid self imposed rules ended up in me procrastinating or pushing trough stuff struggling with headache after headache when coding actually used to feel a mostly fun pursuit to me.

Took lots of time to recognize this monster I created into my head but finally yesterday I did and I gave myself permission to:

- Start programming with just the very basics of the language (while reading a book on said language on the side at a relaxed pace, I can always come back later to improve my code as I learn more)
- Add stuff (unit testing, complex frameworks, CI/CD...) only when I need it
- Do a very basic planning (like a text files listing "must have" features and "nice to have features") and avoid issue boards and stuff, I'm working on a hobby project not on a company or a big OSS projects

It's been so long since the last time I had a programming session where I spent most time actually writing code and not researching and overthinking stuff and it felt great.

I heard you guys like rubber ducks. Here is a Tomato Duck.

Wife's driving me nuts
Work is driving me nuts

At least my kids are awesome!

Maybe getting a new job would help. I'd probably need two new jobs to match this one though

evidently