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.

During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

It’s one-on-one time yet again this week!

I have a 1:1 with my boss every Thursday from 11:30am to 12:00 noon. They often run 45 minutes instead of the planned 30.

Why do I have these? I complained that I have too many meetings, and that it’s hard to get my work done around them (especially while burned out). So as a remedy he scheduled a weekly meeting, every Thursday, so he can make sure I’m getting enough work done. Totally makes sense, right?

And every Thursday he’s 15-25 minutes late. And because they always run long, I lose a full hour or more of time I could have used to get my work done. See the problem?

Today he was 36 minutes late.
Seriously, how disrespectful can he be?

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: 0

!rant

So this happened in the zoom meeting today. 2 colleagues were arguing on something.

A : "Do I look like f**king joke to you?"
B : " No, you don't look like a joke , your camera is off. But you sound like one. "
A : "I am so tired of you , f**k you man"
B: " Hey you can't f**k me without my consent, I said I am not interested."

Me : "Uhm guys this is scrum meeting."
B: "No shit captain obvious, we all know that. "

I am so speechless.....

Tried to impress the boss with my work ethic by staying late to install a new VoIP system. Wasn’t even part of my job description. A few days later I had a flat tire on the way to work. It took me a couple hours to get that taken care of. When I got to work, the boss told me I had to work 2 extra hours that week to make it up. I reminded him that I had worked overtime recently to install his new phone system. He said, “Doesn’t matter. You still need to make up the hours.”

From that moment on I never worked one second more for him than I had to. I quit less than a year into the job.

Those unit tests can be commented out, they’re failing right now.

HR Bull crap

Manager: Oh my god have you heard of libraries? I don’t even need to hire developers anymore, everything can just be done with code other people have already built for free

Dev: Well you actually cause a bit of technical debt when you use an abstrac—

Manager: EVERY TICKET SHOULD BE DONE USING LIBRARIES GOING FORWARD.

Dev: …This is going to implode…Can we at least fund some of the libraries we end up using?

Manager: WHAT? NO! Open source developers are suckers, what idiot puts code on the internet for free?? I shouldn’t be required to fund their stupidity. Let’s just take their stuff and make money with it.

Dev: *Phone rings 100th time today from recruiter*. One sec I have to take this call……It’s urgent.

When the interns mess up big time, good orgs support them. 😭💙

Universal law of side projects:

The motivation to invest more time in side projects is inversely proportional to the free time you have!

When you have a deadline, you want to work on 10 new things, as soon as you are completely you just want to a lazy sloth!

Timezones. So, general rules are:

1. If you don't store timezone, always use and assume UTC. Databases, backends, whatever you use, all time must be kept be in UTC.
2. If you store timezones, ensure you store them everywhere and don't drop them anywhere.
3. It's always better to ignore backend server time in favor of database's `now().` Having a single source of truth makes time consistent (if it's the same database, obviously). If you combine backend time and database time, you likely get a violation of causality.

I've just spent a couple of hours investigating "weird random one-hour time drifts on updates." Guys violated all three rules above:
- they didn't store the timezone;
- their servers had inconsistent timezones. Java was in +XX., while the server itself in UTC. On one host, they forgot to put JVM in the same timezone;
- they dropped the timezone because they thought it was the same everywhere, so there was no point in serializing it.

One of the people I supervise is “Mary,” a woman in her early 20s. Every time she gets critical feedback (even very mild and accompanied by praise), she turns bright red and starts crying … like, a lot. Tears streaming down her face. Other than that, though, she responds calmly and rationally. She carries a handkerchief and just mops up the tears and continues the conversation. One of the first times this happened, I asked if she was okay, and she said that it’s “just a physical response to stress” and confided that she’s getting cognitive behavioral therapy to learn to control it. Honestly, I think she’s handling the whole thing with a lot of professionalism and maturity.

I am her direct supervisor, but she also reports to two of my (male) colleagues, one of whom is a VP in my company. I recently overheard them talking about Mary, saying that her crying is uncomfortable, unprofessional, and “stupid.” Mary is a great employee, and I want to do whatever I can to protect her job and reputation within the company. Should I say something to my colleagues? Should I advise her to say something?

I AM SO FUCKING HAPPY!

Just had an interview and it went fucking awesome!

At some point we just talked about games like Cyberpunk and Minecraft with the developers.

Can't wait to work there!

There is a russian cartoon called Fixiks (“Фиксики”, tiny fixers) which is about tiny creatures that live inside tech and fix it when it breaks without the owner knowing. This is a fun, family-friendly cartoon rated 3+ filled with approachable explanations of how does common tech stuff around us work: TVs, washing machines, etc.

However, there is one weird, super grim episode about one such creature who forgot to leave a TV he was living inside that is being thrown away and ending up on the scrapyard.

Having no choice but to follow his purpose, he becomes obsessive trying to fix an endless amount of broken tech there, with new broken stuff being delivered to that scrapyard every moment. After a while, he completely loses his sanity.

That episode displays what seems like a weird mix of schizophrenia and OCD. Having a psychological trauma he fails to recognize the rescue team of his own kind, attacking them. He loses his ability to talk, resorting to random screams of aggression.

This episode doesn’t really feature even a single explanation of how something works. It just is there somehow among the episodes of a casual, happy cartoon for children.

Needless to say, this is my favorite episode.

Fuck you and your shitty updates Microsoft.

I never asked for a fucking weather app on my taskbar.

Why the actual fuck would I EVER need that shit? I have that on my phone already, same for my news, and literally everything else you try to molest me with.

Want to know why Linux is growing market share? It's because it's an OS first and not some husk that shoves content at you and screams "CONSUME ME!"

FUCK YOUR SHITTY UPDATES, AND FUCK YOUR PLATFORM OF PETTY METRIC BULLSHIT.

"years of experience" basically means nothing, both for people and organisations. You can work with someone who has 30 years experience who knows nothing, and someone with 1-2 years who's practically an expert.

Joined a large multi-national fresh out of college, that had been around for +90 years. I expected them to know software development inside and out. Didn't expect to see so many failed projects for stupid reasons, so many over sights, so many .... morons, to be honest.

Worked for a startup company where most only had 1 or 2 years more experience than me and learned so much.

Worked for a small company where everyone had 1.5 - 2 times my experience, where I learned the meaning of "bewilderment".

Never feel small, or less valuable because of a number. Theres a good chance you are working with jackasses - practiseSafeHex

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

People who say "hi" on slack and then take 50 years to say what they actually want to say.

People who sit on the table beside yours to play games on their phones.

People who call you dad.

People.

Bad dev habit: spending weeks modifying your IDE/OS instead of actually working on tasks.

How most recruiter emails go these days:

- Hiring multiple senior lead engineers <— That’s me
- 180k+ <— I like it.
- Must have experience with AWS, GCE, AND Azure <— Okay, you’re looking for a unicorn
- Kubernetes expert
- Experience with Rust, Node, and .NET <— What type of fucking company are you?
- Must be on call and 25% travel <— Why?
- Preferred: experience with printer repair, Raid Arrays, CAT5, and Microsoft Access <— Y’all fucked up somewhere a long time ago. I’m out.

Example #1 of ??? Explaining why I dislike my coworkers.

[Legend]
VP: VP of Engineering; my boss’s boss. Founded the company, picked the CEO, etc.
LD: Lead dev; literally wrote the first line of code at the company, and has been here ever since.
CISO: Chief Information Security Officer — my boss when I’m doing security work.

Three weeks ago (private zoom call):
> VP to me: I want you to know that anything you say, while wearing your security hat, goes. You can even override me. If you need to hold a release for whatever reason, you have that power. If I happen to disagree with a security issue you bring up, that’s okay. You are in charge of release security. I won’t be mad or hold it against you. I just want you to do your job well.

Last week (engineering-wide meeting):
> CISO: From now on we should only use external IDs in urls to prevent a malicious actor from scraping data or automating attacks.
> LD: That’s great, and we should only use normal IDs in logging so they differ. Sounds more secure, right?
> CISO: Absolutely. That way they’re orthogonal.
> VP: Good idea, I think we should do this going forward.

Last weekend (in the security channel):
> LD: We should ONLY use external IDs in urls, and ONLY normal IDs in logging — in other words, orthogonal.
> VP: I agree. It’s better in every way.

Today (in the same security channel):
> Me: I found an instance of using a plain ID in a url that cancels a payment. A malicious user with or who gained access to <user_role> could very easily abuse this to cause substantial damage. Please change this instance and others to using external IDs.
> LD: Whoa, that goes way beyond <user_role>
> VP: You can’t make that decision, that’s engineering-wide!

Not only is this sane security practice, you literally. just. agreed. with this on three separate occasions in the past week, and your own head of security also posed this before I brought it up! And need I remind you that it is still standard security practice!?

But nooo, I’m overstepping my boundaries by doing my job.

Fucking hell I hate dealing with these people.

!rant, a success story.

I made a tool for a live streamer I like, for free. Something to find highlights in a VOD based on the chatlog.

It took me around 15h to make. It is a very simple electron app, the "valuable" code is ~70 lines.
I wasn't sure he would even bother to try it.

Anyways, I send it to him. 10 minutes later, the guy tells me that "this is amazing! You just saved me hours of derushing my streams ❤️"

That's great already, but it does not end there. A few minutes later he asks me "I know other streamers that would love it, can I share? And can I add you in our private discord?"

I have now a direct access to some of the best youtubers/streamers in my country 🤩.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Two people banged 24 years ago. Now I have to go to meetings everyday

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Lol lol

It's Friday and guess what?

We are fucking deploying on prod!

HR made a day long inclusiveness meeting. About why there are so few women in the department. Basically the conclusion the HR rep was looking for was “toxic masculinity” and it was super uncomfortable.

The engineering teams couldn’t actually participate much because most of them worked on teams without any women and have absolutely nothing to do with hiring. The male engineers were trying to play along and give the right answers. We had to do flip charts and beak into teams and etc.

The HR kept singling out the same three women in engineering and telling the men to “shut up and listen to them”. The female engineers were like, “i don’t know. I don’t have much to say about it.” The HR rep continued to drill those three women to the point that it was uncomfortable.

The engineering hiring manager lost it before noon. He went to his desk and grabbed a stack of resumes. “You gave me a stack of 60 resumes. Looking at names only four applicants are female. Those applicants don’t have education or experience for engineering. If you want more female engineers in the office you have to put qualified applicants into the stack. Forcing these three engineers to talk in front of our department over and over and saying the men have to shut up is not making the workplace less toxic.” Then he told the three engineers, “This meeting is now optional for you three and you are welcome to do anything you want with your time.”

After lunch, all the female engineers went back to their desk and worked. The HR continued to shame the men in an angrier tone for the rest of the day telling everyone “how men can be” from personal experience because they were the ones now representing all women.

Eight bloody hours of that.

My employer keeps sending booze to our houses.

Officially meant for coronaproof zoom social meetings where they play stupid bingo games and quizzes on Friday afternoons.

Why they're sending 2 liter bottles of Rum, 3 bottles of rosé wine and 12 cans of craft beer for the 6th week in a row... I really don't know... I don't even attend the zoom meetings.

All I know is that during breakfast, rum is better mixed into coffee than through cornflakes.

Anyway... Why was this a rant again? Oh right. Can I sue my employer for baiting me into an addiction? 🤔