After having worked at my current company for about 9 months, I finally feel like I'm contributing and less like a complete moron (at least less often).
It's nice! This week has probably been my most productive in a long time.

Why is it that every single employer in this field expects you to live and breathe tech and have it as your only source of enjoyment? Can't it just be a job that I show up and do every day and then spend my free time with whatever the hell I want? This morning's job interview:
Hiring manager: so what do you like doing in your free time?
Me: talks about actual hobbies, trying to be personable, making a few jokes, etc
HM: soooo.. nothing tech related then?

I can't imagine any other job expecting this amount of devotion. "So you want to be an accountant but you don't do it after hours for fun!?" Why is this normal?

**Sorry for ranting, job search is getting increasingly frustrating.

What is the best way for an intermediate programmer to gain experience? The jobs I had before gave little to no feedback on my work other than was it done on time and does it work, I'm not confident enough in my knowledge to contribute to open source and I feel like I need guidance on best practices and such. Any suggestions are welcome.

My worst ever manager was at my first job. He was a dumb, conceited asshole who somehow made everyone believe he was the best at what he did. Luckily he took special interest in me (me being a young girl in my early 20's and all), and tried to spend as much time with me as possible, to the point where he got jealous when i preferred to hang out with another coworker rather than him on business trips, or took smoke breaks with someone other than him.

To name just one example, we were drinking at my coworker's hotel room until late, at which point I fell asleep on his bed. I was later told that my manager wouldn't leave and let the other guy sleep (assuming that there was something going he did not give his blessing to). Finally he left at about 4 am, just to appear the next morning ten minutes early to pick us up, directly at my hotel room of course, to check on me. He was the sneakiest, slimiest bastard I have ever met.

Of course I left the company as soon as I could, and told HR about it. Don't worry though - by the time I left he's found himself a new 19 year old intern to harass, who happened to enjoy the extra attention.

Guys, is anyone here working in Japan? Any experiences to share? I've been wanting to move there for a while now, and in my experience it is pretty much impossible to find a job as a foreigner with only a few years of experience. Any tips would be appreciated 😬

Uhh.. okay then.

My coworker (who didn't study cs but has been with the company for 2 years now) was given the task to write a script that uses a csv file as input. The file name? "csv.properties"
Everyone still calls it a csv file and I'm the only one who cringes.