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Aboutbig ol goof I love pinball, doom, cyberpunk
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Skillscurrently learning C
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Joined devRant on 8/20/2019
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Fucking intern.
While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.
I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).
This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.
She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!
She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)
She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.
Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.
Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!
`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.
I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.
It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.
She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.
... Just.
Fucking hell.
USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!34 -
"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"
So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.
First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.
So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.
Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?
I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.
Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?
"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"
So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.
More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!
I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.
And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.
"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."
You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!
"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."
I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.
So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.
You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.105 -
A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.
It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.
Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).
So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...
So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.
We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!402 -
Coworker wrote a nice package and put it on Github, to share with other departments.
I link his package on our company Slack, mentioning a team, with text "What do you think of this one? Is it usable for you guys?"
Next thing I know I have to explain to an executive why I'm "posting pictures of seductive cartoon girls in company chat with disrespectful commentary"
It linked the Github profile picture of the developer in Slack. A fully clothed anime girl, nothing particularly lewd about it.
But I like stabbing back a bit, and confusing the fuck out of people in suits:
"Hate to say it, but a good majority of all the code the company runs on, is written by people known as weebs, who use their so called waifus as their GitHub profile picture. It is very common for open source Javascript packages, but since we recruited 50 extra devs it now also happens internally. It's not my thing either sir, but I'm afraid we have to embrace it... "
"But what about our female devs? What about Joanna, she's in your team? We have to think of diversity! Our investors are really in to diversity, we can't have a bro culture!"
"Sir, with all due respect, we have super diverse teams without even trying. The problem is... they're all millennials. They grew up on weird memes... and are probably ten steps further in embracing diversity compared to the rest of the company."
"Also, Joanna is the one who drew this particular picture. She's charging a €15 commission for profile pictures... Do you want one of your fursona, sir?"
"What is that?"
"Uh... nevermind. Let's... let's not go there"48