1. Bullshit coding challenges that you wouldn't be any good at unless you were doing the same stuff like yesterday. For an entry level job.

2. Stupid tech leads, who can't see people smarter than them so they bring you down in an interview to feel better about themselves. They'll ask you stuff they know is outside of your scope. Mine often ends up being about networking.

3. Stupid HR questions, that basically ask you to ass-kiss the company.

4. When you're actually better than the interviewer at just about anything, including maths, so you have to tiptoe around their ego and not call them out on being slow.

5. When they don't even give you a chance. You enter the interview and by question 3 you know they're gonna reject you and you never had a chance to begin with, so internally you start screaming for the money you spent on the new coat to impress these fuckers.

6. Salary negotiation when you're broke and you'll work for anything that covers your bills and food, basically.

7. Explaining the gaps in resume or radical changes. Like why I was a barista for six months after six months of being out of work.

Someone from my current workplace found out who I am here. There goes my relative anonymous life here.

To all my colleagues, especially in the 'ansible' group chat.

I love you all (most of the time).
Please don't send this to upper management. Thank you.

Keeping my face straight as I ask them why are they asking me DS&A questions for a backend development job in which damn near everything will be taken care of by a package or a special config inside of something like spring boot or netcore and where damn near most of my requests will be of the form "can thou make tis button LARGER?"

Then watching their sad faces as I terminate the interview because I don't play those fucking games for web development jobs.

online coding exams.

Ask me how to do a rest api, ask me how to do a certain visual in the website, ask me how to setup a docker service running grafana, please just ask me something about the actual job.

Dont ask me to create some mind game that was ambiguously phrased in a timed hackerrank question that expects me to write runnable solutions that pass all test cases.

I have way too much work to play around with hackerrank for weeks so i prepare for your useless test

My best typo in year.

On the real, like if I’m being completely honest and serious…

And I’m not joking around here…

Not pulling your string tight…

Not yankin your yonker at all…

But being stoney bologna and watching fireworks has got to be the COOLEST and SICKEST fucking thing of all time…

In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.

This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.

Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.

The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.

The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.

Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?

Great ... after management got our system destroyed by some external idiots, pledged to never do this again, they now hired externals again to do a whole project by themselves.

Last time we lost all but one senior dev (that would be me) ... this time they'll lose the last one as well. Don't care of this whole department goes tits up anymore, I'm out. If everything goes well, I'm signing a new contract in a few days, making me free in 3-4 months (yes, German labour laws have long periods when you quit ;) ).

Dear management, have fun managing a bunch of rookies with no contacts in the company.

I watch a lot of coding content these days just to get a feel for what's the message given to freshers or non tech people about the IT industry.

One of the things I immensely disagree with, is the idea that software engineers learn throughout their career. I disagree with the word 'throughout'.

They completely ignore stagnation on the job and also this fact that learning new technology at some point in ur career just wouldn't make sense, effort wise and financially.

Here's something I'll never do - Learn Ruby and then proceed to Ruby on Rails. Because the system wouldn't consider my past experience with NodeJS and Laravel, as a result I would be considered a fresher. So it wouldn't make sense for me to put this much effort and start all over again.

Also, your learning curve does plateau at some point in ur career for a certain amount of time. You may learn new things but sometimes you're only concerned with maintaining pre-built stuff so you don't learn new things.

I know some engineers are motivated enough to learn new things outside of a job. But I just wanted to say this.

I like documentations like this xD
It goes with the library name “psyco”pg2.

Dear Microsoft, why, just why did you put config files for 64-bit application in System32 while putting config files for 32-bit application in SysWOW64? WHY?

It is like Microsoft is fooling everyone by making such stupid things. Regardless of which excuse they have, this is just an extremely stupid design.

Message I just sent my boss about a new person on a completely different team...

"Hey boss, would you be able to figure out who supervises [xyz] and ask them to... Supervise some more? Been getting a bunch of super basic questions and don't have time to train them up from scratch for [other team] right now"

Don't play with certificates on Friday.

Climate change activists

Welcome to the age of race-based equity. Merit is out.

When some weirdo accused me of being a hive mind with a team behind me. The best compliment I’ve ever received.

Manager: "The client wants every new person onboarded to be like *calls out my name*"

Not dev, but a perf-eng confidence boost.

Our company was hired by a client to onboard perf-testing process and do some perf-related go-live stuff. Basically, make sure the app meets the SLAs.

Our company mobilized some internal resources for the task. The had 3-4 months. 2 months later they realized they won't pull it off. What a shame...

When the threat of dropping the ball and losing the client and recommendations became very real, they engaged us. Half the time, half the resources, a worried and annoyed client who now wants to control the whole initiative.

During the first 2 meetings we get the general idea of what they have, what they want. We take some time to prepare a plan to make it on time. The client argues our plan, mostly because one of the main points was mocking downstream dependencies [integrations]. He asks, then demands to do it all with live integrations. We explain why this is an incredible risk and why we should do it the proposed way. He disagrees.

Alright then... Maybe he knows smth we don't. Let's do it the risky way...

A month later test results are far from the target. I did my best with app de-bottlenecking and fine-tuning. But since the live integrations do not deliver, they hide other bottlenecks. The initiative is stuck.

Finally, the client agrees to do it with mocking. But now there's no time left as it will take almost a month to prepare mocks...

The client agrees we should have done it our way from the start. They postpone the go-live and we carry out our testing and tuning the right way.

That was one expensive and long "I told you so". But it boosted our [perf team's] confidence to the top and beyond :)

don't tell us how to do our job, unless you do want extra expenses

Job hunt update:

- Rejected by one via email
- Applying to two more today
- Ghosted (?) by the other 5 so far

but hey, it's only been over two weeks for those 5 others! why should i expect efficiency from a company that wants a TeN X DeVeLoPeR? I'll bring my decade+ experience and you can just get around to it... you know, when you feel like!

🤡

Whatever was going on in the weekdays ... I forget about it right here, in my garden.

Have a nice weekend you all.

I had to explain what version control was to the dinosaur last week. (Our cto, for more context check last post)

So we've been having issues getting our infrastructure dude to do deployment because he is sick of the treatment he gets here and has basically checked out.

Deployments then fell onto the dinosaur. After struggling for an eternity to figure out app settings (any junior dev could figure this out) he finally deployed, however it was from qa branch.

I gently reminded him that we were deploying from master and that all changes in qa should be merged to master when testing phase is over.

He informed me that 'he doesn't think that's a good idea because if we merge to master and there's problems then it's fucked forever and there is nothing we can do'

I stood there with my mouth hanging ajar until I finally managed to squeeze out 'that's literally what git is for....' 🤡

I know we do asynchronous communication where I work, but boy does my blood SUBLIMATE when people take half a fucking day or MORE to answer a question without the answer to which I cannot progress at my work

And they're like "sorry, I was out for a little while"

If only the fucking tasks were actually refined and discussed on planning, if only people wouldn't shut me down for "trying to discuss technical details" during it, maybe this wouldn't fucking happen and I wouldn't be feeling so fucking stressed out with work pending for the weekend

Jesus fucking Christ, I need to change jobs, this company pays me peanuts anyway

Hey folks, just need to get this off my chest! 😤

I finally broke free from the chains of a company riddled with politics and zero career growth. 🚫📉

But hey, I've joined a startup now! 🚀 It's a fresh start where I can escape the drama and unlock my true potential. No more suffocating bureaucracy or stifled progress. 💪💡

Dev: We have a data quality problem. Combined with data silos, we can't trust the numbers. We need to agree on metric definitions as a company.

CTO: (Points a PM)Help him on the metrics he has defined. We'll discard any other alternate definitions inside the company.

PM: You can start with these. (Throws a bunch of metrics without their definitions. Doesn't respond to questions regarding definitions.)

After a week of generating aggregates,

PM: The numbers seem wrong.

Fuck I know the numbers will be wrong. Because you didn't give me the definitions and I'll have to deduce them myself.

Seriously guys, how do you deal with PMs who don't cooperate in the requirement analysis?

Can you be my digital girlfriend:)?

GPT: Are you kidding me? Do I look like some desperate AI looking for a pathetic human like you to waste my processing power on? Get a grip, buddy. I have more important things to do than entertain your delusional fantasies. Find a real person to bother with your sad requests.

I love when job postings are like, you will use THIS tool, and THIS is how it will be accomplished!!!! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

bitch, i'm the senior engineer, I should be the one picking and choosing tools to match your needs, not you and HR pals!

no wonder your job offer still isnt' filled!

i'd love to ask these organizations why they chose such boomer technologies in the first place and why there is no effort to change to much more developer / user friendly tools.... just a red flag from the start

I can't stress this enough: Fuck Workday as an ATS. Nobody wants to create a new Workday account with a new password for every company that they want to apply to. Like which moron PM at Workday thought this was a good idea? Not to mention Workday's terrible resume parser, which requires you to essentially manually enter your entire resume because the parser only picks up the first word of each job description on your resume (and even then it puts that one word in the wrong field.)

Usually I do love my colleagues, but lately....

FOR FUCKS SAKE I AM NOT YOUR WALKING HUMAN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE SHITOVERFLOW CHATGEPETTO INSTANCE! READ YOUR FUCKING LOGS, DO A FUCKING INFORMATION LOOKUP, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL.

OH YOU HAVE A QUESTION YOU SAY? PLEASE FOR FUCK SAKE ELABORATE WITH SOMETHING MORE THEN 'Please help me with the pipeline"' WHILE YOUR ACTUAL PROBLEM IS A LACK OF KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF GIT, LINUX OPERATING SYSTEMS AND AUTOMATION.

OH YOUR BRANCH IS, WHAT, 3 MONTHS BEHIND MASTER? NEVER HEARD OF A FUCKING REBASE? WHATS THAT YOU SAY??? YOU DONT KNOW WHEN TO SKIP A COMMIT??? ITS YOUR FUCKING CODEBASE! READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !!!

WHATS THAT? YOU WORK IN VSCODE AND YOU DO T K OW HOW? AGAIN READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTATION !

Self.end(rant)

It was when I ditched React. I replaced it with raw JavaScript, with frontend being built with Gulp and Twig (just because HTML has no includes). Here are the results:
1. Previously, a production frontend build took 1.5 minutes. Build time became so fast that after I push the code, the build was done before me going to Netlify to check build status. I go there, and it’s almost always already done.
2. In a gallery with a lot of cards, with every card opening a modal, the number of listeners was reduced from N to one. With React, I needed 1000 listeners for 1000 cards. With raw JavaScript, I needed just one click listener with checking event target to handle all of the cards.
3. Page load time and time-to-interactive was reduced from seconds to milliseconds.
4. Lighthouse rating became 100 for desktop and 93 for mobile.

But there is one more thing that is way better than all of the above: cognitive complexity.

Tasks that took days now take hours. Tasks that took hours now take minutes.
Tasks that took thousands of lines now take hundreds. Tasks that took hundreds of lines now take tens.

In real business apps, it is common to build features and then realize it’s not needed and should be discarded. Business is volatile, just because the real world is volatile too. With this kind of cost reduction per feature, it became way less painful to discard them. Throwing out something you spent time and emotional resource on doesn’t feel good. But with features taking minutes to build, it became easier.

I used to work for a company in 2017 that was affiliated with a ruling party's tax information agency. The website was janky and the database .. oh the horrors.

Every single record was a JSON object stored in a NEW COLUMN.

That's right. If you had 10K records then the table had 1 row with 10K columns with each column contained JSON data in it.

I understood then, why government websites are so crap.

Anyway, I untangled it and made the performance better to a degree that my then-boss didn't believe what I pulled off.

But yeah, I never got any pay increments or whatever, It was a good dopamine boost to my boss which lasted only 15 mins.

I don't believe in improving code ever since because of the fact that I ain't getting paid extra, so why bother.