Since when is it possible for other (administrator?) users to edit my questions on StackOverflow? I just got alerted that someone removed a sentence from a post I made there. It's not terrible. I probably should have excluded that sentence myself. But that seems really heavy-handed.

Looking around where I work, I'm reminded of when I was young and ambitious, like all the other kids around me at the time, with a dislike for all the older dudes and dudettes in upper management. With the exception of three other guys around my age, everyone, including the CEO, was in high school, middle school, elementary school, or not even born yet when I started my career. Just like them, I was plucky and chatty and (trying to be) funny and social. I didn't know how fast I would go from that set to the old fat guy that they look askance at and wonder how I'm still around with my weird ways and "boomerish", socially retarded behavior. What's really galling is that I'm solidly Gen X, like some of them, but I guess I talk more like a Boomer because my parents were older when I was born and I was kinda raised in that mindset. I'm the office schlub now. A man out of my time. And I've never been in any kind of upper management, even. I am Kevin Malone.

Was told at work today that I don’t follow directions closely enough and the lack of attention to detail in my work is a problem.

I remember being this way since my first elementary school teacher pointed it out to me. I’ve always been this way. It’s how my brain is wired. No matter how hard I try, I always miss something. Especially when it is a really complex set of tasks. I’ve literally got the results of a cognitive test I took in college documenting and quantifying my working memory deficits.

You think you’ll change that now, after more than four decades of me being like this, with a performance review? Good fucking luck!

What does everyone think about this crypto mining device and service? https://pktpal.com/

Whenever I see a “poorly explain what you do for a living” writing prompt, I never know how to write mine. Web development is pretty boring and just doesn’t seem to have a funny enough answer. What would you say?

After the 4th time of being reminded to log all possible hours, including those for which I’m mostly researching and not producing code or deliverables, I’m finally just doing it. I hate billing for low impact activities. A) Because I’m slow at everything and B) If I were the client I’d be pissed that I got charged 2 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes of actual coding and launching the feature.

Showing up to work every day after 25 years of this knowing that I really kind of suck at my job and feeling like I’ll never get to a point where I can say I’m fully caught up to the level of knowledge others I work with have or that I’m expected to have. I suppose this is a bad habit of attitude but it seems to be an actual reality for me with every passing day, week, month, and year. It’s all just too much and my brain just isn’t as agile as it once was (and it wasn’t all that agile to begin with).

Fffffffuuuuuuck me! I got some days off for working longer hours on a priority project than healthy humans should. Now they want me to take part of one of those days for a Very Important video call. Now canceling and rescheduling plans for that day so I can be on duty that whole day because there’s no way my head is getting or staying in relaxation mode with this interruption.

I’ve been very unlucky, undertalented, or underfunded with scaling issues. Can’t think of a time I ever successfully scaled a website or application to a faster performance because of any or all of those three factors.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

When you get more managerial corrections on your projects and approaches to things than your coworkers do BECAUSE YOUR WORK IS SO MUCH HARDER AND MORE TECHNICAL THAN EVERYONE ELSE’S but you still end up looking dumb because you’re the only one being corrected on stuff.

He started a fight on the dev floor. Got fired on the spot.

Recruiters who cold e-mail me get hard and specific questions before I ever give them a resume and phone number. Been doing this too long to just randomly hand a resume and contact info to whoever. YOU came to ME. Make it worth my while.

My mom got cancer and passed away two years later. I had made several videos to document her life. All of that, plus photos and video of our family, lived on a backup drive that got dropped on the floor a few months after she passed away. Head crash that wasn’t discovered until it was turned on again and forever destroyed the platter. It was the largest set of photos and video I had of her. All forever gone.

I’ve been up since 5am and I won’t likely get to bed tonight because of this project. A full 24 hours of awake time followed by another 8-12 hours of work.

When you unknowingly/accidentally/inadvertently delete something someone was working on for a long time and they don’t tell you until several months later when all the backups are long rotated out. No way to fix it and nothing left to do but accept blame and sanctions and work to regain lost trust. Kill me now.

I have a job with health insurance but I’m so stressed out that I overeat and so busy that I don’t have time for prolonged exercise to burn more calories. Ironic that I was healthier when I worked for a diet and exercise company 100% remote that didn’t have a health plan vs driving to work for one that does have a health plan. This feels really upside down.

Absolutely nothing excites me anymore in this field. Tech is such a commodity and I’m just so over all of it. Not gonna go all Ted Kaczinsky but I find myself longing for a time when not everything and everyone was controlled by computers. We’re not far from total transhumanism and despite what some may believe, that’s not a good thing.

Months on this project and it STILL doesn’t work. Way too many links in the communication chain and everything is getting lost in transmission and in translation because of foreign language barriers.

All of this will be my fault when it fails, even when it’s provably actually not. The joys of being the single wringable neck.

1 - Correct me if I’m wrong, but in true Agile, a product owner ought to be able to interact directly with the dev team, and vice versa, in the card/conversation/confirmation process of creating, estimating, and executing the user stories, correct?

2 - If Company “A” contracts with Consultant “A” to have software developed, and then Consultant “A” then contracts with Company “B” who then contracts with Consultant “B” to do the development, who would you define as the Product Owner?

3 - If Company “B” is barring Consultant “B” from talking with Company “A” and Consultant “B”, is Agile even possible?

I procrastinate. Which creates more bad dev days. Rinse, repeat. #Derp

I need someone to make me a list of things I am not allowed to say and who I’m not allowed to say them to at work. This is getting ridiculous. Every time I turn around someone is making this face at me 😬 and saying “Don’t say that to that team” or “Don’t say that to this person”. I can’t do my work right if I have to keep censoring myself on everything people find organizationally sensitive.

Hey boss. I’m not a mind reader. If you need me to change what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, you have to tell me. You changed my job three times since I was hired and our processes twice. Now would be a good time to pick a play and stick with it.

About to tell the boss I can spend more time tracking my time and moving tasks around in the latest of the project management softwares I’ve had to use here, or I can do the actual work. Not both.

A 20-Something: “Hey, why aren’t you dressing up on spirit week decades dress theme days in the office this week?”

“Because I lived in all those decades and my childhood is not a costume.”

“Okaaaay…”

“Because when we dressed up for spirit week in high school we nerdy kids would always get made fun of by the jocks and cheerleaders because we didn’t get the memo that spirit week was only for the cool kids. I have trauma I’m still working through because of that.”

“Geez, I…”

“Look, I got rid of all that shit years ago. Now I’m supposed to go to a thrift store and spend money I earned here for real world needs on 4 new sets of clothes I will wear one time each? That’s literally my gas money to get to this office in an inflated economy. No.”

Me. In my head. Coming up with things to explain myself when I show up at the office dressed like it’s a regular day.

Anytime I write a line of code that works correctly the first time, I’m ecstatic. If I write a whole block or function that works right the first time, I freak out with happiness. Yes, I’m that bad at coding. The rest of y’all probably do such things on the regular and it no biggie. But for me, it’s vanishingly rare.

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

So I’ve spent the last 20 minutes waiting for an Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Pro and another Amazon Web Services WordPress plugin to delete from a server via FileZilla. How’s your day going so far?

Not even the weekend yet and I’m feeling this. So ready to retire. But still too early in my age.

I think today makes a new record for the number of times I have muttered "What in the actual FUCK is going on with this stupid WordPress plugin/theme/database/etc.?!"

I know. I know. I chose this life. It's my own fault. Don't bother with the anti-WordPress beatdowns in the comments. I've heard every. last. one. and I'm too old and too close to retirement to want to start over again with something else.