Gave a recommendation to the boss to do a thing. He said “Go and do the thing.” I wanted to do a proof of concept but there was no time. We got the contract. I tried to do the thing. It didn’t work. It WON’T work because the vendor’s marketing far overpromises what the product can do. No way to back down because the client is already fully invested in the solution. I want to quit my job AND my career now because I apparently suck at all of it.

It was 1957 and this was a 1 byte ram memory module for an IBM Mainframe.

I must be the DUMBEST person on the planet to constantly have problems with being able to drag one Mac directory in Finder to another one without taking everything OUTSIDE of that directory also and dumping it where I don’t want it. Or the file or folder ending up somewhere else than my intended destination. This time I wanted ONE folder from my downloads to go into ONE other folder in my home. Instead, it took EVERYTHING in downloads and dumped it into the target folder. It was impossible to sort out what didn’t belong so I had to delete everything and now all my downloads stuff (some of which I was still using) is gone.

Anyone else out there feel useless as a programmer? By that I mean you have always struggled to solve problems quickly and effectively. Or to fully understand the language and typical patterns and algorithms. Or to retain in memory all the things you need to “just know” on a daily basis to avoid having to look them up regularly and look foolish or incompetent? It seems I can’t keep my mind focused on learning, whether by tutorials or hands-on practice. I should probably just switch careers, but I’m so close to retirement that it seems stupid to attempt such a thing. Am I alone?

Finally got fed up with nvm and npm being messed up somehow and decided to reinstall it. It’s finally finished after 84 years and more text than the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare has been scrolling in my terminal as it installs.

Aaaand it’s still just as broken as before. I’m now considering re-imaging the entire machine and starting over again.

I know all the “right answers” as to why and how we use Node but I sometimes wonder how much of that is sunk-cost groupthink as well as “we’ve always done it this way”.

Should _setting up_ to write code and release software take longer than it does to write code and release software?

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.

CSS is the worst idea ever.

Ok, maybe it started out as a good idea.

But now it’s just a big pile of diarrhea that nobody knows how (or wants to) clean up.

Anyone else out there feel like Git is like Charlie Brown’s “stupid kite-eating tree” that just lies in wait at code deploy time to ruin you? I can never get it right. Either I’m doing some edits and realize I’m on the wrong branch or the master is inexplicably ahead of local (or vice versa) and even though I can see in the git log where things went wrong, it’s like crossing a freeway blindfolded and hoping my git fetch or reset or merge doesn’t blow everything to hell. WHYYYY IS THIS SO DAMN HARD?!

copy code from old projects. also a hefty dose of Stack Overflow.

A friend sent me a link to a torrent of a documentary. Because of the memory I have of Napster days and my fear of being that one guy that gets caught, plus the constant specter of malware, I've never been brave enough to use torrent links and software, so I've never looked into it. Is it safe these days? How do I do this and what do you all recommend for getting at the content safely?

MAMP is garbage. That is all.

WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! I almost deployed a website code update on a Friday.

New job is going exactly how I thought it would. The core code is actually pretty good but a lot more complex than what I’d dealt with before. I literally don’t know what I don’t know and my dev skills, especially OOP, are sub-par and I have VERY little time to brush up on them significantly before the big projects hit me like an oncoming train. If there is ANYONE else who has navigated this type of situation successfully, I’d love to hear your experiences.

HR people who contact you to schedule an interview and you give them your available dates and times and then they ghost you...what are you even doing?

Me right now looking for programming jobs after neglecting to memorize every programming language like a doctor memorizes human anatomy and biology.

So I'm looking at the jobs available and the jobs I'm applying for and realizing that even though I'm never gonna use the 70+ languages (exaggeration) in daily work for any of these prospective employers, I'd better have those languages (and 5+ years of experience in each) just because HR is keyword happy about stuff they know nothing about.

So how do you manage to get 5+ years of experience in something you don't have 5+ years of experience in so that you can get a job where you don't actually need 5+ years of experience in those things anyway? Do I just hit up LinkedIn Learning and start grinding away on tutorials, then stick their "certifications" on my resume? For what purpose if it's stuff I can't get the needed experience in because I don't already have 5+ years of it?

How did I ever get a job in my field if, according to HR drones, I don't have any experience in what I'm doing now?

Ever lose a laptop? I did. 13 days ago. at the airport in security. left it behind because I had two with me, which I don’t usually do. i just realized YESTERDAY that it was missing. someone come to my house and shoot me. because i’m too stoopid to live.

Let me run something by all of you. Let's say you once started freelancing as a "Plan B" in case your full-time gig dropped you. Over 12 years you've managed to build a long-standing personal brand around that occasional freelancing. You have several clients who adore you and the work you do and they tell you they would be lost without your talent and have nowhere else to go and nobody else they trust. You know, because in the past you tried to send them elsewhere (for various reasons) and they just kept coming back.

You get laid off from the full-time gig and ACME Company calls and interviews you as a top candidate they're really interested in for that same type of work for a full-time job they're offering.

Here's the catch...if hired, you have two months to basically erase your personal brand and agree never to do any freelancing work as before, even on your own time on evenings and weekends. ACME wants your full focus and attention. Additionally, you find out that the person you'd be replacing is being let go because they weren't sufficiently tech-skilled for the job. And, with a little digging, you find out that person _also_ had several freelancing gigs going on the side. Probably for the same "Plan B" reason. Which is probably why ACME is demanding exclusivity.

Your client base is small. ACME says "we don't care". The work you do is 90% automated and easily achievable in just minutes a day on a weekend or evening. ACME says "doesn't matter". You already had full-time work to begin with so you weren't doing a ton on the side. ACME couldn't be less interested in this "excuse". And you're not keen on the idea of burning down your brand, especially with no guarantees of any kind in the present IT industry hiring/firing/layoffs climate. ACME says this issue is make or break for them.

If you get to the offer stage do you:
a) Flip the bird to your brand and clients you've built up for over a decade and memory-hole it?
b) Negotiate a non-compete clause with ACME, agreeing not to take on any new clients while working full time for them?
c) Flip the bird to ACME and look for something else?

Asking for a friend. ;)

Get a programming career, they said. The more experience you get, the more people will want to hire you, they said. Well, I'm finding the inverse to be true. Everyone wants a 20-something who knows 100+ programming languages (none of them well) and who'll sleep at the office and kiss butt all day vs. a guy who has a few gray hairs but has seen some things and knows where the bodies are buried.

Just got laid off from full-time salaried position due to various business circumstances. I absolutely loved working there because they paid well, are low demand, they were 100% remote before it was COVID cool, and they didn’t micromanage anyone. Will continue to work for same employer but on hourly work order basis. I’m fighting the “provider” urge to find something else full-time as quickly as possible. My wife, who’s also working part time, says I shouldn’t be in a hurry and take my time to find just the type of job I really want. She’ll even go full-time while I search.

I’m the luckiest unlucky guy.

The other day I was thinking about how much more truck drivers in the US can sometimes earn delivering the goods that are sold on the e-commerce websites I build than I earn building said websites.

Plus, they get to see way more of the country than I do as a coder.

Seriously thinking that before I retire I might have to give being a truck driver a go.

Remote work for me, but not for thee!

Google angers employees with 'hypocritical' remote work policies
Employees were already stirred up over opaque policies on remote work.

Then a senior executive announced he's moving to New Zealand in what some workers consider special treatment.

https://cnet.com/news/...

I didn’t turn down a dev freelance project when the client decided against going with best practices because the solution I offered was a well-established design pattern but created a need for a financial management change she didn’t like. I stupidly built what she asked for. It worked fine in the 3rd party vendor test environment but failed on production. After hours of analysis of code to ensure no changes happened to my source during test->prod deployment, and the vendor denying they had config differences between them, and the client refusing to pay, all I could do was abandon the project.

Regex syntax and vocabulary when talking about it reminds me of what Scientology would look like if it had its own coding language.

Astronaut was always my first choice. But I suck at math, so logically I chose programming. ;)

Librarian sounds like a nice job. Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being a truck driver. Would get to see lots of places and the pay is really good right now with shortages of drivers who aren’t high on drugs every day.

“I suck as a coder. I have no business writing a single function. None of what I’m doing is working. I should be fired and nobody should ever hire me again.”

*Remembers to clear caches and it works right the first time*

“I’m a pretty great coder.”

This is horrifying. Testing code seems to have been an afterthought that ended up ruining dozens of peoples’ lives.

“Bad software sent postal workers to jail, because no one wanted to admit it could be wrong”

https://theverge.com/2021/4/...

Taught myself assembler at 13 (this was the mid 1980s) and wondered how the hell people could stand to do this. Then I found out there were more abstract languages like BASIC or COBOL. So I taught myself BASIC and MS-DOS batch scripting. Various other languages came later (PROLOG, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VisualBasic, etc). But it’s never been easy for me because I suck at math and complicated logic structures. Especially not good with OOP. My brain was ruined by learning procedural coding first. It refuses to incorporate OOP.

When you’re eager to convert Joomla websites into WordPress websites because Joomla is that bad. I mean, it’s just awful.

On a non-Dev forum about a hobby topic, someone felt the need to go all woke about certain famous creators in said hobby. Particularly that those creators have ideas and philosophies antithetical to the (ever shifting) ideals of wokeness. And that everything those creators made should be destroyed and never allowed to be portrayed or discussed in public again. In the name of tolerance, of course.

If this starts to happen to the dev world to the point that I can no longer earn a living because it has become known that I have possibly committed or might commit Thoughtcrime because of who I associate with, I will be glad to see that asteroid, polar flip, or worldwide EMP reset. Because humanity can’t progress if no one can write, sing, play, or make something simply because they are not woke enough.