- Cookie warnings
- Autoplay videos
- "It's better on the app!"
- Surprise paywall
- Newsletter popups
- "Sorry, this content is not available in your region!"
- Lazily paraphrasing another website without disclosing the source in an obvious way
- Anti-adblock popups
- "Become a pro-member today: starting at $4.99/month!"
- "Sign up here to get my free e-book! :)"
- "keep reading" button to load the rest of the damn article
- "We have a podcast!"
- ...

I hate the current state of the web.

Increment operator (++)
Decrement operator (--)
Excrement operator (💩💩)

Is this really what tech-startup culture is?

A year ago I wanted to make a change and joined my friend who is a VP at a startup. She and my team are great even up to the C-suite level. But after a recent encounter with the core developer team here… I’m at my
breaking point.

This dev team is extremely tribal. It’s as if they view other tech teams as “others” and it’s “us vs. them”. My team works on a different vertical so I’ve never interacted with them before and a timeline of events is below. Is this kind of behavior a normal thing at a tech startups?

/story
Here’s some highlights from the last month…

- Customer demands a deliverable because it’s in a contract signed a year ago.
- No one in dev can be troubled to lift a finger (holiday season). I get called in to support.
- This isn’t my code - I’ve never seen or used it before.
- None of dev’s documentation is up to date.
- Find out dev hasn’t touched client’s project in a year.
- Spend weeks working with it. Find fundamental flaws which could have put us in legal jeopardy.
- I realize dev never finished this project because it doesn’t even have basic functionality to do what customer needs.
- Spent entire Christmas/New Year working.
- Create dozens of bug tickets and merge requests.
- Barely squeeze by and save multi-million $ contract renewal.

So what happens next?
- Reprimanded by the dev lead. He tells me I’m “hurting people’s feelings” by pointing out so many problems.
- A PM in a public Slack channel told me I was “passive aggressive” for a Jira issue where I wrote (verbatim) “Can we enable code highlighting in this text box? It’s difficult to show steps to reproduce the bug.”
- get told by VP to stop talking to them
- a bunch of merge requests rejected without explanation
- weeks later I see someone in dev run into a bug I found. I sent him the fix. They accepted his MR in the same day and it actually added another new bug.
- I lookup the recent commits of the lead-dev who chewed me out, he’s been working on adding colors to his console log output for print debugging. This is a time-critical application and he adds 30% overhead with logging debug information in production.
- Meanwhile dozens of major bugs exist and are ignored.
- The CTO at this company loves these people - though he hasn’t brought in any new business (literally) ever.
- My team is about to close a new contract and we’ve spent 15 days to work on it.
- The CTO said my team is slow and doesn’t fit with the business model of the company.

My team has never dealt with these devs before, so I checked Glassdoor for other experiences, the dev team apparently…
- uses “vulgar slurs for women”
- talking about technical issues “resulted in a lot of resentment”
- has an apparent “desire for revenge”

/ end story

This last month really shocked me because for my career so far I’ve never dealt with this kind of behavior. I could see a startup accepting this kind of culture if was bringing in a lot of revenue but they aren’t. They dropped the ball so hard we all lost our bonuses this year. It’s made even worse with the fact that they are constantly producing complete dog poop code (I’ve kept that opinion to myself though).

I’m really left wondering if this is just how it is in the high-stakes startup world.

Sorry - this started out as a question but ended up another dev rant.

CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.

CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.

CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!

CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.

CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.

CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.

CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.

NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?

dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf

The very first ad banner on the internet, 1994

When you realize that there's no "magic" and no "only really smart specialists can understand this" in computers, software and hardware.

Everything is clearly defined in protocols/RFCs. The "magic" part is nothing more than extremely tedious, annoying and boring work combining those protocols together, making them talk to each other, and layering them inside each other.

Understand the little parts and you'll understand how the big ones work.

Yo it's been a while.

Forgot I still had devRant++ and thought it's high time I return :-)

Wonder how many of the oldies are still here

CODING CODING CODING HAHAHA I LOVE PROGRAMMING BEING A LITTLE CODE SLUT. I LOVE SILICON VALLEY IM SUCH A QUIRKED UP LITTLE CODE SHAWTY LOOKING FOR SOME ALGOASS 🍆💦😩.

“Slams fists on keyboard”

I LOVE BEING A CUTE SCREEN TWINK, IMPRESSING PAPI CEO WITH MY FINGER COMBINATIONS. I LOVE PLEASING EXECUDADDY. 🍑😏🫦

“Takes keyboard in hand and slams it against desk until keyboard keys explode everywhere”

I LOVE WATCHING THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE AMERICA FUCK MY ASS IN RETURN FOR PERSONAL PROFITS. 🤑☔️

*digs fingernails into the wall and claws off paint and then snorts it”
*pees and shits pants*
*cries in corner with extra agony*

I have worked with a handful of very green devs in the last 10 years. A common theme has emerged.

They don't heed any of my advice.

An exercise to the reader:

If you have a Windows machine, but need to work in a Linux environment, what would be your first instinct how to proceed?

In this exercise, you are as green as it gets. You have very little professional development experience, let alone server admin experience. And your lead dev has suggested setting up a VM.

1. Set up a Linux VM
2. Use a live CD or set up a dual boot system
3. Pay for a cloud server and set it up from scratch

I have no idea how this person intends to get any work done on a remote, terminal only, Linux server. That is if I can even get their environment into a sane configuration.

task failed successfully

"Let's keep in touch": to your co-workers as you are leaving the shitty company after 3 years and other lies you tell yourself.

Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.

We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.

My supervisor's flaky attitude is annoying the shit out of me.
Mate, why would you agree to hire me for the project I wanted to do (and get me to move halfway across the planet) and then tell another colleague that I'm focusing too much on my project and they should give me their extra work?

Like, I get it but I don't get it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Running your own company is probably most stressful and rewarding thing that ever happened to me.

I hate that "integer overflows" have become somewhat pop culture because anytime I see someone try to use it in a joke, they use it wrong.

I've even seen people confuse them with stack overflows and be like "my intelligence is so low it stack underflowed and became the max of an integer value!"

Or "It overflowed and became zero again" ah, I guess it happened to be unsigned and overflowed by precisely 1 then eh?

So cringe

Fuck first level support.
Usually the users are the problem because they don't know how to reboot or they delay software updates to infinity if you give them the option.

Additionally, having to log in on a user's computer, I always feel like I'm entering a messy's appartment. How can they live like that?
Fucking imbeciles.

I hate it when “We’ll, we’re agile” becomes more of an excuse than a plan.

Why does MS need to be such a scumbag with Windows updates?
Every now and then, this unskipable blue setup screen appears and forces the user to make some decisions.

"Do you want to set Edge as the default browser?"

"Do you want a 360 subscription?"

The usual crap.

But it‘s not skippable!

You have to make a decision and the UI for "fuck off" is different for every decision.

You can‘t just press the Nope button every time.
It‘s fucking deliberate. They want you to spend time on reading their shit and force it down your throat.

And let‘s not forget about people who don‘t know computer stuff very well and are confused by this. Then call us because "the computer isn‘t working again."
And you can‘t tell them to skip this slimy rotten vomit of a marketing weasel because you need them to tell you what the options are for each fucking decision screen.

😫

TIL that “Mozilla” is an acronym for “Mosaic Killa”. There once was an ancient browser called Mosaic.

Germany and digitalization....

The Bundesnetzagentur just started looking for a provider for telefax for the next 5 years, 3000 - 4000 fax per month.

Yay digitalization. Let's go hyper.