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This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.
In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".
As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:
He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.
I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.
The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).
I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.
I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.
Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O11 -
This one project at my study.
We always had to do quite some documentation, even some in a way that works the opposite of how my brain works.
That's all fine if you can agree on doing it differently.
Had this teacher who valued documentation above anything else. The project was 10 weeks, after 9 weeks my documentation got approved (yes, not a single line of code yet) and I could finally program for the remaining 5 days.
Still had quite some bugs at say number five, the day of presentation.
I imagined that'd be okay since I only had 4 full days instead of the 5-8 weeks everyone else had.
Every bug was noted and the application was "unstable" and "not nearly good enough".
At that moment I thought like "if this is the dev life, I'm out of here".7 -
When I realized that web developers who learn frameworks and are skilled in both frontend and beckend development can be replaced by a 200 USD Wordpress site.12
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That one time when it took me 3 days to fix a bug, which ended up being literally one character missing.
I was questioning my life choices for another 3 days.2 -
The second time I dropped out of college. I wasn't sure why at the time, but I just couldn't manage to keep myself motivated and interested. Later on I was diagnosed with ADD and all my school problems made sense, but at the time, I thought that since I'd tried and failed twice to get a computer science degree, I wasn't qualified to be a developer.
And now I have a degree and a dev job and I know what's actually wrong with my brain and how to deal with it.13 -
It literally just happened:
my boss taught me how to use npm, bower and similar to have plugins while developing websites.
This time around we had a project which is divided among different repositories.
One was a foundation project using npm to build, the other one was a socket.io server, using actual nodejs
boss thought: "well they both have node_modules, let's merge them and merge the package.json as well
Nothing worked anymore. -
After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).
Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.
At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).
My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.
Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).
All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.
But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.
After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.
That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.
Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.
Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.3 -
Ever since I became deaf and realized being good at technical algo ds > actual experience coding and building apps...
And was reminded of it recently... job hunting sucks...
Oh and one of my "friends" just landed a $200,000 job at a hedge fund... I'm pretty sure I can kick his ass at coding a real problem though...8 -
When I had to postpone the release of v2 of devRant UWP for 3 months because I changed a few minutes before the final build a "loaded" event to a "loading" event.
Something that for some stupid reason I thought will make the startup faster (maybe by 2ms) has caused crashes on mobile and some Windows 10 versions.
Of course I didn't spend 3 months to find this bug, but at least a few days in December and then I didn't have enough free time so I had to stop until mid February when I finally fixed it.
To find the reason I reverted the code to the previous update and started to add every feature one by one.
So much time wasted for a fucking "-ing". -
Just spent the entire day of which should have been the start of vacation fighting off a second wave of ransomware on one of our production servers. Gandcrab 5.2 anyone?
Turns out an exploit in our MySQL daemon allowed some fucking Chinese hackermonkey to upload a trojan and remote execute it. Thousands of angry customers, me the only one available and able to fix shit and patch up firewalls and system.
And now I get the pleasure of working on what I should have been doing today, another fire that MUST be put out today.
Fuck you deadlines. Fuck you Chinese hackers. In fact, FML.3 -
When I realized that people that talk about doing stuff ("entrepreneurs") make the big bucks, while people that figure out how to actually make it happen, make only peanuts.6
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I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.
The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"
Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.
To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.
...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.1 -
When I realized my job isn't to code, it is to hack for hacks.
As smart developers our job is to be accountable to non-technical product management types who care nothing for elegant system design or DRY code. They expect features get done fast and "technically complete." They use terms like "minimum viable product (MVP)" to imply we'll go back and improve things like refactoring and tech debt later.
They will not. Most likely they won't even be around. Producers and scrumlords have the highest turnover rate of any role on a team. By design they get bored or frustrated easily and are constantly looking for greener pastures. Many people in self-proclaimed "non-technical" roles like this never had the patience and attention span to learn a real vocation, and they've discovered a career path that doesn't require one.
These are our masters. As developers, we will answer to them forever and always.1 -
When my client boss made me a Front-end Developer, Back-end Developer, Graphic Designer, UI Designer, and an Architect (using AutoCAD) with an annual salary of $6,000USD (i live in the third-world hell in Asia).
i escaped after a month1 -
I can't wait until I hand in my resignation to become a pen tester, I'm interviewing next week! I'm done with development. Don't really have any message here, but felt like sharing it regardless.8
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I've lost hope in my precision at this point:
We've updated our website to have X feature. The X feature was implemented, tested and even had unit tests... The worst part when I've lost hope? Both unit and the actual code had the same mistake in them. What was the mistake? Well...
if($variable = 'something') {}
Yeah... Read it carefully... We've always had the same case and only noticed it after 3 months when it was attempted to extend.
Funny enough, few users were harmed but no actual reports of an issue came to us.
Since then, I'm always triple checking that I have the correct amount of `=` to avoid further fuck-ups8 -
When I got changed between 3 projects in one month. Everytime I thought I got it figured out... NOPE. New project, new stuff to learn, comprehend and implement.
Very shitty period.1 -
- sitting down way too long
- back pain
- being treated from above
- feeling lost bc I didn't know what I like4 -
Every time i got fired. So thats 6. At least in the past ten years. Every time i saw colleages get fired. So double that. Every 10nth job interview i went to. Maybe i should say i doubt my dev future every single fucking day.5
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It's now. The last few months. I'm starting to think I might have to leave developer's career [fucking broken messenger heads.. Made me post this rant prematurely]. I'm starting to feel that I have so much more to offer than just write code, solve minor problems by moving miniature blocks here and there.
As for now I've moved to Performance Engineers. Will see how that turns out. But I have a feeling I won't feel like staying there for long either.4 -
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
Are u fkig kidding me
Just when i wrote this post a few hours ago
https://devrant.com/rants/2064722/...
Devrant asked me this question about the same thing....
What
2 -
This entire project. Be glad when it’s over. Remind me never to volunteer for this front-end bullshit again... ☹️2
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Pretty much after couple of years of entering the real world I lost faith, not because I found myself not able to cope and learn but the amount of chaos and closed minded people that you face everyday pushed me to pursue my MBA.
Now I'm slowly drifting away to the management part because I've had enough with this, its just not worth it. I'll keep development for self entertainment in personal projects, and nothing more. -
Open software:
Error message: Failed to load x..
Why not tell:
Error message: Failed to load x. Please reinstall software.
or
Error message: Failed to load x. Remove cache folder located in "drive/somewhere" and try again.
or
Error message: Failed to load x. Please recreate x by using tool y and try again.
if software tells you no meaningful message and you have NO idea how to solve it.. it is one of those annoying things you have to deal with.
Why can't I just create features....4 -
That despite my skills and education, I'm unable to survive on my own, and am nothing more than a corporate cog with a limited lifespan.
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When I have one more semester until graduation and 0 out of all the resumes I put out for internships have worked out. I'd rather not do an unpaid for several months...
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I'm losing faith in my future right now!
I'm dying working for my current employer (read my last two rants) but no one wants to hire me and I'm not sure whether it's my skills, little experience or only halftime availability until I finish studies!
Also, while I'm at it, there are second to none game dev workplaces here, in Poznań (and working as a game dev is a dream <3).1 -
There was this time when I had to solo a couple of group projects. I worked so hard to the point I felt like barfing whenever I sit down in front of my desk and see code. I thought to myself: screw this career!4
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I’m afraid that some day, services will come along that destroys the need for actual programmers. That all of us will simply be stuck at work, drag & dropping these new software solutions in place.7
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I never had a lot of faith in my dev competence to begin with.
It gets even worse on my current (and also first) job. So far I have been handed solo projects that I need to deliver in a small amount of time using tools I have no experience with. I have two other colleagues I can ask my questions, but they are too busy working on other projects they got handed. Which leaves me 80% of the time on my own.
The bright side of it is if I make it alive somehow, my resume will be diverse.4 -
4th year of technical school I though I was not gonna continue programming in university. Got a dev job after graduating and started uni. 2 years after I am pretty sure I am going to be a dev.
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My main project in work is making program in C# (right now .NET Standard) that can read scans of invoices that are sent from contractors. I'm working on it for almost two years now (with breaks and only halftime because university). Alone. And for last two months I've been redesigning, refactoring and making whole app "better", using experience and knowledge gained in the last two years.
Obviously my boss wasn't happy with that but I got him to accept it, promising that it'll make it work faster, expansion will be simpler and I'll make core as a separate library that can be used anywhere, not only in the JobRouter ecosystem.
And so I reworked most of the code, made it cleaner, I hope, and a tad quicker. And I was happy with it while testing on a package of invoices. Today I made first integration with customer's JobRouter.
The results aren't any better - in some cases they are much worse. Especially while searching for invoice entries, which can be in any shape or form and on any of document's pages.
I guess, being a Junior, I wasn't really up to the task. I'm sick of working on a "guessing" program that has to work with every invoice template users can imagine. I'm sick of not getting any recognition for what I did good. And I'm sick of constantly being pushed to make it work better when I just don't have any more ideas or my skills are just lacking.
To be honest, I don't know what to do. I'll probably have to work on making it search the data better. But it's not trivial to just look at the code and see errors. Iterating on the code while working with different invoices worked for a bit in older versions, but I reached the point where changes made to make one invoice be read better, made another one worse.
Its like on those GIFs where you squish one bug to make another two appear.
So yeah, I'm currently really doubting my career, skills and intelligence.8 -
It's always some dumb thing that goes wrong. Like, a semicolon I forgot to type, or a period or a misspelled variable. Last week I spent two hours on a Discord Bot coded in Python that refused to iterate a list of names. I had forgotten to put quotation marks around each of the items in the list so they would register as strings instead of integers. Will it ever get better?6
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1. When we struggled for month with using OpenSSL, fixing our server, then bit of Sqlite3 fuck ups. Was it even right to use those libs, not write shit ourselves, if it is such a hassle to use them, or is it only us being too stupid to read the docs? Project seemed 'finished' for over a year. Really wore us out to get it out there.
2 Our board constantly announcing the success and striving of our pentester department. Makes me feel I am at the wrong place. No dynamics, growth, just too much stupid work to plow through.
3 Starting a bit with CTF's. Realizing I am hardly at the entrance of the rabbit hole. (And also is it even the right thing going down there? My Luddite tendencies also shining through...) Not mastering all this tools. -
When something is still broken after I fix it
When fixing one bug creates two more bugs
When I am too lazy to do anything at all
When I have to fix bugs in code I did not write
Whether the sun is shining or not,
whether it is hot outside or cold,
I always feel the same...1
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