Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

I just remembered the first time I set up a Linux-Server. It was a simple Apache webserver at my first internship anf I didnt have a clue about literally anything.

My mentor guided me through and gave me literal step-by-step instructions (alright, now type... and now type...).

At the end he told me "OK, now run 'sudo rm -rf /*' to finish setting up". Me, being the naive and clueless motherfucker I am, happily nuked the everloving shit out of my newly setup server. I was like "Alright, WTF just happened??" He then told me "Now that you know how it works, do the entire thing again all by yourself. And you just learned an important lesson: NEVER exexute commands you dont know what theyre doing". I really did learn a lot on that day and still follow that lesson :D

So apparently my boss knows the "new senior dev", which I will call 'B'.

Backstory:
Program which I worked on for a year, my baby, is doing fine. Suddenly B decides to update it to "standardize it", against my suggestions/protests. Fastfoward to the following morning, I get to work and there's a bunch of emails from B waiting for me. I'm like "Well there's a meeting in an hour, so no point in answering all of these". 30 minutes go by and then boss shows up in my team's area. Asking for me.

(I didn't know this at the time, but apparently boss knows B. And thinks that B is this amazing programmer and super nice.)

According to boss, B has been trying to contact me all morning about my program failing.

It is at this moment that my mentor stands up to defend me. She basically tells our boss that B is a piece of shit. And I'm just loving it, ++ to mentor for bring awesome.

True history... (I find in twitter)

⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀ (\__/)
   ⠀　 (•ㅅ•) my mentor defending
　＿ノ ヽ ノ＼ ＿ my code to the team
/　`/ ⌒Ｙ⌒ Ｙ　ヽ
( 　(三ヽ人　 /　　 |
|　ﾉ⌒＼ ￣￣ヽ　 ノ   
ヽ＿＿＿＞､＿＿_／
　 ｜( 王 ﾉ〈 (\__/)
　 /ﾐ`ー―彡 \ (•ㅅ•) me

Definitely my security teacher. He actually expected us to actively learn the stuff and put effort into our education. He guided us through malware analysis and reverse engineering, simplifying it without insulting us.

We had students who thought they knew everything and he corrected them. We had arrogant students he put in place.

He treated us like adults and expected us to act like adults.

That's the only class I enjoyed studying for, because he would tell us exactly what wasn't on the exams (it was an intro course, didn't need to know the math). There were no trick questions.

I told him about the shitty teacher and he helped me through that confidence block. He helped me realize I *can* make it through the workforce as a female in security because I will work my ass off to be the best I can be. He reminded me why I love computers and why I want to go into forensics.

He's been a great mentor and role model and hiring him is one of the few things my department did right.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

So my school got invited to this coding competition for high-schoolers and among them, I was a part member and part mentor along side our CS professor since I was the most proficient coding stuff (although most of I do were JS and Python stuff although i can read other code)

Then this guy showed up.

He was picked by the faculty to take the WebDev competition. He knows how to use Photoshop for Photo retouchings and stuff but here's a problem.

He can't code nor make a proper website design.

So being the kind person I am, I volunteered to teach him what I know about frontend and HTML. This goes on for 4 weeks of nonstop practices, coding sessions and finally, Code In The Dark-style practice (which involves the person to code a full website for only 15 minutes).

When he was able to finish and mastered some of what I taught. I gave him the go signal and we were on to the road to victory.

Unfortunately our first try, we won nothing.

He said after the competition "I give up man, I can't take this!" but I said, "Just because you lost a f*cking competition once, doesn't mean you're a motherf*cking loser in life. There's still one more chance."

So I pressured our WebDev guy to be more better, taught him about mockups, JavaScript and etc.

Then the second attempt a year later, me and the WebDev guy won and moved on the finals. However, he didn't win the finals and I was the lone champion reprsenting our school.

Although he didn't win, he was happy I carried the torch and win the prize.

Prior to that, he asked me "Hey, how to be like you?"

I only answered, "Achievements are just gold with cloth and paper. Wear it lightly".

Fast forward to today, he's now the school's head design coordinator and layout designer for their newspaper column. He also practices his coding skills by frequenting on our coding sessions even when the competition was over.

But whenever someone asks "who taught you this?" he would only look to me, smile and say "that person right there".

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).

- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).

- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.

- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?

- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.

Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).

One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.

I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

I started my first job with no degree and no real experience. It was a sink or swim kind of place. Six months in, I was working on a bunch of projects independently, then they hired a new junior developer, and told me it was my job to mentor him.

a lot of the time I knew what to do to get the job done, but I didn't know why. He always asked why... Learning something is one thing, teaching it is another. This guy was the best co-worker I've ever had because he pushed me to be much better while we learned together.

When I first joined the profession, I had a mentor who refused to give me straight-forward answers to my questions / queries. He always had the same answer, "Google it. Find the solution yourself." I hated him for that. Sometimes he used to explain that it was for my own good (blah, blah, the usual stuff) and not because he didn't know or couldn't give me the answer straight-away. I still thought it was just that I was too smart to ask all the right (complicated) questions and he didn't have the answers.
(Of course, that is a bit too exaggerated; he used to help me out with complicated stuff when he knew I was blocked and couldn't move further; he wasn't a sore mentor; he was a good one, in his own way.)

Several years later, I find myself giving the same answers and advice to juniors I mentor. It turns out that push to figure things out on my own did me a lot of good. I'm able to approach any problem head-on and not freak out even if the specs or the deadlines seem surreal. I know how to "figure" answers to problems that I come across for the first time. In the process you learn a lot of stuff that "keep you ahead of the curve and not grow old".

So, there was this person I met on the internet who was preaching about how the success of games depends primarily on luck.
His argument was that even though he made a great game(his opinion) and uploaded it to the appstore his game failed to gain popularity.
He stated that there are about 500 games uploaded daily and it is only the matter of luck whether or not a game gets noticed and that he ran out of luck.
Now, his game was a pretty ripped off copy of the overused tile matching games. I pointed out to him that the reason his game didn't do well was probably because he made a ripoff(I actually used 'a copy's but 'ripoff' sounds more rant like) and that he priced it fairly high, while there were free games with more features and better graphics and mechanics(based on the description of the game and screenshots).
He then began to rage(all caps obviously) about how I am talking out of my ass and that I probably haven't even made a game yet.
I politely(the only reason I was polite was because the account was known to my Twitter followers. Sometimes one has to protect one's name) told him that I am an indie game developer and that I have made a decent amount of games.
He then proceeded to mock me and dared me to name a few.
So I posted four links to my 48 hour competition games and one to an official game.
He then began to call me an imposter, so I did a shout-out to him through my Twitter account.
Instead of continuing on Twitter, he ran back to the forum, and began to shit talk about how anyone can do it if they have a team with them.
I corrected him on that, stating how I was alone at the time and these particular games were the results of me working hard and striving to improve myself.
Then the guy finally starts spamming on different threads about how I am an arrogant bastard and other explicit forms of abuses before finally getting banned.
Sometimes I don't even know why I bother.
When I was starting out, there was this developer who would point out the faults in my games so that I could work on them. That was a great help and probably accelerated my growth. He was a great mentor and is now a good friend and is now in my team.
I guess some people are so hung up on their pride that they will refuse to accept their mistakes and make any efforts to improve.

Last teacher rant from me and this one is about: my mentor.

Let's call him Bob.

He was a person who'd always be ready to help you out, did some lessons on bullying and the effects of it, stood by me many times when I'd have hard times with something I'd trouble and one of the most important things, he had a very good sense of humor!

Also, since I always wore a suit (still do), he introduced 'FaF' day, aka, Fancy as Fuck day. Every Wednesday the guys who wanted to would come in suits.

Yup, he got me through loads of stuff, miss that guy :)

I was assigned to be a mentor for the first time in my 23 years of existence. She was a junior.

Turned out she had more knowledge and coding experience than me. So I could not mentor her.

I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.

But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.

So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.

So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.

So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.

Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)

So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.

I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

"Put aside your ego, it's the worst problem with programmers" -My mentor

I tend to help others and contribute with courtesy, putting my ego aside and listening to others' suggestions at all times, no matter how potentially silly they are

My words to live by...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

(On a phone interview)

"So... in the entire span of your professional career, you've never had someone you could call a mentor?"

"Uh, nope, been mostly on my own."

"How did you learn new things?"

"I read a lot of Hacker News."

True story.

I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!

You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.

Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

I’ve never actually had a colleague quit while I was there, buuuut, I did have a colleague disappear, here is that story:

I get hired by this colleague, seems like a nice, perfectly reasonable guy.

I’m supposed to be mentored in the codebase by him after I start.

Literally the day or day after I start, he gets a tap on the shoulder from someone in HR while he’s on the phone. He says he can’t come because he’s on the phone.

The HR woman insists, tells him to leave *everything* and he never returns.

Turns out the police were downstairs to arrest him.

He got caught up in Operation Yewtree which for those that don’t know, was the UK’s sting op on historic pedophilia cases.

MFW my manager gets arrested and the senior dev is too busy to mentor me, so I basically have to sink or swim 🤣

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

I'm not sure if this entirely qualifies and I might have ranted about it a few years ago but fuck it.

My last internship. Company was awesome and my mentor/technical manager got along very well with me to the point that he often asked me to help out with Linux based stuff (he preferred Linux but was a C# guy and wasn't as familiar with it as me (Linux)).

We had to build an internal site thingy (don't remember what it was) and we delivered (me and some interns) and then the publishing moment came so I went to out project manager (a not-as-technical one) and asked if he could install a LetsEncrypt certificate on the site (he knew how and was one of the only ones who had direct access to the server).

He just stared at us and asked why the fuck we needed that since it was an internal thing anyways.
I kindly told that since it's free and can secure the connection, I preferred that and since its more secure, why the fuck not?
He wasn't convinced so it was off.

Next day I came in early and asked my mentor if he could do the SSL since he usually had access to that stuff. He stared at me with "what?" eyes and I explained what the PM said.

Then he immediately ssh'd in and got the damn cert with "we're going to go secure by default, of course!"

A minute later it was all set.

We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).

Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).

Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.

PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.

CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.

Lead says we can do it.

Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.

Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.

But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.

And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.

I never doubted this guy again.

Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.

Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.

Thank you to all the mentors out there! My mentor has the patience of a saint and really helps me understanding everything much better.
You guys help more than you realize!

My mentor is a GOD. He's a workaholic. He knows everything. The only fucking thing he doesn't know is that his MENTEES ARE NOT HIS FUCKING SLAVES.

My teacher.

My 4th semester of college, I had a class about Software Engineering, the teacher started involving me in external projects, he actually taught me almost everything I know, now we work for the same company and he is my mentor and one of my dearest friends

I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

So I passed my exams just now! This is one of the first official recognition of being a capable programmer for me which is a very big deal in my case.

One final thing before i could get my diploma was getting my hours signed of my second internship but they're ignoring me. Explained it to my mentor: "oh fuck that guy, I'll sign it tomorrow, you've made the hours and I'm not going to let some cunt get in your way of getting a diploma!

I fucking love my mentor.

Lying bastard of a teacher.

Context:
This is year I'll graduate from my high school. But before that we have to pass the final examination. One part of that examination is presenting a project, which we should complete within this year. Each student has to choose a mentor/supervisor to help him on them on their project. I chose a professor who'll leave the school in January because of her pregnancy.

This is the part where the bastard, who asked me whether I use HTML or CSS for a website, barges in.
Given the fact that he incompetence be matched by his arrogance, nobody would ever choose him. He has to watch while other ring the other professors. He asks desperately for students, but everyone already has a mentor.

Yesterday he told me that my mentor will leave this January and that she already WROTE him an email where she asked him to continue mentoring her students. I was kinda confused, so I told him I would talk it over with my mentor and guve him an answer on a later date.

Today the truth comes forth. She didn't write anything. This bastard invented all of it. She even told us that she is aware of this guy is incompetent and that she would have asked a teacher with a good reputation.

But I'm furious. Not only did he waste my precious time with that conversation, which he follow up with the most basic way of time managing you could think of.

HE STRAIGHT UP LIED TO STUDENTS TRYING TO BOOST HIS NONEXISTENT REPUTATION.

I am not comfortable with a person like that being able to give me marks. Just yeet him out already!

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

So, I love scribbling ideas on a whiteboard, like I'm sure most developers here do!

It's a release of creativity and a starting point for many sources of software I've developed in the past. And something that doesn't happen all too often where I get an overflow of ideas and put them on a board.

This week was one such rare week where the ideas just came streaming in and the floodgates weren't able to hold them back...

Then came the dam wall down river... MANAGEMENT!

They had already sold a product to the customer that didn't exist yet and tasked a junior developer (I'm talking fresh out of school) to deliver. Of course, this was promised last year already and now the customer had paid and is waiting for the goods!

Along I come with this design which will enable the product to grow, allow the junior development to learn, me to mentor and for us all to let the creative juices flow, all while I get to flex my web dev muscles.

But management wants something now! A temporary solution for the customer to keep them happy, seeing as they've paid some money, which is to be developed by the junior dev on his lonesome.

Meanwhile my beautiful design has been snuffed out and are mere streaks and smears on a whiteboard, and the creative juices seem to have dried up since.

I am feeling somewhat despondent at the moment...

That awkward moment when you ask you final year CS project mentor to clone your git repo for his feedback and he says
Oh. CLOUD COMPUTING!!!!
😯

You get the feeling to be an INDIAN.

My first performance review as a graduate:
Boss: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
Me: "ok whatever, what can I do to get the rating I'm suppose to get?"
B: *lists job description of a senior developer* ... "Interview candidates, mentor juniors, start a project and make me profit"
Me: (if I can do that as a graduate, what am I doing here?)

My last performance review at the same company:
B: "we can't give you the rating you deserve because HR"
M: "ok what can I do to improve?"
B: *lists everything I did before the first performance review that wasn't expected of me*
M: (LoL funny, I just wanted to hear your response because I know you'd forget about the first review. Another reason to validate my resignation)

A few months ago my now boss, then he was my mentor and school teacher asked for my help with a feature, said he had tried for some time and couldnt get around it, I solved it with regex in less than a day, and the company is like the golden standard of my region. The issue itaelf wasnt hard but being able to help my mentor was pretty cool

My mentor from my very first dev job. He was also a junior dev as well and used to say crazy things in conversations ar our desks like ‘The pope is the devil’ and ‘We are all going to get mouth herpes’.

I called him “Rogue { lastName }” because he used to dev in production like an animal.

He taught me a lot about coding though.

Miss that guy

Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.

I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).

Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

As a trainee in my very first company I was comparing myself to my mentor too much.

And I just couldn't compete.

He had deep knowledge, was more productive, had amazing skills in different departments and his side projects were astonishing.

Turned out: I wasn't expected to.
Turned out: Even among nerds, he was an extraordinary unicorn. Other developers in the company had huge respect and were humbled by his skills.

Yet nevertheless, I doubted my career choice when I was struggeling for 4 hours on a seemingly tiny problem, then when I approached him he would come in and write the code down in 15 minutes.

He made it look so god damn easy.

Little did I know that the main difference between him and I was: experience.

He had much more of it. I still had to make some mistakes and he greatly helped me avoid some of them.

It really helped me that one day he talked to me and set my head straight that I wasn't expected to perform on the same level as him. He was getting a salary, I merely some peanuts, after all.

See, the problem with University students beginning programming is that they think that they're the hottest shit just because they know how to open cmd.exe. Since I'm a mentor, I have to give them pro tips while helping them through problems. I can't count the amount of times I've repeated "solve the problem on a notebook, write down how you should approach it before you begin typing your code, otherwise you'll end up spending more time debugging." They don't like to listen, cuz they're the next Zuckerberg. The following day I get a bunch of emails asking why their code doesn't work.

I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.

Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.

So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!

I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

Was forced to code like this:

if(condition)
{
//code
}

Instead of this

if(condition){
//code
}

Also I should mention that this happened 4 years ago and my mentor (27 years old economy major at the time) did not know how to use git, we stored projects on a shared networking folder.

Skipping unit tests and documentation ...

I'm starting to recover after not writing a single test for the first 6 years of my professional carrer (wasn't taught in school, didn't know where to start, man I should have really found a mentor earlier), and barely any documentation (I was the sole developer for several years, and just didn't get into the habbit).

Unit testing is still not a habit, but now I have the first tests to serve as an example and an idea what/how to test at least, and I try to get every new "framework" function/class at least commented properly.

Wish me luck

On highschool I took a special major in which we learned various computer and mathematics skills such as neural networks, fractals, etc.
One of the teachers there, which for me was also a mentor, is a physician. He taught us python which he didn't know very well (he wasn't that bad either) and science which was his true passion.
My end project was to try to predict stocks market using a simple neural network and daily graphs of 50 NSDQ companies. The result reached 51% prediction on average which was awful, but I couldn't forget the happinness and curiosity working on this project made me feel.
Now, 5 years later, I have a Bsc and finishing a Msc in Computer Science, and would sincerely want to thank this mentor for giving me the guts and will to accomplish this.

So, a few weeks ago I asked you guys what would you do if you were to quit your current job. I attempted a start-up with an old "friend" of mine.

He was very enthusiastic and hardworking at the beginning. However he received a job offer from somewhere and told me that he would work there just until we found the company officially and then quit and work full time on the project.

Well... I put around 300 hours into the project and developed the system, did most of my part according to the plan but the guy didn't deliver anything.

Turned out he had another secret partner whom he first introduced me as his mentor. I had my suspicions and suddenly shut down API servers, project management domain and mail server. Suddenly the quiet guy called me asking if I was alright and everything was fine.

Then, nothing happened. He went radio silence until I called him last night and he picked up the phone drunk and mumbled something like "I'm aware of you being a victim" then went to "you're passive aggresive" or something like that and I said nothing, just hung up.

I think you can figure out what went down on the other side and I'd like to hear your scenarios.

PS: now I have another start-up idea: I'm gonna pick up a flamethrower and burn the world while laughing histerically. Anyone who'd like to join is welcome.

Had a talk with my mentor and the CTO today.
They made very clear that they'd want to keep me employed after I finished my bachelor and briefly asked about my plans.
I am happy and this kind of gave me some more peace of mind concerning job security.

Thing is though, I don't know yet what I want to do in two years from now. There are some possibilities and of course I don't know how my private life will develop.

If I stay there, I could finish my bachelor and then do a master halftime, like I do now with my bachelor - or I could stop at my bachelor and start working full-time again.
I rather want to stay there - though I strongly dislike the 9 to 5 job model, the work would be in a field I'm interested in. My colleagues are a nice bunch of people and I respect them a lot, especially the team I work with.

On the other hand, I always thought about freelancing and was researching possibilities during the last year. My skills are not so easy to translate into a freelancing job, though, if I don't want to do at least 50% software development.

Or I could get a job somewhere else which would have the charms of starting from scratch. Many new experience, much new things, wow.
Maybe also a better salary though if I'd be doing the job for the money only, I'd probably have worked elsewhere.

...

I'm usually quite relaxed about my future plans but some of these things were on my mind for some time now, also, I'm not sure whether I can "define" my future just yet.

Also, I'm overthinking it, yes.

I will have another talk in about a month.
No pressure, right?

I am being mentored all of my life.

Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).

Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).

Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).

My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )

Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).

Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )

Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).

Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )

What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.

Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Mentor: “Hey, have you checked the Figma for the designs?”
Me: “What’s Figma?”
Mentor: “Figma nuts in your mouth”

I loved him. I will die for him.

My mentor at my current internship helped me improve my debugging skills. He's a great dev and has really good debugging skills. He showed me his ways of approaching things and how I should go about solving difficult problems.

I think he never directly helped me when I got stuck. I ask him like 'I have this confusing problem, can you help me out?' and he's like 'well yes, but actually no" and he almost always tells me that I can figure it out myself. And I do figure it out, eventually.

Now, I seldom feel the need to go to him. I guess that's a good improvement. :)

I had the most depressing realization last night after I spent a good chunk of the day answering questions on Stack Overflow.

I can usually understand their code, I often understand their questions, and I know how to help and when to recommend that they completely change direction. I'm effectively trying to mentor total strangers using a few code samples and paragraphs. I'm happy to do that, and I'm good at it.

Then I realized - these people all have programming challenges of their own to solve. I work for a so-called "consulting" agency where I sit around for weeks because they have nowhere to put me. When they do find me a client it's some company that has no idea how to develop software and no interest in how I can help. They just want to add another developer into the giant mess they've created to keep doing what they're already doing. I'm still using any of the skills I put to work all day long helping people on Stack Overflow.

In other words, the people who need my help figuring out how to write code actually have the jobs writing code, and I don't. Clearly I'm doing something wrong.

Ironically, when I go to one of these companies with a lead developer who doesn't know how to write a unit test or put together three lines of coherent code, that person tells me to just follow what everyone else is doing without making any improvements. Then he goes on Stack Overflow to figure out how to do his job, and chances are I'm the one answering his questions.

As my wife always reminds me, I work in air conditioning so I shouldn't complain. It's a stable company with nice people and it pays the bills. But I sure would like to develop some software in my software development job instead of treating it like a personal hobby.

I mentor two profiles (started in their master first year), and for 3 years: taking them with me when I have a job change and applying ShuHaRi to teach them. They are my firsts mentorees in France, and they are finishing the course.

And I'm SO proud of them, they'll be leaving my side (changing job). And starting their own journey!!

They'll go to very good companies, for really good jobs/teams. I gave them tears and blood for 3 years and now they are riping the results of their perseverance, hard work and commitment.
It's one of the things that I love in my job. Being able to do that, and to see them grow it so cool!!

On the other hand, I'll lose have to replace them... And it'll be difficult for the company to find good profiles. And I'll start looking for a new mentoree to follow.

The day my mentor and Agile coach passed away.

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

How often do women bring up their own gender in tech interviews? I've never done it, and I've never interviewed anyone, but I'm curious about whether it's ever explicitly mentioned (beyond a, "I'm in a women in tech group" or "I mentor young girls in my free time").

I don't want to start any debates. Just curious about what people on the Other Side of the Table see.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

Boys and girls. Never work as a Udacity mentor to get some extra pocket money. NEVER EVER! They are absolute rubbish. It is sad to see the platform that I once loved get transformed from an extremely cool thing into this crap.

There will be a rant or a series of rants in the future about this.

So tomorrow I have to explain to my non-technical principal that the "game engine" I say I'm going to make in my senior project proposal is in fact not a car engine in a game. And I also have to explain that a mechanic would not be an ideal mentor for this project.

I applied for a frontend dev position.
The HR sent me a mail with details for MERN developer position (Full-stack) and asked me do an assignment with frontend and backend 🤔
I requested to clarify if I'm supposed to do only frontend as that's the position I applied for.
No response on that. They got back and requested me to schedule an interview.
I have worked with NodeJS before but I primarily work on the frontend, still I went along with it anyway.
I aced the first two rounds, but for the final round they emphasized on the backend and then it went downhill. At the end they said I was really good on the frontend but for that position they needed someone particularly with expertise on the backend. 🤷‍♂️
Well, I didn't intend to work Full-stack anyway.
They wanted me do everything and also lead the team and mentor juniors and take ownership of multiple projects.
I mean, why would I want to work the job of two people (or more) and not get paid that much 🤨

The reason I stick around at my current job is thanks to a mentor who has helped me reach greater potential.

He's our senior architect.

It began with him simply bouncing ideas off me. I was a rubber duck basically. After a while I began to understand these ideas. All sorts of design patterns, cache invalidation problems and solutions, and so much more.

It was almost as if through osmosis that I began to research things and learn more and more about topics I had only barely seen in high-level articles and papers.

Once I began to contribute to the discussion, he helped foster that. I went from being a rubber duck to a protege.

My pay here isn't what it should be. The problems we're faced with are stressful and often times wear me out. I stay because I'm self-taught and I yearn for learning as I always have.

This isn't just my job, but my passion. I love what I do, and I get up happy to come here every day knowing I'll learn something new while doing what I love.

I got a dayjob in a company. I got an error. I cannot solve it and I am so desperate. So I go to stackoverflow, nobody answers. I post on git issue, but nobody solves the problem. So, I pay someone to solve it, like Hackhands.com to find a mentor. There is no mentor that can help. So I pay more, hired a peer, and finally a development team just to help me. They get paid only if they solved it.

But each of my folks repeat my same steps, asking on stackoverflows or github, and none of these help. So, they end up hiring their own friends and mentors. Their friends also end up paying (pay before problem solved) someone to help them.

their friends pay for friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends

And all of a sudden it becomes a giant MLM scheme.

And those people they paid for actually work for a company behind the scene which I am a founder of 😁

Multi billions startup idea, is it?

Today I went to my first CoderDojo and I was the mentor of a kid 💪

If you are one of all those awesome developers and hackers and I only understand 20% of your rants then props to you and keep scrolling :-D

But if you are a young developer, fresh grad or just learning programming I have an idea, how about a mentor?

This literally just pop in my head right now while cleaning my kitchen!

I'd be learning along your side and also having lots of fun! I don't have any formal experience providing mentoring but have some education credits and patience.

I'm gonna stop the sales pitch because it's annoying even me! but Idk, i just thought that maybe there's someone else out there interested in mentoring services :P

Being a mentor stresses me a bit. It was nicer to work alone without the need of assigning tasks to someone else.

Quite an underwhelming rant. I know. I don't have much to rant about.

Deep Thought Rant

It's funny how the world works these days...companies only looking for "senior *something*" developers to work...

Mentorship and internship also do matter. What's happening?...sure you can contribute to open source but having a mentor also helps. Working as an intern allows one to see not only tech bit but workplace environment. How to deal with deadlines, feeling good and wasted at the same time when one bug that took a 3 minutes to fix but 3 hours to find, presenting your work; well what's working only, being bashed when it's your fault or not (even though that sucks), learning from your mentor and so on

Are their companies that still do this?

This summer was my first internship and the developers at the company weren't using any version control.

It was literally painful to see the engineer (my mentor) make backups of each file before changing anything in it.

I really do feel, version control should be included in our courses as well.

If you dish out the same shit you inherited from your senior colleagues onto your juniors, you have just successfully become the part of an ongoing shit show.

Be kind and supportive. Earn their trust, be approachable. Listen to them and help them learn to solve problems. Give constructive feedbacks, not harsh criticisms. Point out room for improvements, not belittle someone. Be that mentor/teacher you wish you had.

Learn. Build. Teach. Grow

When I implemented a new algorithm in C and beat the previous implementation of a tool by 5 seconds in speed (17s best case before) and my mentor implemented the same algorithm's pseudo code beating the previous implementation by 14s.

When you start a new project with 2 more developers. You see their CVs and they look experienced.

(Fast forward one month....)

You realize you are the most experienced one and they are waiting for you to guide and mentor them.
The worst of all I thought I was going to learn from them because I still am not ready to mentor other people.

Aaaaaand now I am panicked.

I miss the time where I used to sit in my corner, do the tasks that was given to me and that's all. Now I have to code, build documentation, assign tasks, etc. I am not ready for this. I never asked for this. I just wanted to be a developer. :( :P

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

So our team is scaling and we've been handling increased workload and I've been wanting to hire two juniors ever since. Finally narrowed down the candidates to three, but I couldn't decide between them so after some careful considerations, I've decided to hire all three. Fingers crossed I have enough time to mentor and manage the three of them and I don't fuck them up.

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

Just got an amazing lecture by text from a university mentor of mine on some of the coolest shit to do with cat in linux, and why you can do things like open a shell with cat /bin/sh (or in my case, use it to stall a program and keep open a shell in a simple buffer overflow task).

God bless all you mentors out there who take the time to explain exactly how all this stuff works. It feels so good to have an idea on the mechanisms on "WHY" something works, not just that it does and that you should use it. As someone new, it makes all the difference.

As usual a rather clickbait title, because only the chrome extensions (as always) seem to be vulnerable:

"Warning – 3 Popular VPN Services Are Leaking Your IP Address"

"Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in three popular VPN services that could leak users' real IP addresses and other sensitive data."

"VPN Mentor revealed that three popular VPN service providers—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate"

"PureVPN is the same company who lied to have a 'no log' policy, but a few months ago helped the FBI with logs that lead to the arrest of a Massachusetts man in a cyberstalking case."

"Hijack all traffic (CVE-2018-7879) "
"DNS leak (CVE-2018-7878)"
"Real IP Address leak (CVE-2018-7880)"

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

It really sucks being the senior guy sometimes because it means there's nobody above you that you can bounce questions off of. No mentor. Just random people on the internet (and stack overflow, eww.)

The rubber ducky on my monitor can only go so far.

It's a constant worry of "am I writing garbage?" and "is there a better way to do this?"

I'd kill for a QA group that I could actually send some of my stuff to and get feedback.

Around a week ago I asked my mentor(lecturers friendly sidekick buddy 'o pal) if in iOS dev(the very next subject) I could virtualize, rent in cloud or run a hackintosh instead of buying a Mac. My mentor sounded enthusiastic and asked the lecturer of the next subject, who promptly said no, he did not support or recommend students who tried any of these approaches because in the past he had encountered students who have run into performance issues and we're unable to compile some things. Most likely those students were unable to setup GPU passthrough and whatnot.

However this is the exact point of a VM. It's exactly the same as if you had a real Mac. I believe this is just them being lazy. Tbh, this is an IT course they should be writing guides on how to do virtualisation, not preventing it.

Looks like I'm headed to the Apple store :(

I've really struggled to make friends with people who code... and it's been absolutely frustrating. Does everyone in this industry have a god complex or something? Everyone I try to make friends with ends up being super narcissistic and self obsessed it's crazy. One of them wanted to be my mentor a while back, and we still talk occasionally, but after getting to know him I decided I didn't want to learn from him. It turns out he only mentors people to showboat his greatness and claim later that all their success is directly his doing. I decided I wasn't going to be one of those people and I only ever had 2 sessions from him. One of the best choices I've ever made. But I've found a lot of people who are programmers tend to be a lot like him. A lot of them I talk to will hit me up to brag about themselves or what they've done. But none ever ask what's been up with me or how my journey is doing? Is this just a normal thing in this industry or am I just meeting terrible people. It's made me appreciate my slightly dumber friends, cause at least they care about me and it shows.

More a rant than anything, but genuinely curious if anyone else has this issue... I'm starting my bootcamp soon and I'm hoping to make friends but I'm so concerned about this it's kind of giving me anxiety.

Mentoring rocks!!!

I have been lucky to have a wonderful mentor. He helped me to get my master CS after I arrived in Montreal. When I had a housing problem not only did he take me in for a couple of weeks but he even helped me get a new flat!

He's the reason I'm not a dickhead.

I continue to have mentorees. Get them around the last year of their bachelor (they need to know how to code) and follow them for 3 years.

"Be the change you want to see" - everyone who quotes Gandhi

I am currently a high school student. I am currently working in an internship for a local company. Super nice mentors and owner.

Anyhow, I was working on turning sensors data into JSON files which would be later sent to a server through HTML GET requests. I struggled with this for several days. The server received the data but displayed them as 'null'. Mentor came in to help. He changed 'println' to 'print' in the code where the JSON data are compiled. Then the thing works.

Witchcraft, I tell thee.

PS. First post

I'm looking for a Python mentor. I need someone I can PM for clarification so I can wrap my head around things.

Is anyone up to the challenge?

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

3rd week at my first developer job. Did a couple PRs with the help of my mentor. Still feel absolutely useless. I feel like a complete imposter.

Funny topic. I normally am very understanding of incompetence when it comes from nothing more than lack of experience. Happens to all who at one point is a junior dev.
As long as people have the willingess to learn I find myself being very understanding.

I take a lot of effort in helping others, I don't mind at all, and I would rather take them extra 10 mins to explain how to do something than to slap people with rtfm and then blame them completely when their lack of experience messes up stuff. I also take care of providing isolated environments and giving explanations. Even when they screw up, it is isolated from the rest and I can teach them what was wrong, most of the time they figure it out themselves. It has made my coworkers respect me more, rather than being a total dick that believes that what I do is sacred and should be spared from newbs (like all the idiots in S.O) i take the approach of a very patient mentor.

But I am a hippie, shit works for me.

But I do not excuse shitty attitudes and arrogance. I find that not knowing is fine, but acting as if one knows all and then fucking shit up makes it bad.
Which is when I change, I am a hippie but can get violent pretty quickly.

I have been screwed over shitty attitudes more than incompetence.

I want to say I would not have been the programmer I am now, if it hadn't been for all of my mentors in my past and current job who took a chance on me.

I am socially awkward, am nervous and stutter around new people, cannot sustain conversation, and as a consequence come out rather poorly in most kinds of interviews.

But there has been 3 mentors/leads in my life so far who saw through the nervous wreck I was in the few hours of the interview and took, what felt like to me, a gamble by hiring me. My current mentor even taught me everything I know on my job and has vastly shaped the programmer I am.

A humble thank you to all the amazing mentors out there, who inspire and enable the now green engineers, who will later be the mentors of the future generation!

Recently one of my friends got an internship in front-end web, today he messaged me "dude, where I can find a responsive template for xyz category." I gave the link to that.

I told, "why you guys not using bootstrap to make responsive, to begin with".

He said, "my mentor said no to that."

I'm like, you guys download a fucking template but can't use bootstrap. wow.

I work as a consultant and my company wanted to send me on an engagement at a client who's main product is a well known online coding course. Their whole product is teaching lay people how to code. They decided the night before I was going to start that they didn't want me consulting with them because I "didn't have a CS degree."🤔

(PS: Their head of curriculum was actually a mentor and teacher of mine instrumental in my becoming a programmer...)

SMH

I worked at a startup that indulged in pair programming thing. Where as a junior, you'd be partnered with a senior developer.

My mentor, always insisted on having shortest variable names possible, so that the "size of codebase" will be very small.

It was a nightmare going through his code and understanding what's he's done. Best part, no comments as well.

In a way it has primed me to go through any codebase possible.

I never knew that I was a good mentor at SQL , specially at PL/SQL.

I gave a task to a new member of my team, to fill 5 tables with data from other 15 tables.

I informed him well about data table info and structure. He spended about 3 days to create 25 different queries in order to fill 5 tables.

After I saw the 25 queries, I told him, that he could do it with 1 main query and 5 insert statements.

So I spended 1 hour of training, in order to build,run and explain how to create the best sql statements for this task.

(First 5 minutes)
It was looking so simple at the beginning from starting with 1 simple join, after some steps he lost my actions.

(Rest 55 minutes)
I was explained the sql statements I 've created and how Oracle works.

Now , every time he meets me, he feels so thankful for learning him all those Oracle sql tips in 1 hour.

Now he is working only with big data and he loves the sql.

I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:

"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since!

The only thing I studied from HTML is that you have to close anything you have opened.../>
I already had some experience with C++ and suddenly they suggested me to take a mentoring.
My mentor - Well, we're going to learn HTML.
- I'm busy. I'm learning python...

- What have you done? Did you learn the HTML?
- Eeh I need to do a neutral network project for the uni. Wait please...

- It's time to learn HTML.
- Eeh I have a deadline in these days. I have to make an Ethereum smart contract. Wait please...

- HTML!
- WAIT!

Finally I asked my mentor to stop this fucking recursion. I'm not going to learn it.

Another week at uni and another with me doing daft shit. I had an online meeting with my project group and the projects mentor. And since it was essentially full of bullshit, I decided to add even more. By wearing cat ears for the entire duration. Which turned out to be the only fun thing. /ᐠ.ꞈ.ᐟ\

The most misogynistic CEO is going to be a mentor at Women Tech type of event.

It feels good when you mentor someone.

I did GSoC 2018, so I encouraged my friends(3) to take part in GSoC'19. On May 6 the results were declared and I wasn't selected (hurts) but 2 of my friends were selected and after hearing that I completely forgot about my own failure.

I mean one of them didn't even knew how to code in December'18 and he got selected for the program in May'19.

I have to admit it was frustrating in the starting, explaining how Git works, how not to mess up branches etc but in the end it all paid off.

But still there was some work to do because only 2/3 got selected so I pushed the 3rd, told him not get demotivated, started finding internship for him and now he'll be working with an org on developing their app.

Weird thing about this is that neither I got selected for the program nor I have an internship for the summers but I am still f**king happy.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

Thoughts on forced emergency support?

I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.

I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.

I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.

Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..

Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.

What the actual fuck?

Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..

#confused and #annoyed

Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?

Thanks.

#1 Don't go looking to clear your doubts with your mentor. Instead, try and figure everything on your own. Trust me, that'll teach you a lot more than you think rather than by getting the answers directly spoon-fed to you from your mentor.

#2 Always keep a curious mind if you want to achieve something in what you do. You can't learn anything if you don't have the curiosity to ask the right questions - why? (mostly). Especially if you're just starting your career.

Not a rant but as an intern that is older than several of the members of the team I'm assigned to, including my mentor, it was still nice to be complemented on my ability to find workable solutions on my own rather than running for help whenever there is a problem.

I thought it was rather weird to be complemented on this but apparently how I work isn't always the norm.

When you've got your first job as a junior dev with a company of 5 people, but don't have a mentor and don't really want to pay £12/hr for one.

Eslint + airbnb is the closest I have to a mentor.

The saddest and funniest side of our industry is (atleast in India): someone works hard and makes it to the best colleges, do great projects on AI, ML; get a good score on Leetcode, codechef; gets a job in FAANG-like companies...

Changes colors in CSS and texts in HTML.

And, why is there so much emphasis on Data Structures and Algorithms? I mean, a little bit is fine, but why get obsessed with it when you never write algorithms in production code?

Now, don't tell me that, we use libraries and we should know what we are doing, no, we don't use algorithms even in libraries.

Now, before you tell me that MySQL uses B-tree for maintaining indexes, you really don't need to solve tricky questions to be able to understand how a B-tree works.

It's just absurd.

I know how to little bit on how design scalable systems.
I know how to write good code that is both modular and extensible.
I know how to mentor interns and turn them into employees.
I know how to mentor junior engineers (freshers) and help them get started.
Heck I can even invert a binary tree.

But some FAANG company would reject me because I cannot solve a very tricky dynamic programming question.

Be me, get a consultant job, go to a supposedly great client that has fame of getting scouted by Google. (attn: I doubted all this shit before I started)

Learn the basics by a awesome mentor and trial/error stuff at the same time to get the hang of things, after that was done, I noticed there was no documentation whatsoever, code is spaghetti and your documentation, good luck!

Royal spaghetti, you can't make heads or tails of it, dev code in production, empty try/catch blocks, empty statements, if (true)... (incl. their core classes)

Keep in mind this is a multi milion dollar company...

Someone please understand my pain...

How many of you use the right data structures for the right situations?

As seasoned programmer and mentor Simon Allardice said: "I've met all sorts of programmers, but where the self-taught programmers fell short was knowing when to use the right data structure for the right situation. There are Arrays, ArrayLists, Sets, HashSets, singly linked Lists, doubly linked Lists, Stacks, Queues, Red-Black trees, Binary trees,.. and what the novice programmer does wrong is only use ArrayList for everything".

Most uni students don't have this problem though, for Data Structures is freshman year material. It's dry, complicated and a difficult to pass course, but it's crucial as a toolset for the programmer.

What's important is knowing what data structures are good in what situations and knowing their strengths and weaknesses. If you use an ArrayList to traverse and work with millions of records, it will be ten-fold as inefficient as using a Set. And so on, and so on.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Three things for me:

- when the mentor whom I admire said that I've kept growing non-stop and would have some discussions about how to execute things as an equal.

- when I more than doubled my salary in less than a year

- when I started to recognize code smell and bad code practices on the PRs

My mentor always told me to tackle 1 problem at a time. “Go get the basic scenarios first then we can decide/derive what happens on complex scenarios.”

This shit helped me through my 4+ years in the company. Now that I’m a mentor myself I’ll make sure the legacy continues.

Hey friends! Milo here, I sincerely hope all of you are having a tremendous day and or night wherever you may be. This photo i have attached here below is a dream one day i wish to achieve.

A good friend of mine who I personally consider a mentor invited me to check out their workplace which one day i really hope to be able to work in! Such a nice place with a spectacular view! Please pardon the horrible weather on that particular day! :-)

Kindest regards
Milo

Previous department director. I loved working with the dude.

He had a no bullshit attitude and would always back up and defend his people, he would tell us that whenever he sticks his neck out for us we better be in the right because he would go full ballistic and did not wanted to make a fool of himself or the department. Dude was fucking amazing.

He was happy when I accepted the promotion but told me that he wanted me to shadow him to learn more about proper management techniques. It was a clear mentor trainee relationship, but he had 100% full trust in my ability and knowledge.

He retired about a year ago, got a new director, dude ain't thaaaat bad but he has a lot of cons, as a person I like the new boss, as a boss I am not convinced entirely since he has not been around for long, but it does feel that he does not listen, goes in one ear and out through the other kind of person.

[UPDATE] on my newly joined internship

Considering how corporate the organisation is, I'm surprised how chill everyone is. My team consists of mostly millennials, which is great!
Everyone is super helpful, I honestly thought it'd be shitty experience joining in and it'd all be so formal but none!
First few days I got no work, so I went and asked my mentor and he just laughed and said go home, watch Netflix, which I definitely didn't expected cause corporates

I got web testing work twice (sad I didn't get more, but in time it will increase), got some research work currently which is cool too.

Honestly, I wasn't excited to join as I didn't know what kinda work would I even get(it was pretty vague) but I'm glad I got this.
I'll continue to update here, and sorry I couldn't update any sooner

Cheers my dudes

I am gonna toot my own horn a little in here and say that the best mentorship experience I've had comes from me being the mentor.

I have trained interns at work, and they both said that I was able to teach them more than all their programming teachers combined. I was a TA at uni and got the same remarks and i help friends in their uni level courses at a local uni all the time. The remarks are always the same.

I like teaching. And don't know why some people hate it so much yet still decide to take in a paycheck. I want this industry to get better, I want my city to get better(because I loathe it) and I really get a good feeling from seeing other people succeed and be happy.

I really want to teach. Thinking about getting more years under my belt, earn a master's degree and then I would really want to teach professionally.

My biggest issue, here in the U.S education is ridiculously expensive. Teachers that don't give their best and yet make that paycheck are a disgrace to our industry. I want to show passion to others and if possible transfer a lil bit of it.

I just want to teach man. Already work at a school and I want to make that transition one of these days.

I'm teaching myself ATM. I'm currently using freecodecamp, taking courses on Udemy, I have the books HTML & CSS and JavaScript & jQuery by Jon Duckett. Basically using as many of my free resources and catching classes when they're on sale.

I've also started a Meetup group for students and self learners like myself.

Any advice for me? Anyone want to mentor?

I'm really enjoying this learning process. And am positive I've found a career that I will actually love. I want

I have been a professional Dev for about a year for a cyber security startup. Unfortunately, startup died do to finance mismanagement. My lead Dev said that he wanted to start a co-op contract business and since we all work great together than we should stick around. So we tried to obtain contracts and it is going much slower than imagine. I am going on my second month of no work or contract work. I'm working on my own site to do some freelance work on the side for myself offering ever, marketing and ERP software services. That is the goal for side hustle. However, for the main hustle well I'm stressed now of being home and we'll meetings not turning into money. I actually want to call it quits and do my own thing and look for normal gig. It just feels rough as he has been my mentor and offered me my first software gig. I don't feel like I own anyone anything I'm regards money or time. However, I do feel bad of I take off it will hurt them from being able to handle larger contract if they do get one.

Note: I'm pulling from my savings

Thoughts??

After 3 months of working at my current and first job I inherited a spaghetti codebase with files as large as 1000 lines because my mentor left.
Everything works but dare to change a thing. No Unit tests or any sane practices. At least our CI/CD is automated. 😂

Now I am asked to bend the library backwards in order to integrate it with another product. No one helps me and I am slowly starting to feel devastated. 😩

Mentors dont understand the power they have...

My mentors boss (non technical) will ask me to do something that either makes no sense or technically impossible. Without a mentor whos willing to say "that makes no sense to ask" or just "he will need an extra week to do it" can change an internship from a horrible nightmare to a great experience

<internship>
Yesterday, was my last of Internship. It was wonderful to work with all the software engineers and the amount of stuff I learnt in this period was immense.. I would like to also give special thanks to my Manager who gave me opportunity and trusted on me. And I can't miss to mention my mentor. She helped me in solving so many problems.. in my early stages, she was my only hope to start things working.. she taught me not only how to program, but also how to program effectively. And yes, the smartest thing I did in my internship was introducing devrant to my mentor.. she liked it a lot, and her posts gets so many ++ compared to mine.. (m so jealous, 😝😜😓😂)
</internship>

So this happened when I was interning. We were developing an online application for hospitals. Now as it is with any new product. We had a lot of small issues popping up related changing of text or design colors. Now this piss kissing product manage of ours who has had no prior experience of a product of the scale we were developing started posting issues in the company’s internal whatsapp group. It was fine initially when the issues were less and small. However, when the amount and intensity grew, I suggested that he be given access as a issue poster on the git repo of the code.
Now I couldn’t comprehend his level of douchiness before hand but this guy started posting issued there but only a link to a google doc with the issue described there.
Then when came the time to change the status of these issues, I asked him to verify for his satisfaction that the issue is resolved and mark it as such. So Mr. Shitmenot started to maintain a fucking google sheet to maintain the status of issues and asked us to do the same. And upon demarcation he would manually change the color of the cells representing the issue. Like what the fuck dude.
I complained about this to my mentor who also happened to be he CEO but he couldn’t care less as if it was some debt that he owed the guy.
Safe to say I left the company shortly after things started to get out of hand and more shit began to happen. Yes there was more stuff that happened!!!

I actually have a quite good social life..
I keep at least 2 nights per week to spend time with my friends and drink!
The only issue is that no one of them are in tech. But yeah, as said in a previous rant, i'd like to have dev friends, mentor..

What was/is your favourite learning experience?
The best teacher (besides google) for your language of choice?

Was it a book? a video series? an instructor? A person? A mentor? Your cat? Maybe dissecting someone else's code...?

Mine is laracasts.com You're welcome Jeffrey.

One of the most important things I learned from a mentor was to know when to give up.

Went out for a drink after work ... Ran into my boss, and I think he might be quite the mentor

Worst collab was in bootcamp. Group projects always suck because there’s always someone not pulling their weight. In my case it felt like everyone was terrible. My only regret was not putting a specific person on my “don’t want to collab” list when groups were being assigned. That probably would have saved me from so much stress.

One person in my group didn’t know how to start up the project…two weeks into us working on it. She even had the privilege of having an outside mentor. Mentor didn’t know how to work the project either—but let’s be real, that’s not the mentor’s responsibility. She forgot she needed to run npm install. We were six months into this bootcamp and she forgot one of the simplest commands.

Another person was just a follower and couldn’t think for himself. He was so faithful to another teammate’s choices and direction that I wondered if they were screwing each other. Other teammate could be absolutely (and destructively) wrong and he would defend her as “well she’s taking initiative and showing leadership.” It wasn’t leadership, it was bullying. They weren’t dating/screwing, but I did suspect he liked to be controlled/dominated by “strong”women.

The “strong” woman teammate is someone I suspect of being the spawn of Satan. You were only useful to her if you agreed with her or could help her. If you gave her any sort of pushback, she’d turn on you. I think she wanted me to be both her parent and her scapegoat for the sketchy things she wanted to do. She pulled a lot of bullshit and tried to blame everything on me. Seriously, she would invest a lot of time in stupid things like getting me to agree to use bitmoji for team pics; I just wanted to check with the bootcamp first because they might have an unwritten rule about using your real face for presentations so guests know who you are. I had to get the bootcamp staff to support me because she was out of control. She tried to say that I was sabotaging the group from day one. The staff explained to her how her story of me “sabotaging” the group doesn’t add up. She backed down a little but she’d still try to screw me over through the remainder of the project.

There was one dude who was alright. He was the keep your head down type. Spawn of Satan would be on his ass about being late to class and he’d just stare at her stoically. He was a husband and a dad so he was choosing how to expend his energy. I don’t like people being late either, but show some compassion and don’t snap at people.

If I saw these people again, I would not even pretend to be friends with most of them. Spawn of Satan especially: I’d take out my crucifix and send her back to hell.

My coworker, whom I attempt to mentor when I am not frustrated and impatient, is refactoring one of our smaller programs. It uses modern MVVM practices, unlike the dilapidated crap we inherited from my predecessor and the lazy asshole that was me 3 years ago. I am excited to see what he learns and what he can teach me, maybe he will finally understand my shortcomings as a mentor.

I can't recall one single person I can call a mentor, however...

When I first started as a developer I had a senior to work with... I knew close to anything but I was always good at research and learning on my own... But we used an asp.net framework, it was new and there was little to no useful information, only basics... When I asked the senior (let's call him Joe) for help he gave me a quick answer:
Joe: Go to file xx, there's an example of what you need there...
Me: Well, been there and that's great but it doesn't help...
Everytime I was stucked during my first week it was always some sort of the same, so I insisted this time...
Me: so, Joe... I'm really stuck on this one, can you give it a look?
Joe: I know, I've been researching a way to do it for an hour now and can't get it either...
Me: wow! Thanks... But I thought you were an expert on this...
Joe: not really, never used it before. It's as new to me as it is to you! :)

So, that switched me from "this fucking weasel won't help me for shit" to "well, let's help each other"

We became good friends, always challenging each other and from that day on I stopped asking for help, and asking where can I help others...

I had great and greatly bad colleague and seniors. Each one thought me something either what to do or what not to do, how to act or not, how to tackle problems, how to teach...

Everyone I have worked with, worked for or trained is a mentor of mine. Even those I feel like I failed training thought me how to do better next time...

Thank you guys for being grate... Thank you assholes for teaching me how to send a guy go fuck himself! Good luck for those who get stucked with me

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

My best mentor was at my first job at IBM. The senior dev took 2 weeks to pair program with me and get me up to speed on all the applications, tips and tricks, and the different legacy codebases. I learned more in those 2 weeks than my entire 4 years at college lol.

So... I decided to refactor some of my old code that I wrote exactly 11 months ago, which was one month after starting work..

My first reaction was: "Was I so stupid?"

Second reaction: "why the fuck my supposed 'mentor' allowed me to write this bullshit?"

I've had a mentor who talked less and taught more. Before becoming a front end developer, I was doing flash. So, when I started front end, I didn't have any idea even about the basic stuff.
But, whenever I get stuck he will give a keyword for me to search. So, I learned how to survive in New areas & technologies - By googling.

My dad, the man who taught me cutting corners is less possible in the IT field than any other field and that you have to do it CORRECTLY unless you're deliberately asking for problems, is using the OEM recovery utility to reinstall the OEM copy of Win7 Starter onto a shitbook destined to be a diagnostics machine for smart cars *because he doesn't wanna go driver hunting.*

They're all literally right fucking here. On this one page.

My mentor has become the bad example he once steered me away from becoming.

My current mentor - the lead dev at my company who's been around forever. He's patient and willing to explain anything once, and peppers every conversation with best practice. He's also been happy to learn from me on the rare occasion when I know something he doesn't. And to boot, he's working in a second (or possibly more) language

Need opinions on testing as a career:
- is it good?
- Do you find your work interesting?
- Is it rewarding(in terms of salary/timings/other stuff)?
- Does it has a good career growth?
- How hard is the work for a fresher in this?
- How much mentor support does a fresher gets in this?
- How much salaries are there in this?
- how true do you find the believe that software testing will get automated and jobs in this area will get reduced in future?
(Better if you can give a comparison in your answers, with developer profile) how tru

I am a dev and am thinking of getting into this

TL;DR Shit programer trying pass off stealing code as "Recycling"

Backstory:
Client hires senior dev. He lied and knows nothing. Has been causing havoc in production since day 1. My crusades to defend production have been without much success.

Since he wants to LITERALLY put his name on every big project, he finds any reason to make a new version of it (or make a slight astetic modification) to say he did something.

The client doesn't know or care about the programming side of things. Which means it is incredibly difficult to get him to understand the issues this brings. Not to mention that the "senior dev" is acting as a consultant to the client, altering the facts.

Story:
The piece of shit, is trying to make a new version of a big project. It was originally made by my mentor. Again, if you are using someone else's work to complete your own, I don't care. But if you take 99% of another person's work and then say...

"I took and existing project, which was similar to what I'm trying to make. Then I modified it to fit our needs."

Fuck you man!

You took someone else's work. Now you're trying to present it as your own. No references to our team. Again, there is literally nothing new about this project. It's exactly like the original. The client didn't even ask for this.

Today, I was sad because of a problem that I could not fix for the past month. I was so desperate and disappointed that I seriously considered switching career. Then mentor helped me fixed it. To say that I went ballistic is an understatement, I went intercontinentally ballistic.

How is everyone's day going?

FML having to take on and support a python test framework that looks like it was written by a junior C embedded dev without a mentor.

- Imports everywhere in the code
- No abstraction or OOP
- sys.path.append fest (broken imports of course)
- Global variables fest
- No docstrings
- No readme
- Somehow mixed with a jUnit test framework as well
- Uses Windows environment variables profusely
- Pycharm has a stroke when I open files from this project

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

After years of working at a place where you are as good it gets in terms of domain knowledge, it can be refreshing to work with someone who has way more experience than you.

The previous company I was with wanted to have me as one of their primary engineers, and everyone else who came in would have to learn from me (most of them were low-skilled contractors). This should have been great in theory, but it was actually quite frustrating since I did not relish being the mentor figure while just being two years into my career. Despite it getting to my head at times, I was aware that I still lack a lot of skills, but with no one to teach me, I hardly progressed in terms of growth, even though the leadership treated me well and listened to me.

Took a leap of faith and quit, to join a start-up where I would be the most inexperienced (and the youngest) person. Has been a few months, and I have stumbled and goofed up more times than I like to admit, but taken with the right mindset, it is nice to see how a team of professionals goes about it. It is a learning curve to get back into the mindset of the novice (after more than a year of being the undisputed "go-to" person), and to make effort knowing that you'll fall short in multiple places by the standards here, but at the same time, it's nowhere like the frustration I felt previously when my head was pushing against the shallow ceiling.

Fun part is, the learning is almost not at all about the code, but about how to be a proactive team member and all the things to think through and finalize BEFORE getting down to code. Some of it is bureaucracy, yes, but given the chaotic place I come from, I don't really mind it as long as it only goes as far as what is required.

The most amusing part of it all to me is how I try to be humble and listen to people (everyone's got a lot more experience than me), but I'm often asked to be critical of what others say and poke holes instead of just taking what they say at face value, which has been one of the most challenging things to adapt to for me (for similar organisation cultural reasons mentioned previously)/

Not specifially one but a couple of minor mentoring moments.

I started out at a rather small company (<10 people) with a completely new language to me (Perl).
I had some trouble following along some tasks since I wasn't familiar with Perl or generally backend stuffs at all.
So the person that was supposed to "mentor" me was just giving me tasks without any hints of how to do things, this is where my "true" mentor came in to play.
I asked him a couple of things after a few unsuccesful searches on the internet and he always seemed to have the answer to it right away! It seemed like he knew everything and I really appreciated his patience and help. He did point me in the right directions when I needed it.

He left the company about 3 months ago and I still somewhat miss his mentoring existance, as he wasn't only a code but also a life mentor.

I really hope that one day I can be just like that guy, helpful, patient and be a mentor for someone else. :)

So in grade 11 (2 years ago),i had to do something called "job shadowing".basically you choose a profession and you go to a workplace. My cousin (who's in the same SAP industry)got me into this SAP development place.there were like quite a few "developers" but mostly business analysts.they made me learn this (in my oppinion) absolute shit language called ABAP which I found to be mostly glorified SQL . First I had to just create a small program which I did in like a few minutes after my mentor taught me the basic commands but you have to learn alot of module numbers and other shit.and guess what ,I remember I had to end one liners with a damn full stop,seriously fucking irritating.
So,worst dev technology I've worked with ever is SAP.Bad thing is my cousin and my uncle are really trying to take me into that bullshit SAP shit of theirs but I always refuse.will never step my foot into a SAP development job ever.

As part of my engineering apprenticeship, I was sent to work on a train depot. One day, a mentor of mine called me over and said "Kid - can you go and see Mr so & so and ask him for a long weight?"

I, without thinking about it - went all the way across the depot found the gent and asked him for a long weight. He looked at me, a little bemused - and asked me if I knew what the weight looked like. I said no. He continued to inquire about this weight - it went on for a few minutes until I realised my stupidity. There is no such thing as a long weight - only a long wait.

Needless to say my mentor had a huge laugh together with his mates at my foolishness.

Sometimes things really are quite simple.

Hello, folks, I'm starting to learn Android Studio and for the same, I've attended this workshop held at University which was not very helpful in certain aspects. The guy/mentor assumed that we all knew what is Firebase and started dropping knowledge bombs about firebase and integration with Android Studio(Apps).

So, coming to the fundamental question i.e. I'm reading SO 'Documentation' which is still in beta, I find it useful, as it is scratching the basic surface. What are other sources to learn about Android, of course, sources which are not deprecated?

Got my first dev job last November and I've been working as a contractor for the government. Supposed to be on a 4 year contract job, just found out that out project is being pulled in September. Is this common for federal contract work? My Human Resources team haven't been very helpful in explaining the process to me. Is private sector development any less volatile? I don't have a mentor or anybody I can bounce questions off so sorry if this is more or less common knowledge :/

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

My Mentor during the 1st year of my College

Set High Expectations and very frequently used to throw insults and shame me as if I knew nothing. And he was not wrong. I sucked so bad. Did learn some basics and promoted me one level from the "total newbie" state

But my best Mentor would have to be my PCs, Compilers, Debuggers. Couldn't find a better one

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

I finished school 3 months ago, Ive had a traineeship for those three months. Now Im employed at that company and they want me to be the PO of a project already. Ive never been PO, any tips?

In this Project I will be both PO and mentor for interns and Im gonna have to write code for the project as well.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Dis dude @ODXT. First actual friend I made at the job. Magician that showed me the BS and Magic workarounds in report development using SAP. Also GM, Taco Accomplice, and Ramen connoisseur. Really happy to call him a friend, mentor, and partner in (food) crime

Hello other devRanters! I have a question for all of the lady developers out there. Guys chime in too if you feel like it.

My girlfriend is a practicing doctor - and she loves what she's doing. But the other day, she casually mentioned something that really surprised me. "I kind of wish I learned to write code".
I'm kind of a horrible mentor, and I tend to figure things out on my own after hours and hours of digging around / experimenting.

I guess my question is, how did you guys get started as dev's, and what language? Was it a curiosity thing? Did you have a mentor? Self taught? I don't want to start off somewhere that risks discouraging her from pursuing it.
I'd like to provide her somewhere to start, just to see if it peaks her interest.

Any thoughts would be appreciated :)

Well my greatest mentor has been bad experiences. Its always there, lurking in the corner to mentor me. And well i do take a lesson or two, now and then to keep me afloat.

As they say- what doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger.

Human mentors have been missing from my life. Superheroes don't exist :-/

My last week of 2017 sucks! The function that been assigned to me has been 7 months until i doing it without any priority tasks. The bad for this, is becoming worse for the clients and they really want it until the end of 2017, so happy new year motherfuckers.

Here's the story, the function i am doing requires a heavy calculations, and i am no brainer in math, though my logical skills, hopes me up to made it quickly as possible. However i am full of workloads/to-do for the past 3 months, that i am unable to comply my documents regarding my employment!!

Much worse for this is the coding guidelines. There no fucking guidelines at all, like do what i want just to make it work, but my team lead ironically speaking that never touch that because it's already working. Dude, the server response was the real issue there and i was supposed to handle that function because your fucking json was not formatted well! Shout out to git for giving me a saving grace not to fire me.

Lastly, the leader's attitude. You're so sarcastic as fuck! Of course i won't get mad at you on personal matters, i understand. But on work, the way you communicate was not like my any mentor/prof that i ever met!! I hate my fucking work. Hope my 2018 would do my best, AND I AM GONNA MAKE MY OWN GUIDELINES ACCORDING TO YOUR ASSES!! HAPPY NEW YEAR, GODDAMNIT!!

What keeps me from loosing my sanity every day? A mentor who taught me the value of "nuke and pave" automation. Just nuked the entire Azure resource group, including virtual networks, subnets, virtual machines, vpn connections, the whole nine yards. Redeploy takes about 5 minutes.

How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.

Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.

I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.

However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.

My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.

I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.