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Search - "2 stories"
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So, there's this big company in Poland with its name starting with C and having CEO famous for saying that every software developer can be replaced with a finite number of college students.
They recently lost a HUGE government contract and so stories of people working there came to light. My two personal favourites:
1. A tester who has been fired for finding too many bugs and mistakes in their product. He was also told that bugs are to be found by clients on production, not in-house.
2. A programmer who was yelled at by his team leader for "wasting time" on code reviews instead of typing the code. He was also told he hadn't been hired to criticise other people code.
God, I'm so grateful I don't work there.20 -
I have a couple of stories that I think are memorable from co-workers quitting in funny/interesting ways.
1. At one of the first companies I worked at, they gathered everyone to make an announcement that began with, “this is just a reminder, any heavy objects/packages need to be removed through the freight elevators, and cannot be taken through the main lobby.” We’re all thinking OK... why are you telling us this. Next part of the announcement was, “so and so (co-worker) is no longer with the company.” Apparently, which we found out later, the guy either quit/and/or got fired and wheeled his desk chair out the front door through the lobby (keep in mind this is an office on one of the busiest avenues in Manhattan). The whole thing was crazy. That’s the last we ever heard about him.
2. This one was strange. A really quiet dev at one of my previous companies was clearly constantly bored at work (he barely had any responsibility and was pretty much ignored) but the job was pretty cushy. One day, he was out from work, and no one thought much of it. Then he was out another day, then another, and before we knew it, it was like a week. No one knew where he was. Eventually, he sent an email saying he got stuck out of he country or something and he wouldn’t be coming back. Ok... weird, but kind of made sense.
But, one of our ops guys was able to see the ip/location of where he logged on to send the email, and it was right from NYC! So pretty much this guy was just fed up, left one day (with no notice), and just never came back. And then lied that he was out of the country when trying to explain is hasty departure.11 -
🔥 🔥 Release day! 🔥 🔥
devRantron has reached v1.0.0 today! Here is what you can do with devRantron:
1. @mention someone when posting comments
2. Filters rants with keywords
3. Add emoji when posting rants and comments
4. Get notifications
5. Browse rants, collabs and stories
6. Browser user profiles
7. Post rants
8. Create custom columns of your own choice
Thank you so much to all the contributors, especially @Dacexi for designing the app and @sirwindfield for setting up our build infrastructure.
We plan to add more features in future. For example, searching rants, edit/delete rants or comments and most importantly, themes. Right now it has a dark theme by default.
Thank you to the users to opened issues on GitHub during development. Your feedback has helped a lot.
Whenever you find a bug or want a new feature, please open a new issue on GitHub and we will look into it.
Contributors are always welcome. I am still working on writing a article about the structure of the application, I will let you guys know when that is done. It will be easier for you to contribute when you have a bigger picture.
Relevant collab: https://devrant.io/collabs/420025/46 -
Mainly a story with some ranting sprinkled on top :)
My grandma used to refuse to turn her PC off because ONE SINGLE WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE like 2 years ago made it so that Windows would turn the PC on by itself, nevermind it was fixed in the next update, she would simply refuse to try to turn the PC off from that point on... I never looked at the uptime but the PC was sitting on a carpet and all the fans were struggling to keep spinning, so much dust! When I asked her why it's so dusty all around the PC (the table that the PC was under was covered in a really thick layer of dust) she replied that the chambermaid comes every Wednesday to clean up the whole flat so she has no idea. I set up a camera that was recording the whole room so I could see what was going on... sure enough the chambermaid avoided anything that looked like it could have some ICs in it with a distance of at least 2 meters... When I showed the video to my grandma she was like: Yes, she is scared of electronics...
Seriously fuck me... Allright, I cleaned the whole table, carpet and the inside of PC, everything ran so quietly that I wasn't sure if I plugged the fans in.
Anyway after this I had to record the PC one whole night so I could prove to my grandma that it would not turn on by itself and she can in fact turn it off.
Fuck me... what a bad week that was...
PS: Yes, my stories do not have a point :)5 -
Shouldn't be necessary if you just write understandable code xD..... Some people just write stories in between 2 lines of code....15
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I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"
Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.
I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.
With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.
I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.
In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.
I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.3 -
Less a rant, more just a sad story.
Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.
There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)
There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.
And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.
Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"
He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.
I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄
Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)
But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.
So.
That's absolutely amazing.8 -
follow on from my last rant.
I've finally gotten my new Jira project. Only thing I seem to have access to change is the Kanban board columns. Still has 50+ fields when creating a ticket etc.
Asked the support team handling the request if this was a mistake. He said no, i'll need to open another ticket to have those changes requested.
Opened and got a reply. Currently there are 2 versions of Jira running. They are working on consolidating them atm and won't help me right now until this is done. I've been asked to re-open my request after the consolidation is done in March 2019.
5 ... fucking ... months, so I can have a competent ticketing process.
He pointed me to a page explaining the move and listing all the changes taking place. Well lets look at the changes they are making that are so critical:
Change 14: Rename "More info" status to "Needs more info".
... Oh pardon me. I didn't realise such critical show stoppers were being addressed. Please do continue. Don't mind me, i'll just be over here taking 4 hours to create an Epic and 6 stories. As you were9 -
Infinite loop...
Got a story assigned with no requirements listed this sprint. Since I finished the rest already I was like, lets be pro-active and see what it's about during the stand-up.
Me: Hi, I only have story X remaining, what's it about, there are no requirements listed in Jira?
SM: Yeah person Y is going to reach out to you with the reqs.
Me: Ok, when is Y going to reach out?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, so why is the story included in this sprint then?
SM: Because they want X implemented this sprint.
(Me wondering if the Scrum Master is familiar with infinite loops, thinking let's try this out)
Me: Ok, if X should be completed, can Y reach out to me with the requirements?
SM: Y doesn't have time now, will probably be in 2 weeks.
Me: Ok, why is the story included in this sprint then?
Stand-up lasted a lil' longer today... Hope the SM got the message not to assign stories without reqs or clear communication anymore.5 -
Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.
1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.
Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.
2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.
I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?
3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.
Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.
4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER
Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.
5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.
Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.
6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.
I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.
7) CLICK BAIT.
Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine
Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists6 -
Background: I'm proficient at PowerShell, I was told that I got hired to my previous job (as DevOps engineer) mainly because of that skill.
Few months after I started I wrote a script to automate some processes. My boss saw the script and told me that it was too complicated, and that I should make it more simple.
Now I'm all into clean code, meaningful names, small functions.
So the code was readable and maintainable.
I asked him in what way is it complicated. He didn't know exactly. (Later I figured that he didn't know of some of the (built-in) cmdlets and functions I used.)
He raised his hand high and made a gesture and explained that I'm "that high (skill? enthusiasm?)", then lowered his hand to a lower position to mark the bottom line, then raised it up half way up and said that he wants me here - in the middle.
After that he added: "This is not Microsoft! and we don't own the 3 other buildings that can be seen from our office window" and pointed at the window.
I was surprised by his comment, I didn't know how to respond.
I've got more stories to share about that workplace.
I can't believe I stayed at that place for 1 year and 2 months.16 -
1. Decide to learn optimisation algorithms
2. Realise that you have forgotten calculus
3. Decide to learn from the beginning
4. Search for tutorials
5. Go through the introduction parts
6. You know that you can't complete
7. You watch other entertainment things on YouTube.
Stories of a lazy programmer...11 -
How to become a hacker😎
1.Go to the store get a black hoodie, wear it and go infront of the PC.
2.Turn on the PC with WINDOWS😂
3.Change cmd font colour to green.
4.Type the following code in cmd.
ping 192.168.1.1 -c 9999999
5.OK now do that in again and again in 2-3 terminals.Now your desktop is full with black and green😋.
5.Take some pics of it and upload stories😍.
6.OK now your a HACKER😎10 -
A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.
I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.1 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.
Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.
Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.
Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.
Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.
I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^5 -
I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.
Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.
However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.
The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.
I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.
Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.
What a fucking asshole.
So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.4 -
We have 2 layers of testing environments and production.
I tested the changes on the 1st layer, bud since it was 5min to lunch i did not test on 2nd layer which is connected to the production DB. I pushed to production and caused 5+ websites to go full retard and went to lunch.
Came back to 19emails and 3+ skype msgs about "why the fck would you do that..."
Estimated damages nearly 20k EUR and i lost some permissions for two weeks, but my great boss helped me out and cheered me up by telling stories how he took down multiple servers too
plot twist: im the team leader of our office now :)5 -
"Most unproductive meeting of career?"
2 stories
Story 1:
Company had 5k people working for it. We all had to attend a meeting about holding effective meetings.
Rule 1 was to have an agenda for all meetings and associated information so that people can come prepared.
In my 19 years at that company I and one other guy were the only people who followed that rule. Including the executives (never followed it).
People thanked me for doing it all the time... then they'd hold their own meetings and no agenda.
🤷🏻♂️
Story 2:
VP of our department would hold meetings and INSIST people ask questions / get upset if we didn't ask questions.
We were also told what we were NOT allowed to ask about.
At one point there were complaints that support was replacing too much hardware. So after lecturing everyone about replacing too much hardware ... nobody was allowed to even mention that the hardware was actually shit.... but we were supposed to ask questions.
Same VP would come back to us and moan about how he just couldn't get resources for our department... like bro that's your job don't whine at us about it, do the job...
Dude was just a weak man child.3 -
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
Oh gosh.. i can finally understand the CV and application nightmare stories... We're getting new people in, and there are quite a few interesting ones.
0) pages of randomly placed info. PAGES. I'm lost in there!!
1) no basic info whatsoever. Like, no nationality(we're recruiting internationally), no birthdate, barely his name and email. I know that the first ones are not really needed for the job, but they're still customary.
2) entry level back and/or frontend job. This guy's a phd graduate, working research with big data in a bio-something department. We're a web startup.
3) there are some listing so much unrelevant stuff, I'm not even sure if they meant to apply to us.
4) (my favourite) email subject: application, email body: empty, attached: short_application.doc ("hi, this is an application to the posted job. Best regards, Name") WAIT WHAT?6 -
Ok fellow ranters. I've scoured the internet for hilarious and enraging stories of programmers being asked to either work for free, or for stock options, or to hack (crack) stuff, etc.
Here's my latest one. A friend who's obsessed with crypto came up with a "great" idea which was for me (of course) to build a landing page for a fake company to trick people into submitting their crypto wallet keys and all that. What started as a joke quickly turned into my friend getting mad at me for not wanting to actually make it lol. Like seriously wtf is with people. All the reasons not to do that scheme are plainly obvious!
Next. Some person who worked for a company I consult with pulled the generic. "I have this great app idea" line & proceeded to of course ask me to "not steal it" lol. It was just an app that would list gluten free restaurants... That's hardly even an idea!!
But what's fucked up about all this is my friend from the first story is so obsessed with becoming a "crypto millionaire" he actually resents me now for not
1. being obsessed with crypto
2. not committing cybercrime on his behalf
Anybody else have enraging stories about stuff people have asked you to do?3 -
Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.1 -
Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.
Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...
Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!
How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.
Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.
You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.7 -
If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.
Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it. -
I have a friend that every 2 days posts stories of her being in a club or something similar, dressed up and make up everywhere, with lots of drinks and shit like that. Girl has 0 skills and is living on the money that her dead parent left her. Honestly, shit looks fucking exhausting.
I hate clubs and being out with people. I do love drinking and having a good time... but every 2 days for it to be something? man I already feel tired and it ain't even my life.20 -
Despite some of the few bat crazy events that occur, I've got a fairly sweet dev job.
1. I only have a 25 minute drive to work. All interstate, I live close to the highway, and the business is right off the exit.
2. My current position, I have a lot of autonomy. My projects don't have deadlines and help other teams with their projects (system design, testing, etc)
3. I work with several military veterans. I think I could listen to their crazy stories all day (being a dev isn't so bad).
4. Department manager just quit. Probably going to have less and less things to rant about. Along with #2, I plan on having a lot more time for side-projects (stuff *I* want to learn about).3 -
The first two stories on slashdot's homepage are:
1. Google releases Angular 2, breaks backwards compatibility
2. Apple releases Swift 3, breaks backwards compatibility
If you use either of those tools, why do you put up with this? When did software engineering stop being about building useful or enjoyable things for our customers, and start being about doing thankless make-work for Silicon Valley billionaire companies? Is this the legacy we want to leave to the world?4 -
Each sprint lasts for 2 weeks. But I get the basic info to start working on my stories only when 3/4th of the sprint is completed....
So yeah....no one gives shit about estimation at least in my case.6 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
What would you think about sharing something cool (preferably tech related), or weird, or f-ed up about the country or the city you live in?
I'll go first, here in Cluj-Napoca, Romania the internet really fast and dirt cheap like 1gbps fiber for 15€/month.
2. The government paid like millions of € to add ticket vending machines for public transportation and they mostly don't work, I managed to crash one while buying a ticket. Card payment is not functional on like half of them. Also they run Windows......... What a joke...
Looking forward to hear your stories on this topic!4 -
So my girlfriend just flipped out and sad that her whole Dropbox was totally empty. All of her files studies, her jobs and even her poems and short stories were gone...
Turned out she has 2 accounts.
One for...@gmail and one for...@googlemail
this is actually not my first instance where someone asked me for help regarding an important account where they just didn't check if maybe they used one instead of the other.
I know it's good that they changed it and kept both addresses but some people just get confused by it6 -
A guy who had the same nationality as the enterprise we were working for was promoted from JUNIOR js developer to UX/UI coordinator for the entire department just because he was 2 year older than me (26 vs 28). Literally he was a junior dev and went to that.
One day he was accusing me of writing a piece of code which led prod to downtime. I was in the office, he was in another country with our manager and technical director next to him and we were talking over internal conference system. I shown git history + his name + his code and he was saying ‘that’s not true!!!’.
I couldn’t resist and I began to yell something like ‘You fucking fuck piece of shit cocksucker...’ for 5 minutes. Since that day i was the god on my project for UI/UX side.
Even now he is in the same place on the same position...
PS: more stories to come with this guy6 -
!dev
Again, someone I know got married after having a relationship for 2 3 years.
I am 26, soon to be 27. I never ever had a good relationship. All I have his crap and crap stories. In my country girls get married around 28 maximum.
Arrange marriages are way to go here. But do not want to have that fuss. In lockdown no chance of meeting someone.
Not achieving anything in my job, no realistic progres in my personal life. I think I am heading towards a big mess.65 -
Around 2 years ago, I had first discovered DevRant.
I was an intern in a startup then, and I was working on ElasticSearch. I remember making rants about it. The internship ended. So did my relationship with ElasticSearch.
This week, a new intern joined our organisation (a different organisation). He was assigned the task of deploying ElasticSearch, with me as his mentor. All was going good, we migrated data from MongoDB to ElasticSearch and all.
Back then, I used to curse the team lead (leading a team of interns mostly), for not helping me properly...
I wanted a publicly accessible dashboard, since we can't really see the Kibana dashboard with SSH :P... So, we implemented user authentication using X-Pack security. And here we are, stuck... Again... I'm unable to help the intern. The World has come to a full circle.
PS: I have to just guide him while doing my own User Stories.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions... -
While I was working on a university project with my team, a teammate asked me why the window of the program in my screen was bigger than in his. I simply answered him that his screen was a FullHD one that had a 1920x1080 resolution, while mine had a lower resolution, and he was like "Noo! This isn't a fullhd screen, it's not so sharp".
So I showed him the "1920x1080" sticker right below his screen, and him again "Yeah, it could have this resolution but definitely it's not a FullHD screen".
- Ok, as you say...
The same guy two days ago was talking about creating a GUI in C.
I told him that C was the wrong language to build programs with a GUI, although there's some very old libs that allow you to do that in 16bit.
And him again: "Ok but Linux (distros) do that and the UIs are great!"
- Do you think that all the fucking Ubuntu/Mint/any distro code is written in C??
The funny thing is the arrogance with which he says all these bullshits.
P. S. We are attending the 3rd year of Computer Engineering.6 -
TL;DR The prodigal son returns.
A long time ago my partner in crime left the company. So I was a "one man army", until management gave me 2 newbies to train. We'll call them X and Y.
X was new to the company, while Y was moved from a different area. During the time I was training them I realized which of the two had potential, or at least was paying attention.
Some more time passed and X was showing signs of being a good candidate to join the team. Y, on the other hand, well there were stories from his previous team. Not good.
Guess who was added to my team. It wouldn't be a rant if it was the capable one. Y was added to my team, while X was sent to a completely different area.
Time passed and I suffered many misfortunes. But this week, I saw him sitting next to my desk, X is back. I'll probably have to get him up to speed, but my little prodigy is back! -
A few years ago my boss held a brainstorming meeting to go over features for an internal reporting app. I brought up we should have related business news stories scroll on the page header like Fox business or something. He laughed and said sure. Two things happened after that.
1. Found out the marquee tag still works in chrome.
2. Yeah you bet I put that shit in there.
Anyways a meeting was held a few days after where my boss chewed me out for actually doing it. He showed the app to his boss and got laughed at by his leadership team when they saw news headlines scroll over analytics graphs.
After writing this I realize this is more his embarrassment than mine. Have a great Tuesday fam.7 -
A guy came from another city, just to teach a little bit on how to improve productivity, and after almost 2 hours of him telling stories about his life and career, in five minutes he told us to delete games and facebook from our cellphones, and only focus on learning and work related apps... And He tried to sell us the complete series of books and videos with the full content on productivity in the end...4
-
We have the funniest and weirdest conversations during lunch, most of them not dev related. Have been thinking about ranting them for a while now because they are just good fun.
The following one brought a bit of a discussion so It convinced me to post it because i would like to hear all of your opinions about this one:
Imagine that one day you come home and there is a (deep) clone of yourself having sex with your wife, what would you do?
We got divided into 3 groups mostly.
Group one would send him away and let him life his own life.
Group two would make use of the fact that there are 2 of them.
Group three would murder him, the explanation Why Was quite interesting, because it was the first instinct of them, it would also have been from the clone, that's why that had to.
Again I would like to hear what you all would do :)
Maybe if this one does okay I will post more stories11 -
TL;DR: I don't like working with 'most' Indian people. And some stories supporting that written below:
=====================================
A client calls me directly to get features/fixes done on their site. No middle management shit at the company I was working at, at the time.
So I quit the company, but the client has my phone number. So he starts texting me to get more work done. I tell him "I work for money, if you can pay me that, I'll do all the work you ask of me".
They praise my blunt-ness and say they will discuss it. And I never heard from them ever again!
=====================================
Client reaches out to me and gets me to work for them for 2 hours/day and pays me INR 8,000 (about 95 USD) a month. I say fine, I'll do the work.
I do the tasks as they say for 3 months then I ask for a raise to INR 10,000.
They start pointing out mistakes in my work, and they say they're not seeing the "dedication" in me. Only when I asked for the raise. Not before that, mind you.
=====================================
Vice President of the company tells me that he saw me in his dream the night before.
I've told this one before so I just threw that in.
=====================================
At the end, I do like some Indians that I work with. It's just that most of them try to massively underpay you, or want to get the most work out of you as fast as possible and sometimes both.7 -
I've come back to devRant after, don't know, 2 years, and I get the feeling that this place is much more... hostile than I remembered.
I understand that this is a place to let out frustrations and vent a bit, or post stories and stuff, but I browsed the comments of a few rants, and I'm surprised at how many times I see friction between users, and insults thrown around.
Maybe I shouldn't have come back here8 -
This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!
So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.
I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.
I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!
IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!
In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.
I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!
When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.
In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL
In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!
IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.
Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.
I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.
Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.
If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.
Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.
For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!
Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!5 -
I've been reading devRant at work for the past 6 months and it kept me sane through a few moments. Thanks. :)
And now I finally started to feel that maybe even I could have some horror stories to share. (I've been in the company for more than 4 years)
(Sorry for long post.
TL;DR: break time laws suck in my country.)
One example would probably be how our company decided to cut 5 minutes from our lunch time (down to 25 minutes) and add 3 minutes to our 5 minute coffee break(*"gifted" by our CEO) in the afternoon.
You're probably asking yourself, "What happened to the remaining 2 minutes?".
*Well, it's simple. In my country it's somehow still legal to have only 30 minutes of break time for the whole day if working hours don't exceed 10 hours. It's actually written in the law that you CAN divide that lunch break time to be placed at different times. To me that sound like fucking nuts...
Thankfully nobody's taking that time change quite literally and most people still use the full 30 minutes. But some people here have been fired for much less, so I don't play around. I just pretend to work while reading devRant. 😎3 -
- have a look at the project
- brake it down into smaller stories
- estimate the time
- multipy it with 1.5
- add 1-3 days of testing
- add 15% project management
- add a 2 days buffer
= be happy with being done in 2 weeks, present it in 4 -
Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :
1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .
2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.
3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)
4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"
( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )
5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)
And there were many other short stories like that.
Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)
But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.
Bloody Office politics :| -
So today I spent most of the day "gaming", basically trying seeing what my PC could handle. It was very disappointing and realized I wasted a while day.
1.Somehow the graphics settings even set to Ultra didn't feel realistic.
2. The games take a long time to download even with Steam... 50-60GB... WTF....
The largest game I ever played on PC before was maybe 4-8GB... (DVDs)
And yes I installed Steam and bought a game (Project Cars 2). The videos looked pretty nice I'm videos but not so in game... (Waiting for refund now)
3. I downloaded some other demos but the setup time and cutscenes took too much time
4. Controls for some games seen to have been ported from console (they were mapped to XBOX buttons?).
I should've stuck to my original plan... Programming, no games
But I think one thing if certain... I will never understand console games (the ones with stories/plots). I'm sticking with arcade or the ones I can cheat thru at most.7 -
I am here on devRant now for a while. Althought, reading amy of your stories and taking care of websites is not what I usualy tend to do, I started doing it as a favour for a friend of a friend.
Baaad bad decission :-(
"pls, dis is urgnt! uplood dis pics asap on page"
*mail notification*
*face palm 1* because who sends pictures by mail these days ... I like my 50MiB Inbox, dont spam it with garbage!
*opening mail - lists attachments: 1 file, ~900KiB* ok whats happening now?
*facepalm 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9* (10 if there still would be a face to palm on)
the person seriously send me the pictures in an attachment, within a pdf document that was created with MS Word.
No - Just NO!
I should have known better ... sooo much better :(6 -
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 😂 -
It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.
Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.4 -
Fuck me I'm pissed. This sprint, my tech lead has been away and a senior dev has been covering for him. We plan a load of work and distribute stories and we churn threw it quite well. However, my senior dev says let's not deploy until all the works done. I was like, how is it going to be tested? He was like well it will be fine because it's all one test. Bs. We now have 2 days left, tester is getting stressed because they don't know what to test or what's been finished. Scrum master is asking why all of it should be tested at the same time and I'm here like this is fucking dumb. Also the tester decided to start testing with the most complex piece of work, rather than prioritising.
Starting to wonder if I'm just the outsider or whether no one understands that granularity is better.2 -
Stories from a Startup #2
One day our CEO stormed through the office, going door-to-door holding a cease-and-desist notice he got from our ISP because someone decided to pirate "Chappie" at work.
Definitely wasn't me. 👀 Don't know if he found out who did it, though... but we all certainly knew.5 -
I don’t recall why but a project was in need of an all-nighter and I was the only programmer available to do it. I even brought a sleeping bag and, about 2 hours before people started arriving for work the next morning, I slept in a gap between my cubicle and a wall. I brought a shaving kit and everything. For some reason I didn’t want people to know I had pulled the all-nighter so I had to make sure to get up and look presentable before the first person got there.
When my kids get the mistaken notion that they’ll be able to be like me right out of school and be able to make the money I make and have the flexible schedule I have and work from home and choose projects I like, I tell them my war stories about how I had to work 23 years of some hellish stuff to gain that privilege. -
I am in an apprenticeship as a software developer so you might think I would have lots of stories to tell in wk73 but you could not be more wrong! Our school teachers don't care about us or the thing they teach!
BUT in the first year, our company payed to send all of their IT trainees to a special training facility and the coaches there where amazing!!!👍🏼
For every IT related subject there was a coach! And they were fucking experts!
Let me tell you how this "training" worked:
1. Basic introduction to a certain subject
2. Some basic tasks
2.1 Extended tasks for those who want to dig into it
3. Search some other students to team up
4. Define project
5. Discuss the project plan with a coach.
6. Realize project
6.1 - Question rises -
6.2 Discuss question with coach
6.3 Coach prepares prepares presentation on the questions subject
6.4 Coach sends out invitation to everyone
6.5 LEARN AND PROFIT
7. Awesome product is finished
8. Present project to other students
The awesome part about this is that the coaches pushed us to our limits (so we would keep improving) but they would assist with every problem you faced.
They where relatively young and the spirit within the teams were amazing!
Because not all IT trainees have this kind of training the professional school is pretty boring ever since...
But I silently thank them for that training after every exam at school. -
Took a task with 3 story points ( mappable to ~2-3days) and wondered why it was so much more than the estimation. I expected to finish in 2 to 2 1/2 days but needed 4. Afterwards I just realized that I accidentally did more then needed and finished two upcoming stories as well, each 2 SP so 7SP for everything.
Feeling jumped from "man I could be faster" to "man that was really fast".
It feels like a fuck up, however, it is victory1 -
Shady business practices. You see a lot of stories of people getting fucked over on here. Companies giving applicants a "coding test" to get work done for free, or guys promising to pay when the work is done(and then bailing), deserve to be thrown screaming from helicopters.
Some quick advice for people starting out:
1. If it's important, get it in writing. Promises are worth precisely dick, unless it's legally binding.
2. Exercise caution in interviews. The shadier companies know a lot of applicants are desperate, and they take advantage of that fact if they're allowed to.
Not sure if I'm rambling at this point, but fuck it. 🤣 -
It's been a little bit over two weeks since I quit my first job, thought I would share some stories 😁
I started my very first job in the middle of August (last year) and my duties were to fix some issues on front-end files. You can see my previous rants to see how long were these files 😐
So after 2/3 months I managed to get my shit done, started learning Vue on my own to implement it to new projects (and done it successfully) and learn something about shitty clients who don't know how to live and don't know what do they want.
When I quit the job on the last day of April, I was so happy to end it mostly due to this one specific client who were able to turn happy innocent coding of a great project into hellish shit. Plus there were some issues I noticed with some people I worked with (like they were sending these sexist memes which weren't funny at all 🙄)
TL;DR if you feel that your job post is not for you or that is doesn't make you feel happy or comfortable, don't be afraid to walk away. I did and I don't regret it 😉 -
I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)
(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗
First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂
Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.
I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.1 -
"Tips" are fucking stupid. Any waiter or anyone who expects me to "tip" them is a fucking clown hobo. Full disrespect
You're telling me i should pay you extra money or else you're not gonna do YOUR job right? A job where you already receive stable monthly salary?
Whoever standardized "tipping" is a fucking CLOWN. Must have been a restaurant business paying billions for this marketing scam to normalize as if tipping 2$ is normal
Who the fuck are you? Are you my fucking friend? A relative? A family member? Why the fuck should i pay you extra money just because you want some extra money?
Guess what fucktard. I want some extra money too. Has anyone ever tipped me in my job? No. Has a client or will a client who paid for a software i develop ever tell me "hey youve done such a great job heres some extra $$$"? No. Will a client ever tell me "hey your software earned me 100k$ heres a $100 tip or a $1000 tip"? NO
If i dont get tips Fuck you. Rough world and live with it.
Anyone who wants or expects tips I immediately view him as:
- beggar
- gypsy
- homeless
What the fuck are you gonna do with 2$ 5$ 10$ tip bro? You're broke and your job sucks go and learn some skill and you might earn more if you're so stubborn about a tip
Today i paid for coffee $7 but the price was 6.25$. Expecting a change, the waiter just went off. I told him give me my fucking 0.75$ back you fuck. And so he did. But he gave me back 0.7$. Where the fuck is my 0.05$????? Fucking retard. You want to take extra money from me just for a COFFEE. YOURE HOMELESS BRO TF U GONNA DO WITH 5 CENTs???
Also the reason why i get so pissed off about this is
1) The other day i was at some other coffee shop also paying for coffee. Dont remember the price but i paid. However i miscalculated. I paid 0.10$ less than i was supposed to. She was standing there and telling me I'm missing 10 Fucking cents. Confused, i calculated again and realized i made a mistake. So i round it up to 1$ instead of 0.10$ and she kept everything instead of giving me the change of 0.90$. So its NOT ok that you're a gypsy for not accepting the payment because its missing 10 cents, but its TOTALLY fine that you take 0.90$ extra money just because you want to. GET FUCKED
2) The other day i was in a store buying food. At the cashier i paid $27. However i was missing 0.02$. The cashier told me do you have 0.05$ to coverup the missing funds. In disbelief, i was looking at her could not believe my fucking eyes what she asked. How fucking POOR can you get. I gave her more than 2 fucking cents and proceeded with my shit
Very valuable shit i learned from these stories: NO ONE will give a shit to accept a payment even if its missing 1 FUCKING CENT. But its totally fine that they dont return me however much they dont want to.
How about you sometimes fucking say "hey i know you you come to this store very often heres a discount"???
Or "its fine that you dont have 0.01 fucking dollars, you can take your food"???
Or "hey i seen you buy here often heres a fucking discount just for you today"????
Because of that i have decided to take ALL of my fucking hard earned money and ask for the exact change. I dont give a FUCK just as much as THEY dont give a FUCK.
For reference:
0.01$ = 1 in my currency
0.90$ = 90 in my currency
27$ = 2900 (4 figures) in my currency
My currency is shit. My country is shit. People in my city are shit. The whole vibe here is shit. And perhaps that is why i shit so much because i get stuffed with too much daily BULLSHIT12 -
I feel a bit like shit.
I started a new job about 2 months ago. Company is great, culture is amazing,project is interesting, processes are what i always dreamed.
This is after having learned the job from scratch at a startup that was all you can imagine. Tedious,hoping to be something that was not yet and so on....
So we are coming at the last week of a sprint. Its Tuesday and most stories are competed. We dont have a culture of jumping on others PR, its kind of like this is my PR kind of mentality. This is not established its more like an untold rule. But coming to the end i figured, especially if i knew exactly how to fix the PR that o should jump in a make it happen.
Person who owns those prs unassigned themselves from those and added me instead kind of like: “well take it if you want it....”
What are your rules regarding others prs and sprints?4 -
When you start a new job and you inherit a steaming pile of shit that NEEDS to integrate with a completely separate application but after repeatedly telling your manager his requests aren’t possible, he denies it and says it is possible.
Some context. They have an old application written in MVC. They want a new application written in react. They want all the old functionality to integrate with the new functionality. I don’t just mean render different views based on the route, I mean they want both applications to integrate seamlessly to create a new application. Not to mention this new application is completely different to the old one and has requirements that aren’t even compatible with the old application.
Also. I got into trouble today for completing the sprint in 2 days and starting on user stories (that were in the sprint, not the backlog). Apparently we’re not allowed to showcase the product until the sprint ends and we go through our retrospective/demo. LMAOOOO -
I gave a very small overview of the flutter sdk a whiiiile ago and I have been thinking about going back to it. Currently considering between 2 courses on udemy that are at a discount price. I love the idea of dart as a language and prefer declarative ui building over xml shittyness. I was an Android/ios development for 2 years and hated every minute of it, but really love the idea of building mobile apps.
What are your thoughts and considerations on this? Should I jump right in or just leave it asside? What are your success stories with flutter and what did you use to learn the framework besides the docs? How easy are things like state management and persistent storage with flutter compared to android and ios?
I will eventually make my own decission by building sample projects, but hearing from the community would be great.5 -
I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.
I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).
I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.
As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.
These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.1 -
Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.
Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.
Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.
Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.
Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.
Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.
Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.
Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.
I think it's time to say goodbye 😔4 -
This story happened to everyone, and i am sure that if i search, i will find dozens of similar stories, but the different here is, i tried, i really tried, in a hundred different ways to achieve my goal !
When you are stuck on a problem, let's say, that you have a program, project, website ... and need to achieve something technically weird (or hard) and need some help to save you time on experimentations. The first thing a lot of people do is : Google.com && put search dorks.
But, at a moment, google gets "dirty", you use it so often that he always think to know better then you what you are looking for.
It reminds of "Ted", the movie (for thows who know it) where they asked : "Hey ! Why does google always suggest us to look for black dicks ??"
It is exactly what happened to me, i got results who doesn't have anything to do with what i was looking for !
You can give it a try now : type "semantic web RDF to RDB"
You won't find anything, except results related to : NOSQL DBs, which is totally annoying.
Something else, i once google swift to get some updates, what results did i got ? Taylor Swift ... (musician)
I often get 2 or 3 results from google, which made me thinking that i somewhat reached the end of internet, or that people are so dumb that i will have spend hours trying to figure my solutions, but, before doing that, other solutions had to be tested.
1- TOR : Google tracks his users and uses its algos and bullshits to return results as close as possible to the user's demand (big fail ...) so how about moving to a different country ? DL TOR browser, open, setup, go to US, open google (got us version YAY !) enter my keywords, and, nothing, still nothing, more results for sure, but nothing related to what i was looking for.
2- VM
Pop a VM, launch TOR, use Hidden mode, delet all cookies and stuff (it is a new VM but who knows).
Use keywords (now in UK). Here they are !! my results !!! i finally found some decent results about my keywords !
But, i have the required knowledge to do this kind of stuff, but how about people who rely heavily on google ? they can't change country, clear everything, trick google to think you are a new user, they have almost biased and flawed results. I tried duckduckgo (i love them) but they are not that efficient.
Google says not to anything evil, but they ARE EVIL, miss guiding people, suggesting corrections who have nothing to do with the keywords, or results totally unrelated in any way to the keywords while results exist in other countries ???
Ever since, i don't pay attention to google at all, and started thinking that google's algos are manipulating people, i don't know if it is done on purpose or not, but the result is the same, people have biased results based on their country, on their tag, on their ID, and the recent keywords.
During that period i was cursing google every funcking day, and i am still doing it, too much trackers, too much manipulation, i will end-up enclosing myself in darknet.4 -
is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?
i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :
1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.
2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.
3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .
4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too
compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)
2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.
3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.
4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.
as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.
this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.
this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?
in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?
Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/
mann i want some people skills like these guys10 -
New office stories during the emotional turmoil...
Story 1: The creepy fuck
So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.
Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.
I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.
The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!
👀
Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.
Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.
Fuck this guy.
Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect
So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.
The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.
But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.
Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..
To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.
He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.
That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.
I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.
I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.
The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol
Never again he'll school anyone.
I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.
Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.5 -
- the 2 hr meeting called for every day of a week, to prepare for a PPT which is to be presented to a higher up exec within 5 mins.
- the sprint planning meeting, where all the stories of that sprint are already weighted and assigned to the devs, but it still goes for 2 hrs
- the backlog grooming meeting, where instead of looking at the sprint backlog, the current sprint is looked at and discussed. -
New office stories.
They use following channels as official communication channels
1. Google Hangouts (yes, living in 1800s)
2. WhatsApp groups (FUCK MY LIFE) Thankfully I am not part of any and will avoid actively.
3. Slack (heaven's sake some sense here).
And above that, they use Google Workplace for emails and office tools.
And now combine this mess with Apple. How inhumane my working conditions are.3 -
It's been a long time since I was active but I felt like ranting about my shit college today.
Everything is so slow and dumb there. I'm in year 2 and we started learning JavaScript in class and our teacher said: "Here's a picture of a soccer score table. Now try to remake it with HTML and CSS!". WTF? I thought we were supposed to learn JavaScript?
This wasn't the first case of stupidity in my college (more stories coming soon).3 -
My dev goal for the new year will be teaching others, and I could use some help!
For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up some kind of community project in my area teaching people who are having a hard time finding a job in their field how to program, specifically web development, in order to advance their job prospects. There is a lot of demand here in Holland and as we all know it doesn't take much more than dedication, disambiguation skills and an almost fanatical fondness for solving puzzles to lead a very happy life as a developer. I'm hoping 2019 will be the year.
What complete courses can you recommend to teach someone how to code, that are fun/inspiring enough to keep someone motivated (and able to go to school and/or make a living in the meantime) until they can use their built up skills and portfolio to get a first job (perhaps 1-2 years)?
I plan on tutoring once or twice a week for a few hours and being available for chat the rest of the week when not working. I have enough experience (and curiosity) to help with any assignment but I do not have that much spare time, which is why I need this resource to be as good as possible, and to need as little extra explanation as possible.
My benchmark is the excellent freecodecamp, but I'm wondering if anything else is available. Bonus points for anything in Dutch, or anything that stands out by explaining things in the clearest way possible, and with great assignments of course.
Also I'd be very interested in any stories about similar (not-for-profit) initiatives, especially from a learner's point of view.
Thanks!1 -
Had someone mention adding tasks to stories in our sprint mid-sprint is messing up the sprint statistics... Can someone explain to me how one is supposed to know every task and approximately how long it will take to complete for a given story before even opening the code base up?
This is currently my major gripe with agile / scrum. How exactly you're supposed to instinctively know the solution to a complicated problem, as well as the steps to implement it, the approximate time it'll take, AND roadblocks you'll run into on DAY ONE? WHAT?
Too often does a 2 point story turn into a 5 point story because deep down it was a more complicated problem than originally thought, and a good scrum developer is supposed to... Either clairvoyantly known that or just allocate hours into unrelated tasks?
Someone help me out here -
@Flux
I read https://devrant.com/rants/1845851/...
I was going to comment until I realized it was a post from 300 days ago.
Just want to say ask you how it went or give a post mortem. Also Congratulations. I hope you brought a long run way when you started almost a year ago.
Remember starting is 80% of finishing, and carrying through is the other 20%.
Success looks easy when all you see are the success stories. Steve jobs wasn't the most famous marketer, he was the most famous salesman, and what he sold was a dream.
Marketing is a buzzword, and a lot of companies try to use marketing as a replacement for sales people, but nothing really beats a good sales person or team. Thats the secret to marketing: forgo it as much as possible and work on sales and relationships instead. Awareness is nice, but money and sales are better.
This coming from a guy who had six businesses by the time he was twenty six and helped his family to start two other successful businesses.
Apparently I'm good at helping other people make money just not good at helping myself do it.
What I've learned is if you can get 1 customer you can get 10 and if you can get 10 you can get 100. And then keep going.
Good luck.3 -
I have a guy that will come in a few hours to discuss about an e-commerce website he wants to start his business. I've accepted to do it freelance.
Things are a little quick for my taste, but I know myself enough to know that if I don't jump head first, I'll back out and miss on an opportunity to add something valuable to my resume (and get a bit of money).
The thing is : I have nearly zero experience in 1) e-commerce websites and 2) client relationship and managing. So that will be a great challenge to me, but that's precisely what I need right now.
Anyway, I'm coming to you to ask a few questions : assuming his requirements are simple and common for an online shop, should I create it from scratch or would it be wiser to use a dedicated framework (Prestashop, Wix, etc.). If the latter, which one would you recommend, cost and efficiency-wise.
Still assuming simple and common requirements, how much time would it likely take, for an average developper (I'm no Linus Torvalds) working on average 8h a day ? More like 2-3 months, or more like 5-6 months ? I'm leaning more towards 2-3, but since I don't have experience in these kind of websites, I find a lot of user stories that might take me time to figure out.
Last but not least, what would be approximately an honest price, technical costs aside (domain, host, potential framework, etc.) for that kind of work. And for maintenance ?2 -
I have several stories from the same mentor. Programming, networking etc...
2 of my biggest lessons from him:
1. "If it has to be done more than once, it can be scripted".
2. "He who controls the network packet wins". -
Anyone out there a Scala fan? I am! Seems like most of the stories here are quite negative but positively is my thing so here's my 2 cents:
Scala is an amazing data processing language. It's a functional language with a lot of really great things like a consistent collection library api, case classes, brilliant async library's like Akka Actors, and plenty of solid learning resources like Twitter school and Martin Odersky's online course.3 -
this is how my mind processes gods and religions.
comparing to the current time, they are comparable to the movies.
like 'The Avengers' - 1, 2, 3, etc
they are the stories, for ENTERTAINMENT, of that time.
and along the way, they twisted and turned the scripture.
and the fans became the followers.4 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
Who is going to tell Netflix that not every title need to be a 10 part series? A story that should fit into an 1 hr (maybe 2 max) is padded with unnecessary stories to be a 10 part series of 1 hr+ per episode.2
-
!rant
I’m thinking about switching job and trying a consult company and be a consultant.
I’m trying to get a grip if it’s any difference between that and being a developer at my current company.
I try to google but the result varies from “This is the best job ever!” To “This is the worst job ever!”.
I talked to a colleague of mine awhile back that said all in all there isn’t any difference. The code is the same, the work methods are the same and so on. One difference is that you can work at a project for one year and then you never see it again. Which is good if it’s a bad project and bad if it’s a fun project.
Another difference that he mentioned is that you have to make every hour count and you have to do something that the company can get paid for. And this is what makes me think twice. I’ve worked with IT for about 7 years but I’ve only been a developer for 1,5-2 years. I don’t know if I can produce as much as they want, being a junior developer and all, and maybe stay where I am for a year or two.
Do you guys have any thoughts about being a consult? Experiences, stories? All is welcome :) -
Discover 2 days before go for a vacation week end that one of the customer servers will shutdown at midnight (the customer discuss and finally got other 2 days).
And that you to do a backup of 30gb of data before you leave and upload on the new server.
And in conclusion, as all the love stories, leave 2 day later that you didn't make in time because the original server is veeeeery slooooow. -
Has anybody experience with Scrum in small web development agencies? Especially estimating stories with story points instead of hours/days?
We have a new junior project manager, without any practical experience working agile, who wants to establish scrum because what he read about it sounded so good... I already worked agile with kanban before and I loved it, but I only have little experience with scrum.
I think scrum, or agile in general, won't work with the clients we have. Most of the time, our clients have a fixed deadline, a fixed budget (either money or time) and they know their requirements, so there is no much room for beeing agile.
Regarding story points, I just adding an unneccessary layer of abstraction, because the customer wants to know how long a specific feature takes. Sure, story points are just another, more dynamic unit for time, but then why nut estimate in static time unit in the first place? Another fear I have, is that some devs may be more ignorant regarding deadlines and expectations on customers side. "yeah I'm working for 10 days on this story, but it's 8 points!" instead of informing the project manager "Currently I spend 2 days on this feature, we estimated 3 days, but it seems I need 3 days more".
Maybe I shouldn't be worried, but it would be great if you could share your experience and learnings. Thanks in advance!14 -
Every day, the SM likes to come by the dev table and ask what our updates are (stalking jira + dev slack channel is apparently too boring).
He comes by every 2 hours.
Each time asking about how close I am to finishing not only the current feature but the other stories I have to work on too.
The other stores are not in progress, what makes you think I was working on them in the background of what I'm currently working on?
Doesn't help that we somehow keep adding stories mid sprint, -
Was hella drunked yesterday. Guy at work brought me to some place called beer garden. Tf do u order in a beer garden. Whack. They drank 2 huge beers and so did i. Its like 1 or 2 liters no idea. My vision was delayed and blurry. My head hurts now too. They good ppl but i hate alcoholics and average people with no ambition other than to go out talk unimportant stories which wont buy me bread and drink alcohol. Im a fucking businessman. I want to talk about ideas and creating businesses especially tech startups or saas. Im a fucking God. I deserve to be surrounded by highly ambitious millionaires like myself who dont drink or talk shit, but talk only money talk. I can do moneytalk all night long. Any improvements on what can get me bread is ALWAYS highly more valuable topic than shittalking non bread topics. I hate this and i feel bad for these good people to watch them slave their life away not trying to be rich like me they're content with being average and it disgusts me because when ur average ur just 1 slip away from becoming poor or homeless. I'd rather steal millions and rot in jail for the rest of my life than work for matrix as a slave to eat crumbs for the rest of my life...24
-
Need advice about switching to contracting.
TL;DR;
So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.
Now the full story:
Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.
Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.
Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.
Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.
So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.
Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.
Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!3 -
https://thriveglobal.com/stories/...
What's your business life like? Do you work at home (while being employed) or do you do you seperate private and business-related physically? -
Be me, a ret***
Already 3 months in a new position. (check my previous rant)
Storm have passed for a while but another storm is brewing.
C levels are having disagreement with each other.
Caught in the crossfire as one the of C's hire.
Have some chit chats with both side of C, each telling different stories.
C#1 told me there was a demand from C#2 to force tech guys (not defined who or how many) to resigns.
C#2 told me there is no plan to close the whole tech team. But there's a distrust brewing in the tech team especially on the C#1
Be me, C#1 hire...
Me telling them IDK what their real intentions are but there's a high probability for my reputation to be tarnished on the job Market.
I've always had good review amongst peers and confident I did and do a satisfactory job for my previous employer.
Be me:
Resorted to flexing my connection to high ranking (think of C suites) reference who I've worked and have good relations with.
Connected them to my C#2.
Dunno how the C#2 thinks of me and what my value to C#2 are.
Don't know what the future hold for me.
Tried doing one interview but topics of my reputation comes up because of me jumping to executive position without having "Manager" ever in my resume.
Got a bit too defensive on that and it might eff up my chance to have a backup ready in case I urgently need to jump ship.
Depression and impostor syndrome hits like a truck every day.2 -
Let me share my sprint with you.
So, we lost a developer this at the start of the sprint because the organisation we work for is total cancer.
Project manager frequently says to us that it's better to under commit than over commit.
Come sprint planning, we commit to exactly what we know we can achieve.
Of course, the PM whinges and says we need to put more in the sprint. So, we say sure, but we can't guarantee we will deliver everything on time.
Fast forward 2 weeks, we complete 90% of what we committed to.
PM is whinging at stand ups, asking us why some user stories are still in 'ready for test'.
We try to explain to the PM that 2 weeks ago we made ourselves very clear that this point 2 weeks later would most likely happen.
PM stops whining.
Tester starts whinging about only having a couple of days to test. Blames developers for not adhering to acceptance criteria.
>User stories aren't actually user stories, they're user essays.
How do you deal with this?3 -
Trying to configure a smartphone which was already optimized for elderly users, with a more simplistic launcher, larger font size etc.
But the underlying Android 7 and its apps still keep showing up with their inconsistent UI and nagging messages and suggestions.
Is it even possible to configure any Android device to make it really simplistic and distraction free like, say, a classic NOKIA before the age of smartphones?
Culprit no. 1 Google and Android system. Suggestions about features keep recurring, even after stating that we are not interested in the feature.
Culprit no. 2 WhatsApp, unfortunately still the most popular messaging app in Germany, so this crappy bullshit software by Mark Fuckerberg's company has to be installed. Even to me as a tech savy developer, WhatsApp has a confusing user interface that tries to promote features like status (their versions of stories) without any option to hide / turn off.
How shall an 80 year old senior learn to use the app when they previously only used SMS and voice calls? I don't know.7 -
1 - Correct me if I’m wrong, but in true Agile, a product owner ought to be able to interact directly with the dev team, and vice versa, in the card/conversation/confirmation process of creating, estimating, and executing the user stories, correct?
2 - If Company “A” contracts with Consultant “A” to have software developed, and then Consultant “A” then contracts with Company “B” who then contracts with Consultant “B” to do the development, who would you define as the Product Owner?
3 - If Company “B” is barring Consultant “B” from talking with Company “A” and Consultant “B”, is Agile even possible?7 -
Last week, a story was discussed of moving code from one class to utilities class that 2 similar actives can use. I'm on 2-dev team (out of 4), and the lead dev was going out early for a convention. Originally he was gonna do it, until I realized 4 other stories depended on this one!
Today he came back, saw my work and got pissed. Said I changed too many things, unsure if the code will even work, that it wasn't "surgical" enough. Also complained that I extended both classes from the similar code class (which extends the first classes's original extended-by) instead of using an interface to a class where the similar code is... his title says lead dev, but he's only got age rank on me as far as I can tell. -
rantHeader = "Merry Christmas to me!"
subHeader = "How a phone survied a three stories fall but dropping it from 1 meter high shattered its glass"
And it's Christmas with my direct manager on holiday till Februrary the 33th 2085 meaning I will get a new phone in 1/2 years if all goes well...
Well at least I have a good excuse not to connect to work during my holidays as MFA app is on this phone...2 -
Top 5 Reasons for Not Discussing Weird Topics in Your Graduate Admission Essay
Knowing the top five reasons for not discussing weird topics in your graduate admission essay is very important. There is really no strict requirement about what kind of topic you use, as long as you can discuss it effectively. However, choosing weird topics may not really work for you, especially if it’s a very controversial or sensitive one. The following are the top five reasons why you should avoid discussing weird topics in your essay.
Reason #1: Weird topics are weird.
First off, weird topics are exactly that, weird. The last thing you want to do is weird out your graduate school admission panel, which is almost a sure way of getting yourself that polite rejection letter that every applicant dreads of receiving.
One of the main important points to remember is to think of your audience when writing your graduate admission essay. This audience will be composed of tenured professors, and probably younger teachers closer to your own age. Although it is a good idea not to tailor your essay according to what you think they want to hear, it’s best to stick to a topic that will make the panel want to get to know you more. You can do this by putting yourself in the admission officer’s shoes and trying to feel what your reaction would be with a particular topic you have in mind. Being creative is good, but to any audience, weird is weird, and most audiences will not know how to react to a weird admission essay.
Reason #2: Weird topics may reflect your personality in a bad way.
Weird topics make you look weird, or worse. You may think that a weird topic is the same as a creative topic, something that most experts on admissions officers urge applicants to use. With a weird topic, you can easily make the jump from being creative to just plain strange or worse, someone with an emotional or personality problem. Weird topics, when discussed ineffectively, are bad topics, and can be anything from the death of a pet, recent religious epiphanies, and even parent bashing. These topics are the last topics that can paint you in a good light so avoid these and other similar topics.
Reason #3: Weird topics may not represent the real you.
Weird topics will not paint the real you, unless you are naturally weird. If you really think that being a little bit off will pay off, then by all means do so. But if you want to appear as normal and as emotionally healthy as possible, save the strange stories for Halloween night.
Reason #4: Weird topics may seem too informal.
Weird topics can get too informal. You can be informal but you need to look normal as well in order to avoid appearing irreverent. Some may disagree with this, but often the only way to get on your admission panel’s good side is to tread on the middle ground arefully, and not be too stiff and prudish but not be too loose either.
Reason #5: Weird topics may confuse the readers.
While most schools allow their applicants free reign when it comes to writing an admissions essay, you can do your self a lot of good by treading on the middle ground. Avoid weird or strange topics if you can. A weird topic will put your readers in a place where they may not understand you. And in a process where getting to know you as a person is the main objective, this move will definitely have an effect on whether you get accepted or not. Knowing what to write in a graduate school admission essay is fairly easy, especially if the school provides you with a set of questions, known as prompts as your guide. As long as you already have the other requirements such as the right grade point average, recommendation letters, program of study and the like, you can start working on your essay. But if your still not sure whether it good idea to write essay by yourself. You can find tons of great quality writing services such as https://uk-essays.com/research-pape.... At such a websites you’ll easily find help from from people who already have considerable experience in writing a wide variety of essays. They will gladly help in any issue that makes you difficult.