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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!227 -
This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).
- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).
- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.
- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?
- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.
Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).
One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.
I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.16 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.
This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.
The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.
Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.
Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.
DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.
Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.
We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.
Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.
Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.
So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.
Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!
What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.
This my friends, is why admins are assholes.4 -
Follow-up rant to my company. Today's day is fairly good, so let's talk about infra.
We're building upon an existing open-source project which is not intended to be extended (e.g. plugins).
Our backend-team somehow hacked symfony into the app, which made the actual work a little bit less annoying. But on the other side, there is absolutely no automation. Everything is setup by hand and I need to upload my sources to my dev-server and watch what files exactly are overwritten. Because if not, I accidentally overwrite core sources which will break the whole app, no matter what. If I forget what file I wrongly overwrote, I have no choice but to setup the core from scratch and apply our sources on-top, AGAIN.
The first time setup took me almost five days.
Oh yeah and the team shares one dev server, so whenever I feel like fucking with a mate, I can easily fuck up his system, since everyone has root-rights.
We're required to use windows, but our dev is linux and I am the only knowledgable linux guy. They need cheatsheets (to be fair, I need my powershell-cheatsheet).
We market the same app with some additional functionality, but we also have clients which require their own stuff. This case has never been thought-out, since for these specific clients, we also modify some core-parts. Which makes it a real hassle to add a basic new feature to that special customer.
At least our frontend is somewhat decent. Simple and without critical thinking, but it works and is decently understandable. I'll rant about that for another day, it's still tedious.
I know I won't stay there for long since I start my own stuff, but it's sad. Nothing is perfect and they _do_ want to make it better, but it's the usual "there is no time, client first" talk. On the other hand, they tell that we should be more efficient, but there is no way to be without looking back at the fundamental structure and what takes us so long.
I don't think I am able to change anything here and as I heard from co-workers, they already look for something new.
cheers
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