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Search - "bankruptcy"
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I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
We were still using python 2.7 waaay into 2020 - It had been heralding the impending doom since 2018 and finally end-of-lifed in 2020.
That's when I finally managed to be the loudest asshole in the room and allocate a team (myself included) to refactor shit up to 3.6 (then somewhat more modern) for a month or so.
COVID the destroyer may have helped by wrecking havoc on our client's demands pipelines.
It was the third week into "the red sprint" when my entire team (myself included) were beheaded out of the company since we had "not delivered ANYTHING in weeks!" (emphasis in the original).
Frankly, being laid off was by a large margin the best thing that company ever did for me.
I heard from a poor schmuck who stayed behind that they were still using the shitty spaghetti code from before our refactoring - in freaking November 2021 - and that our entire last effort was thrown out because "nobody knows how to use it".
There is tech debt and there is tech bankruptcy.
I may have a lot of tech schadenfreude now :)13 -
Worst experience with a higher up?
At an old contract job (around 2013), I was contracted by the company to help guide their developers with me to rewrite their software (it was buggy as shit, they didn't know better.).
So, a month later, we are in the middle of the rewrite and the boss flies in pissed that it's not done yet, he had the audacity to accuse me of stealing contract work with no experience in the area.
I told him flat out, "you don't know what the hell you are talking about. If you didn't hire a JV coding team, you wouldn't need me to redirect your damn rewrite."
He fired me, so I went to his superior and told her the situation. She told me i completely deserved it.
Worse part was I got paid half of my contract. Didnt make that mistake again. 😒😒
Found out later that the company failed, declared bankruptcy. Felt pretty happy.2 -
*Got a request for installing and configuring an online shop for a client*
Me: Do you have a web space already?
Client: No, I don't want to pay for it. (FYI: They only cost about 20€ a year)
Me: Okay, but free hosters are often slow and unprofessional. I really do not recommend using free hosting services.
Client: Doesn't matter, do it.
Me: *Working on the shop for several weeks, finally goes online*
One week later, client contacts me saying shop is offline. I realize the free hoster he used shut down their services (bankruptcy), resulting in the loss of about 90% of the work that I had done (no proper backups due to complexity)
Client: How can that even happen? You'll redo the shop, right?
♪~ ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ5 -
Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.5
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I was looking for a job 2-3 months ago and two companies reached out to me after the interviews and offered me a working position. One company was pretty close to me and didn't require me to relocate to another city, even though it was a shittier kind of IT/developer job where we needed to fix legacy PHP CMS's. By that point I had no money and was depressed after looking for that long and jumped on the opportunity. Forward 1.5 months later and the company I started working for decided to file for bankruptcy. Nice huh, working for a whole 1.5 months. I reached out to other company that would have hired me otherwise in hopes they would still have a position open, all they can offer me is a non-paid internship. I would need to relocate to another city where I don't have anywhere to stay and pay rent + a deposit, after which I would be broke again, and they offered me a performance review after the internship after which they would THINK about giving me a job. Fuck this.4
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Worst:
Going through bankruptcy
Best:
Getting out of it, joining a team that is so on the edge of everything, that asking questions on SO is useless, and they can only be answered by us debugging the platform itself, as suggested by its maintainers.
... To boldly go where no man has gone before1 -
"Longest you worked without rest + why?"
46hrs
2 x 14h shifts from 0400h on.
No breaks, toilet, drinks or food.
Intercepted by a removal and all the getting ready, getting there, preparing food and such stuff.
Quite common the 10-14hrs shifts these days. Logistics companies take pride on how they don't give a remote fuck about their employees. .. And! Regularly fucking up everything with their out of this world expectations and assumptions. Only thing stopping such madness? The reality of sailing the edge of bankruptcy.
Seconded by a university event that everybody fucked up and had to be pulled out of the mud with 44hrs straight.
Well. Intercepted by some booze.
Best part? My then time partner decided to throw an episode in my only free time. God I still hate that daemon. She must have committed a series of crimes against humanity by now. Easily could be responsible for the downfall of civilisation.5 -
!Dev
In Malaysia for some reason Chinese and Indians are considered as outsider. Some Malays are considering themselves are native (actually the Orang Asli are the native). Many politicians attempt to even startled a racial fight against the non- Malays. My country is operated by a closed system. Most Dutch , US companies are leaving Malaysia due to the unfairness.
Before this I worked in a Dutch company in Malaysia , where lately the company declare bankruptcy as my respectable boss told me what happened. Later I learnt, in order for a foreigner to start a company in Malaysia , a transaction of transfering have of the company assets and name under an assigned Malay man by the government.
The racism here is real and crazy. It is no surprise most Malaysian migrating to Taiwan, China Singapore , Thailand and some western countries.
I hate racism. Recently I heard news about western countries still have the hatred against Asians which I abort the idea of migrating there. But in my country Asians are hating other kind of Asians before for being different Asian.
May be I should just get my arse back to Mongolia (where my ancestors will be )6 -
I was being interviewed by a start-up company and one of the founders came in the room, said hello, put up his feet on the table and said "So what can you do for us?" 😐
1 year later (last week) I get an email saying that the company will disband because of bankruptcy. I smiled.1 -
Time for a full refactor. Everyone can go home for three days while I unfuck every page and pattern.
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I love working on legacy products. You just need a good shower and possibly a therapist after.
- Sensitive data sent over the internet encrypted with DES (not even 3DES). Guess it doesn't matter that the key (singular, for the last decade) is basically 0123456789ABCDEF.
- Client databases with open default port, admin/admin superuser.
- Critical applications (potential for substantial property damage, maybe loss of life) with a single point of failure and without backup.
Suggestions, to slow down a bit with sales, so we have time to rewrite this steaming pile of crap are met with the excuse: be more pragmatist, this is standard industry practice.
Some of this shit can be fixed on my own time if my conscience nags too much, but others would require significant investment of time from multiple developers, which would slow down new business.
Guess the pay is ok, so that's something... -
Brave Browser.
There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.
Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:
Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”
If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.
But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:
“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”
Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.
In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.
Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.
I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.
There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.
In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.
Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.15 -
Wow I'm jobless now due to inflations now no companies here in Malaysia wants to hire me.
I looked at linkedin realised I am not the only one who is facing this issue.
Most company in Malaysia declared bankruptcy. Massive retentions.
Looking remote jobs from overseas, got ghosted.
Hey @devrant want to hire me to reprogramme devrant for 3500USD? Hihihihi😈😈😈🤡15 -
No network in mobile due to bankruptcy of an Telecom Operator and people think that I could help because I am good with computers instead of going to fucking retailers of other Operators who could adopt the number.1
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Acer vs MSI Laptops.
Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...8 -
Best boss ?
Well, on Friday we learned our business was shutting down, bankruptcy.
Other new recruits have had a 10 days notice. My boss had me a 30 days notice instead, and have been fighting day and night since then to find a new investor to buy our solution and hire the team with it, comforting me that I will be part of that team.
Feelsgood to have a boss having your back :-)
(see previous rants for more)3 -
#tli anyone that guesses my s3 bucket name can attack me by sending PUT requests... I may go bankruptcy any day now