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This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
===rant
So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.
When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.
With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.
After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.
The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.
I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.
After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.
Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.
I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.
I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.
And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.
On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).
So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.
So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.
During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.
The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.
I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.
I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.
Bring it on.9 -
Just like basketball player need good shoes, programmer deserve a better keyboard.
Definitely not show off. Just wanna say I'm a big fun of Cherry MX mechanical keyboard.
17 -
Aren't the spirits of the two mottos the same?
"72-10 don't mean a thing without the ring!"
&
"It's null till you ship it."
1 -
>> On the phone talking to someone
>> Describe an ad taken out in the NY Times where Skechers roasted Nike for a recent fuck up in a basketball game
>> Sees same ad 15 minutes later on Instagram
3 -
I'm watching a basketball game (NBA) and they had an issue with one of the clocks at the arena.
They of course fixed it by turning it off and turning it back on.12 -
actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)
So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.
I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.2 -
!dev
Well, it's time for a personal thing today, because I was hit with some shit today that I'm still kinda shook about.
So, as a bit of introduction (I've mentioned these in previous posts before but whatever, not everybody sees everything): I'm currently a senior in high school and I'm in the school's band (neither are too related, but a bit of setup for this story). I've been talking to a girl lately and I think I like her. She's fun to be around, kinda silly, and just great overall. She makes me happy and I like it. Her name is Grace, her sister's name is Taylor (just to avoid confusion later)
In the school's band, we play at home football and basketball games. Today was a basketball game. Normally when there's a game I just stay after school because I don't want to go home and come back a couple hours later, plus I like to hang out with some of the other people who do the same thing.
Grace was staying after for the game too. I was talking to her in the band room, kinda flirting a bit (on an unrelated side note, she's ticklish). Someone comes in the band room because he wanted to practice a bit, to get ready for the game. She's going back and forth between the band room and somewhere else (not too sure where she was). At one point I left to get a drink, come back, she's sitting next to him, just talking. I join the conversation, and her sister (Taylor) comes in, to get ready herself.
I go over to talk to Taylor for a minute. She looks at Grace and the other guy, then looks at me and just says "separate them". To which I said "...what? why? how?"
Me and her go outside the band room and she tells me that basically the guy has been cheating on his girlfriend with Grace, and it's just hurting everyone involved, except him basically. His girlfriend doesn't seem to fucking care, and he's done it before with someone else. (The other person actually like vaguely mentioned it to me a long time ago, but I didn't really know what she was talking about until now)
So basically, dude's cheating on his girlfriend with Grace. And I like Grace. Honestly don't know what the fuck to do. I want to do something because whenever something's going on with Grace, her sister always trusts me to make sure shit goes right. Some times when Grace wouldn't eat, her sister would always talk to me and ask me to make sure she actually eats.
Fuck guys. This stuff has been on my mind for the past ~4 hours and I don't know what to do, or if I even can do anything about it. I just needed to get this shit off my chest.
Sorry for the long personal story. Some parts I didn't really articulate very well. Honestly it was more of me just getting everything into words.4 -
A telecom engineering friend of mine asked me if I wanted Backnowýk — a strange brew made of cherries and strawberries that, if you brew it just right, is both lemonade and yogurt, depending on how you hold a glass of it. Straight angle relative to the floor makes it yogurt, but change that angle, and it fades into being lemonade. But if you don't drink it fast enough, it turns into blood.
So, I drank it and gained an ability to slam dunk leather balls, and since then, for every football game I'm in (I don't know how to play soccer though), there is a basketball hoop just for me, and when I dunk, my team scores.
Went for a walk. Met the lead singer of Death Grips — MC Ride. He wrote me a gay ballad:
🎵 Please take me to recording studio Portland🎵
🎵 Please take me to the recording place digital🎵
🎵 Aniverse🎵
🎵 Aniverse🎵
🎵 [DREAM FRAGMENT LOST]-verse🎵 -
My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball] -
I don't even really know where to start, so I figure I'll just throw this out there and see where it goes.
My daughter is disabled. She's in sports and dance, but it's taken my wife and I years to find out about the organizations she's now in, and that's mostly through word of mouth. Other families have told us because they've had the years of experience that we didn't. And now we're passing the information on to other less experienced families. And that's a problem that everyone we've talked to agrees upon: there's really no good way of discovering what organizations are out there, and what they can help with.
There exist some sites out there like https://challengedathletes.org/reso... which are really just lists of sites, but really nothing more to indicate that this group has wheelchair basketball, that group has adaptive ballet, that kind of thing. So I'm thinking, what if I built a site that provided an index. Searchable, faceted, like Algolia or AWS Cloudsearch. That part I can do. But how would I go about gathering the information? Could I somehow scrape it? If so, how do I organize it? Do I crowdsource by petitioning /r/disability, the Facebook support groups my family belongs to, and other places across the interwebs?
I can design the data model. I can build the webapp. I can make it fast and pretty and easy to use. But how do I get the data?2 -
Start my internship at ‘around 11:00’ today. That’s how it was put by the owner. The company doesn’t have an office so they meet in the home theatre of a mansion twice a week. Across from the indoor basketball court and ping-pong room.
If it’s not a real company, experience still looks good on a resume right?1 -
!rant
What movies/reality around me tells about free time:
- the "grand parents" generation (people who are in there 70-80s now) used to go out hang in tea shops, bars, parks,churches , wander in fields, chop woods in their leisure time in their 40s
The "parents" generation (people who are in their 30-40s now) were more into sports and would go for basketball , soccer , cricket for leisure time and later transitioned to playing board games/video games /xbox-PlayStation stuff/comics In their leisure time
The "our generation"(people who are between 18-30 now) are/would be more into playing mobile games and watching anime/web series/movies/weird porn and scrolling social media feed as leisure time in our 40s
( I have taken 40s as a criteria because i am guessing that as a standard age where you are "settled" and have things figured out)
Is this how the pattern is going? And isn't it sad that we are Going from doing stuff that's fun and making you street smart to doing stuff that's useless , time wasting and a little depressing ?5 -
You know I'm looking around a t a museum of 3d graphics programming right now.
Not my first time but the same arcade machines are playing the same tooons over and over again in an eerie way and strange;y thertes a basketball game up there on several large screen tvs too...
I remember my first detailed look at opengl.
For some reason it just never worked for me.
But I see all these incredible sources of past fortune sitting unplayed, and think.. wow... what a waste.
these brought me many hours of joy and gave me an opportunity or so I thought to try to make friends and meet other teens when I was younger.
They represent countless hours of lovingly crafted mind-crack, and noone smokes them anymore.
Aliens armaggedon sits right in front of me, holstered faux guns glowing in red alluringly.
the huge box of unclaimed mooks and stuffed sheep sit there sadly robotic arms that can never reach them just hanging rusting, unloved by a new generation to curse them for never grasping anything and stealing their quarters and a HUGE 96 inch or more screen for Tomb Raider, FUCKING TOMB RAIDER hums in a corner just slightly out of my full view.
and noone is here. why ?
and yet the gaming industry supposedly continued to thrive.
in a way arcades were better they kept people from being addicted to wowcrack.
just like raising gasoline prices would prompt the creation of cleaner more efficient mass transit.2 -
Everyday life: Colleague offers me a stress ball after hearing about deadline shifted forward (again).
We are ending up playing basketball in office with the whole team...
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