Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API

From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "best vs worst"
-
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
Best 2017: that’s a tie:
- refinding devRant and feeling like this is the place I was missing from my life!
- getting to the end of the year with a stable and complete project, bring on next years insanity!
Worst: still working ( minor routine tasks ) during my annual leave! -
Best Dev experience: Switching to rust,
Worst Dev Experience: Using VS code at work because I can't get anything else approved to be installed.9 -
Best:
- survived 2020 and all its woes.
RIP those that didn't.
- delivered a major project this year that felt like it never wanted to end.
Scope creep.... nope, scope realignment kills the soul.
- hired a competent dev!!! 🥳 Not being a SoloDev is a weird feeling!
- pay rise during a pandemic, that was a nice touch.
Worst:
- dealt with several useless contractors and ended up redoing most of the work myself.
- don't lie to me when you say you *can* do something, only to throw yourself into a complex rabbit hole you can't dig yourself out of.
- major project took 500% longer then originally scoped - it was only meant to be a tight 6 weeks, not an excruciating never ending list of changes and rebuilds 🤯
good thing I get paid regardless - but I don't think the burnout was worth the while.
2021:
- let's see what the world has on offer to try and burn me out of existence this time! -
TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.
Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.
I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).
I'm not shy so I'll go first:
MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).
GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).
STACKS / SKILLSETS
I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache
I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract
MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).
SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85
*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.
I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.20 -
I'll go with IDEs (and multiple answers) for this.
In my *opinion*, the best IDEs are:
- IntelliJ and the other JetBrains products for almost any serious work. It's just too good (even though there are some bugs every now and there)
- VS Code for quick coding, hacking
- micro, if only a shell is available
Worst IDEs:
- Qt Creator: I just hate it, it's hard to configure, hard to use, big nope for me.
- Some IDE for the Clean functional programming language, which I've only used once and I don't know its name, but it was a painful thing to try to use back then (~3 years ago)2 -
OK. We've got this tiny little pet project of mine (work related)…
I rescued it from the git archive, simply put: someone hot glued an elasticsearch scroll + document processor (processing) together.
After a lot of refactoring, I had an simple, much improved (non-parallel) Akka Worker System without an Akka topology / hierarchy.
I left out the hierarchy at first, because I didn't know Akka at all.
I've worked with a lot of process workflows, and some systems that come very close to IPC, so I wasn't completely in the dark.
Topology requires knowledge / creation of a state machine / process workflow. And at that point of time I just had... Garbage. Partially working garbage.
I finished yesterday the rewrite into several actors... Compared to before, there are 8 actors vs 2... And round about 20 classes more. Mostly since I rewrote the Receive Methods of Akka as Command DTOs... And a lot of functions needed to be seperated into layers (which where non existent before)
Since that felt more natural than the previous chaos of passing strings or other primitive types around, or in the worst case just object....
(Yes: Previously an Actor was essentially a class with one or more functions "doEverything" and maybe a few additional functions which did everything - from Rest Client to Processing)).
Then I draw the actual state machine based on everything I've written in the last weeks and thought about how to create the actual topology and where / how parallelizing might make sense.
Innocent me stumbled in the Akka Docs on Akka Typed... (Didn't know it existed, since I'm very new to Java and Akka).
Hm, that sounds an a lot like what I did. In an different way, yes. But not so different that it might be VERY hard to port to.... And I need to change (for implementation of hierarchy) a few classes....
[I should have known at this stage that my curiosity would get the best of me, but yeah. Curiosity killed the cat.]
Actually the documentation is not bad. It's just that upon reading the first more complex examples, my brain decided to go into panic state.
The've essentially combined all classes in one class in all source code examples [which makes sense more sense later], where it is fscking hard for an chaotic brain like mine to extract information....
https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/...
The thing is: It's not hard to understand… actually very simple.
It was just my brain throwing an fuck you tantrum.
So I've opened more examples in other tabs and cross referenced what happened there and why...
Few frustrated hours later I got that part.... And the part why it's called Akka Typed. It was pretty simple....
Open the gates of hell, bloody satan that was too easy for fucks sake.
Nooooow.... I just need to port my stuff to Akka Typed.
Cause. Challenge accepted, bitch - eh brain. You throw tantrum, you work overtime. -.-
I just cannot decide wether to go FP or OOP.
Now... I'm curious wether FP is that hard... Hadn't dealt with it at large before.
Can someone please stop me... I'm far too curious again. -.- *cries*6 -
I'm bored and can't sleep soooo...
Bad clever code vs Good clean code
Worst / best examples. - what's devRant got
Stories, pictures, links. All mediums are welcome1