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Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
"four million dollars"
TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.
That's all the management really cares about, apparently.
It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).
Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.
Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".
"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"
I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"
1st motherfucker.
Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?
Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.
Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.
This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.
I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!
Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.
Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?
Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.
Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.
Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.
I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.
Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.
Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).
In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.
Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.
4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.4 -
Story time
I really love helping and teaching others about code. Recently I had a friend that wanted to get into web development. Being me, I told him that i would teach him all he wants but that he needs to do some research first to show me that he feels comfortable with as a minimum requirement. I told him to research the minimum technologies required to build a web page and to tell me about the request response cycle and stuff like that. When he came back I was expecting small explanations such as "html stands for bla bla and is used for bla bla".No. this dude comes back all proud to tell me about flipping Laravel. I sit there quietly listening to him go on about the "Laravel programming language". He likes anime, I like kendo (and have trained in it) so while he is talking I slowly move us into the part of my office where I keep my boken (wodden sword). As soon as he sees me sitting down with the sword he asks what am i doing with it.
"Well, remember when in some anime that you like you see teachers beating their studets over stupid shit?"
"What?"
..."WHAT DOES HTTP STANDS FOR?"
"The...the err the web language that.. er"
BOINK
"what is javascript?"
"Like the updates thing?"
HARDER BOINK
:) guarantee he wont forget what http is after that and what js and Laravel are from now on :) needless to say he will continue learning with much more care.
Coding dojo for real mofockas, ya dig?3 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.
I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.
The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.
But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.
The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.
“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”
The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”
SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.
Talk to your recruiters, not me.
The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞
It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.
The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.
Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞
My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”
It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.
If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.4 -
Bored waiting for a long running test cycle to complete, so...
Monopoly: Software Dev edition.
All properties are companies with apple and alphabet being the most expensive ones, course the online version plugs into stock tickers to accurately reflect the current share price.
All railroads are broadband providers.
You don't build houses or hotels, but patent portfolios and 'landing on another property' becomes 'infringing on a patent'.
Cards:
- Kickstarter refund, collect £200
- Hit by ransomware, pay 1bitcoin.
- You are sued in East Texas, go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect dividends.
- Get out of court free card.
Yeah, I'm that bored that I'm rewriting bloody monopoly...5 -
Here comes the sleep time again. Now I will think about all the amazing stuff that I can build tomorrow and make it big out there just to wake up and do the same thing again and again till I go to sleep and repeat this cycle. Peace.
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Today I experimented a bit with Dockerfile's.
Was quite surprised how far you could go with a spicy salsa of ARG, ENV, SHELL and multi stage builds.
But... For fucks sake....the debugging is like poking a light year long rod into a black hole, trying to fish something out of the event horizon....
In the end I got a nice setup for Java build's, version injectable with ENV/ARG, non root user and version specific behaviour.
As the debugging is non existing...
I filled up more than once my SSD....
It was an annoying brain damaged repetitive cycle of changing Dockerfile, pruning all images if docker build stopped because of missing free space, waiting for all stages to complete, start new.
And caching is a fragile thing that puzzles me .........
Guess more fishing tomorrow.
*Gives a happy deep throat to the beer bottle in hope of death*4 -
I am back after 5 years
It's been a long time
After working for a shitty company, I ended up working for a startup for an interesting big project as a software architect
It was a good experience just for some stuff, but I hated every moment we needed to build some demo or prototype for potential customers or allies
I was tired... 2 years of demoing is too much. And finally I got a Senior Devops in this company working in Kubernetes
I finally discovered my role and my position, I want to solve problems for other devs and myself. I help anyway in the final product, because fast and reliable build and release cycle need to be a must
I wish everybody could find their main role. I took 12 years to find mine lol -
Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:
There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.
Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm. -
I want a tool called "bogo-npm" which creates a VM and then installs random versions of npm and dependencies in a cycle until the build is successful. It'll probably be the biggest optimization that dogshit ecosystem has ever seen.
I'd just let it run over night and save myself the urges to strangle every single fucking developer who added dozens of dependencies to a stupid near-static website.
And the creator of the abomination called `npm uninstall` which for some fucking reason does the same as `npm install` and then obviously fails because that's the reason I wanted to remove that package in the first place.
We need more heroes like that leftpad dude.3 -
Everytime I consult with senior devs on how to transition from my sysadmin job and get my first dev job they always tell me to get a CS degree.
Look. I will get that fucking degree eventually. But I want to build up dev skills and learn from a company before killing myself over math crap for 3 years. But it's like a vicious cycle. Every junior position I apply to rejects me because I have no degree.
I'm fucking frustrated and depressed.
What should I do? I want to break from the IT meme and get a dev job.
In the meantime I'm doing small projects and freelancing in my very little free time. But I feel I'll never truly be a developer until I work as one professionally.4 -
I cycle between games I play. I am now back to Minecraft. Playing FTB OceanBlock. It is progression lite. Less of a grind with short and long term rewards. It is like a skyblock, but you can start on an actual island. I am really enjoying the mods FTB developed just for this modpack. The modpack has plenty of tech in it to satisfy my need to build something purely for fun.5
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Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.
So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.
I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.
In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).
I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.
But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.
I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.
Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.2 -
Wanting to see if I can build a full web dev stack on my phone, any ideas?
So found I found a not so helpful terminal emulator, a programming keyboard, enough IDEs to make your head spin, and a few rooted apps if rooting was an option right now. I'm half tempted to setup ssh and ftp on a cloud server such as Google cloud.
I'm doing this to see if it's possible and able to be used during work, although I am beginning to doubt the idea will make it into my development cycle.4 -
My consuming cycle:
1. An urge to buy a new shiny thing. No peace of mind if I refuse to buy it. My brain starts to generate sentences like "Treat yourself", "Why are you even living if you can't buy what you want", etc.
2. Acquisition. Immense guilt about the money spent. My brain somehow classifies any non-electronic thing that costs more than $30 as "ridiculously expensive", no matter how much money I make, no matter my reserves.
3. A short period of... no, not peace of mind. It's just an absence of that urge. I can't quite call it "peace".
4. goto 1
Hyperconsumerism is hell. I don't want my life to be ridden by guilt. I want to break that cycle, but when I try, it's just me asking that blaming questions to myself.
Somehow I probably got an answer. I should make my everyday thought process and patterns independent of buying stuff. Money shouldn't define what I do and what I think about.
Everything I need with an exception of medicines is both factually cheap and perceived as cheap, and I don't feel guilty about buying medicines.
What should I aim my thought process to? I'm tired of programming, because it provokes an entirely different kind of guilt, the guilt of "you shouldn't be resting, go write that article, go study that new web shit, go build that another open source thing (that nobody cares about)".
Art makes me a bit happier though. I studied 20th century progressive art a bit, and appreciating the ideas behind certain pieces of design, architecture and fine arts make me feel superior than other people, and also superior than my past self. I don't know if it's healthy or not, I'm just being honest now.
I think I need more art in my life. For now, I'm fine with knowing that I'll probably never create a real piece of art (aside from programming), so at least I can consume art instead of buying worthless shit that doesn't make me happy anyway.5 -
So worked myself into stupor for a react-native app(first -time). It is the client part for large system ecosystem. Was rough at first but after initail field test and refactor to the code base it is in 95% stable form. This all happend in 2 months. During this time co-workers build rest of system in node and other backend magic sauce 👩💻 .
My app has sibling app to collab with. I make a note (early in the development of this sibling app) that the ui is not working for the use case and get in a heated debate with co-workers. Concede 🙌 that it is not my part of the system and leave it to them, they blame the fact that no design was given. Fast forward to yesterday I get munched by client that wants to showcase the system to large company and has to struggle with sibling app. I tell him it is something "we" would look at in the next cycle ( covering for my coworkers) .
I feel shit and year now starts off with crappy feeling that all my hard work to get my app to decent version of itself is lost☠️ .
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