A contractor at my old job was doing a development role and was constantly annoyed and the idiotic design decisions going into the website backend we were developing 🙄😒

When he decided enough was enough he could have easily written a really snarky email but instead he wrote the most sincere and professional email to his boss and the director thanking them profusely for the opportunity and hopes he would be welcome for future work with the business....👍

He was a really good Dev and the email made the bosses super happy thanking him so much and how much of a shame it was he was going....😍

He bcc'd me on the mail and when he handed his computer in he told me to open the email and highlight in full....👌

At the end of every line in white text was 'Go Fuck yourself' or 'Zero fucks given'

The bosses never realised... And I know he's been back there about 4 months now..... But shhh 😭

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

==================

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

How to run a successful business:
1. Fire 30% of staff because covid, 'we can't afford you'
2. Be wrong about covid and have higher sales volume than ever
3. Be unable to handle such traffic with limited resources
4. Move EVERYONE, every fucking specialist, every non-people person to customer support and make them refund ALL disputed orders like robots because customers aren't happy
5. $?

A company called me for a job interview for my internship. As they saw my LinkedIn, they said I had a great skill set built up as I was studying Software Engineering and working aside as a freelancer.

After a short talk they mentioned my international business management (IBMS) minor that I have taken and criticized me that I took a wrong path of my career, told me to rethink my position of my studies and said they will not take me into consideration for the position.

That left me puzzled. Like what was the reason of that call, just to criticize my decisions?

Can't remember the company name that called me here in The Netherlands.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I really need to let this out somewhere...

Why the f...? Srsly.. Why would anyone do that? I'm joining another project. Apparently lead dev has adopted a coding style, where:

1. Every dev writes code however he likes, i.e. no clean-code requirement at all.
2. All services are crud-only. I mean all service classes. All must have those 4 methods; no more, no less.
3. Half of the business logic is inside controllers.
4. Not a single comment... Interfaces, models, etc. -- not a single one.
5. Xmls -- tabs, classes - spaces.
6. Xml schemas are downloaded with each build rather than stored downloaded once and stored locally.
7. I can keep going on and on.

Is it just me or are these some really weird decisions?

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

"Redesigning somebody else’s product is always a tricky business. You don’t know why they made the decisions they made. You don’t have the data they have." - Lukas Mathis

So two mini rants rolled up into one

1) programmers who can code in 8292 languages but don’t know shit about the business side and think they know better than the business folks when it comes to big picture decisions, please go fuck yourself.

2) People who respond to “Gotta set up a few machines for non tech folks” with “Oh you should try Linux, it’s so user friendly”. You need to go fuck yourself. You have no idea what you’re talking about and probably lack empathy too you rotten squid smelling cumsock.

Why do most people think that machine learning is the answer to their poor business decisions. I have recently had a client who won't stop talking about how his business will grow to Google's scale if I get the model to 97% accuracy . Regardless to say his data is noisy and unstructured. I have tried to explain to him that data cleansing is more important and will take most of the time but he only seems to care about the accuracy and how he is losing investors because I haven't reached that accuracy. This is fucking putting alot of pressure on me and it's not becoming fun anymore. I can only hope he achieves his ambitions if I ever get that accuracy (Ps: From the research papers I have read on that problem, the highest accuracy a model has ever got to it 90%)

Unnamed hacking game - "terminal" graphics
-Multiplayer. Last man standing.
-Like a tower-defence game but technical
You work for a company that has outsourced their technical department to Bykazistan, a country with good internet and bad laws. On one hand, labor is very cheap! There are no pesky laws protecting workers, so you don't need to pay them what they're worth. Phew. However, there are also no laws against cyber crime. But for a start-up like you, the risk is worth the reward!
...which would be great! If you were the only company with that idea. As it turns out, you aren't. All of your competitors also recently outsourced to Bykazistan, and that could be an issue.
You would be afraid, but you are a hardened businessman. You are familiar with the cut-throat nature of the business world and where others see risk, you see opportunity. Let the games begin.
Your mission is to protect your ciritical assets at all costs, eliminate your opponents, and make ciritical financial decisions - all while maintaining your uptime!
Build a botnet and attack your competition to decrease their uptime and disable their attacks. Port scan your opponents to learn more about their network, but beware of honeypots! Initiate devastating social engineering attacks - and train your employees against them! Brute-force their credentials, and strengthen your own.
Make sure to keep your software patched...

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Biggest teamwork fail? This is the general way we do business where I work right now:
My boss didn’t want to be the kind who hovers, always micromanaging. He also hates the idea of taking programmers away from their work for meetings. Sounds great, right? This has resulted in:

• All non-lead devs being excluded from all meetings other than scrum (including sprint planning and review meetings). Nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. They don’t think we “need to know.” This means most of our day is spent trying to figure out what needs to be done, rather than getting anything done.

• Our remote boss making dozens of important decisions about our platform, never telling us, and blaming us for not forcing our lead to be more communicative.

• Pull requests staying open for weeks, sometimes months, because nobody has definitively decided what version we’re actually supposed to be working on. This means our base branch could be any of them, and it means PRs that have been opened too long need to be closed, updated, and re-opened on the false promise of someone actually looking at it.

Just ranting here... but I think our biggest teamwork fail is happening right now, with all of those things ^

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

Are junior developers expected to make business logic decisions? There's one that my boss wants to know my opinion of, and I'm thinking, "fuck, I don't know, why should I make that decision?" Or is that part of what developers have to learn?

CTO s shouldn't write software once there are more than 50 devs in the company. They shouldn't make tech decisions. It is time for you to back off and help with more important things. We really need you to get process nailed down. We really need you to help us understand business better. Not writing code.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

So according to my Business requirements I have learnt Golang, in addition to being comfortable in C,C++,Java, Android. I have also fixed problems in python. Now they want me to learn UI framework including ReactJS. And when I screw that shit wrapped language in my ass, now they have asked me to also get comfortable with Groovy, Geb and Spock for UI automation. Thats being I have just joined 3 months before. I dont even know where my tears have gone. Have they just dried up? Or sucked back by my eyes? My life already sucks and I already question my life decisions to become a software engineer. Its never ending.

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.

Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.

Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.

3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.

Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.

Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.

Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.

Could go on, but rant over.

There should be a developer licence so we could stop these stupid wannabes from getting into and ruining the industry with their shit work. We're so fed up maintaining these stupid codes the company previously outsourced somewhere on earth.

That moment when you get blamed by product/business for a slow feature...
A feature which the same product person demanded you implement two days before the deadline that the feature was supposed to be released at but you never got told about. You end up doing a miracle and the company avoids a lawsuit but you still get blamed for it being slow. Shouldn't have agreed on the ridiculous deadline and left them suffer from their own bad decisions and communication

!rant

I had a talk with my manager about my future role in the company. I had talked with him before about my interest to dive deeper in the technical side - rather than the business side, for which we have a higher dev demand.

The outcome is that I will work more closely with the senior devs on technical improvements and also tech strategy (e.g. implementation of code reviews). I will also advise the upcoming manager of the development team (who is coming from a PM position) on technical decisions. Lastly the roadmap for the company is to work more with cloud technology (azure), which is also going to be in my new duties.

I'm looking forward to these new challenges where I can improve myself on the technical side (yay!) rather than on the business side (which bored me).

After years of only breaking even or low profitability BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CHEAPSKATES WHO THINK WHAT I DO IS EASY AND SHOULD BE FREE OR $5 OR WHATEVER AND FRIENDS I DID WORK FOR FOR FREE TOTALLY ABANDONED OUR FRIENDSHIP AFTERWARDS FOR STUPID MISUNDERSTANDINGS ON THEIR PART I closed down my web dev business and now focus only on full time employment. I don’t even do sites for friends anymore.

But did that stop people who before wanted to haggle prices from now BEGGING me to go back into business or to help their referral or to please-pretty-please just help them with one more problem?

Nnnnnnope!

And even now I hate disappointing people and telling them no even though I know they’ll have tiny budgets and will stall and delay and not deliver content or make decisions so I can finish and GET PAID.

WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! AND WHERE WERE ALL THESE OPPORTUNITIES WHEN FEWER PEOPLE WERE INTERESTED IN MY SERVICES?!

Man I have no idea how my company is running as stable as they do. Every time I peak under the curtain of some piece of machinery I find such bad practices…

Just found out our in house database manager only supports listing all objects in a table, updating objects by first reading each row you need to update and only support “select *” queries.

This is after having to argue with some engineers that using http or grpc when interacting with the new service I’m writing in the none-jvm language is better than writing our own driver for their custom rpc and service discovery system.

But like honestly I’d be mad if these decisions had a visible performance impact on the business, but it somehow doesn’t… this is bizzaro world where all I learned from my 8 years experience as a professional goes out the window…

Had you known what he knew (1), had the training he had (2) and had the objectives he had (3), you would have made the same decision

the holy decision-making trinity

don't be quick to judge or question others' decisions. You don't know some things. S/he may not know as well.

Do you get informed about the reasons behind business decisions in your job?

That wasn't the case in my last job and I dreaded my code for that reason.

I think this kind of lack of information can lead to bad engineering decisions and unstructured code. Also, this doesn't lead to the needed ownership of your work.

What do you think?

Design team constantly needs help fixing bad commits and merges. (can't use git after using it for 3 years...) And boss wants to know why the ticket is falling behind.
After explaining I'm pretty much told that assisting other teammates is part of the job but I'm being paid to write code and need to stay late.... this is while I'm hitting a 10 hour workday already (skipping lunch). And btw, we aren't doing reviews this year because the business made some bad decisions recently and raises aren't in the budget.

Has anyone else worked in business environments and found... em.. "wannabe-tech decisions?"

For example, naming stuff with shortened words and underscores instead of spaces.... for no real reason? Or maybe using the word "database" a little too often, just to use the word? (similar to the way you might call someone by name, only to confirm to them that you have learned their name?)

It doesn't actually bother me, rather, I think it's a bit cute that these people are interested in our culture and want to be a part of it, even if it's in sort of silly ways like this.

I've got a user who keeps asking for weekly updates on a project I'm on and my pm is supposed to interface with them and give them the status. But my pm comes back to me like "so everything is good right?"

When we just talked last week about how it's not and I still have work stoppages. I have status updates written in our ticket tracker for him and he has tons of emails explaining the issue but he always forgets what the status is anyway!

Jesus, having to keep reminding someone of something when the information is right out there for them to grab quickly and easily is bloody annoying. He just neglects this one project! I'd cut out the middleman but I need him because I don't know enough about business rules to make decisions or ignore concerns that crop up in my planning!

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.

I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?

My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.

If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.

A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.

Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.

Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.

For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?

Can anyone give me a logical explanation?

P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.

So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...

P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.

My department was tasked with building browser extentions for Shopify to add functionality to their admin panel.

We warned the bosses about how unstable these extentions could become as there is no warning of changes to Shopify's code. If they make a small change it could break everything.

Instead of listening to us, what did they do? They doubled down and had us build this massive plug-in that adds dozens of complicated UIs and features to run the core of their business. I actually left the company over this and several other questionable decisions.

Last week I was catching up with their last remaining dev. Appearently a few weeks ago most of it fell apart and some of its not fixable unless Shopify makes some changes.

Does anyone else find it strange that the stupidest people in the company are making all the decisions.

In order to be able to engineer software you have to understand everything that the product owner knows, the business analyst knows, the product manager knows + how to actually make the system both work in a reasonable time frame and be maintainable long-term.

But we're not the one making the decisions. The irony of it is something that I can't get beyond.

And when I do go out on a limb to point out a logical inconsistency to UX or product... They don't thank me for it they hate me for it and then 3 days later figure out that they should be doing it and quietly follow my suggestions.

Seriously is the goal here to create good software or to avoid stepping on everyone else's toes in the company who is overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

I think companies based on a hierarchy of non-technical people controlling technical people, in the creation of software products are a dying breed.

When it comes to creating software products everyone in the hierarchy should be technically minded.

I've seriously been trying to come up with an alternative perspective here.

The executives of the company are completely out of touch and the only thing which looks like progress to them in a sprint review is something visual on the front end.

The technical architect, the product owner and the product manager all seem to be engaged in keeping the executives happy and managing their expectations. By means of obscuring the truth.

Imagine how much more cost-effective building a software product would be if the executives were engineers themselves.

I'm keen to do an experiment and build a company comprised of engineers only.

Obviously they need to have insight into the other roles. But none of these other roles are as complex as implementation itself.

So why exactly are we the slaves of these well-meaning under thinkers?

On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!

I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..

Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.

Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.

Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..

So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...

Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!

Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!

I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..

Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??

I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.

You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!

I’m just a mug and they know it!

So fucking angry!

I once worked as the sole web developer for an in-house agency for a large corporation. The guy I reported to there was by far the best boss I ever had. Most weeks I wouldn't even see him.

He was smart enough to know the web was important to the business, but humble enough to say he didn't understand it. He rarely ever questioned the decisions I made.

The only downside to the job was it was part of a large corporation.

!tech

I am yet to start the phase of life where i am more than just a student but i often see things around and have some thoughts. Recently i was feeling that the 2 biggest crimes a person could commit is being repetitively irresponsible or being always dependent.

Like, if i am a father , a husband , a sole earner or have someone dependent on me, i could not afford to make simple everyday mistakes that i often do in my current youth age and people ignore. These days i sleep at 5 am after watching movies, wake up at 3pm , knowing that mom has already made me food, my college mates have already made assignment, and there's nothing better that i could do . Life is relaxing.

But my dad cannot afford mu luxurious lifestyle. He cannot waltz on the bike at 90, he can't sleep till 3 , he can't afford to watch long webseries. Heck, he can't even afford to have a platform like this and rant or post stuff. He has to run at 6 am in morning to get groceries for our restaurant. I wonder how he or any other mature person relaxes their mind.

Similarly everyone has to show some boss characters in life. You can't rely on a stick forever, you got to have your own spine. Dad used to have a biz partner who took most of our restaurant decisions, but then business went low and he ran away. So at the end dad himself had to take up all the things in his hand.

I on the other hand am totally spinless. Clg has taken the decision for me that i gotta give papers that's why am studying. Later company will take decision to fuck me up and work infinitely and i might just do that . I usually never come up with a good innovative app idea with a solid vision and therefore end up following other people's ideas , visions, etc and that too rather incompetently.
I wish i had more courage.

'Responsible' people of devrant (bread earners, family runners, etc you know if you are one) , would you like to share your life tips or let me know if my thoughts are wrong?

Because business analysts are perfectly qualified to make sound UX decisions...

There was a department. Long time ago their work was somewhat complicated: background checks of businesses, websites, ToSes, assuring agreement compliance, some risk management on top. They started as small 3 people team but over the years they were hiring new employees to catch up with the growing customer base. They were still struggling. Few years back we've integrated 3rd party services to help them and, finally, their backlog was gone!

In January they complained about how much more work they have since the merger so I inquired about which process was troublesome, what was the flow, etc., and it turned out to be very... Tinder-like - the issue was the sheer number of cases:

1. open a case,
2. check results in few windows,
3. if green + green + green, move right.
4. else move left.

It was ridiculous, I wouldn't stand for that. I sat for an hour, made some ghosting scripts that followed same business logic and saved results alongside their actual decisions. Last week I compared the two and there was zero difference so I green-lit it with my boss and pushed to prod.

Oh, the happiness on their faces when they heard the news, the disbelief, the tears of joy!

And then it happened. After 4 years of being cautious not to stir the waters I did it again. Yesterday I accidentally replaced 17 people department with 3 scripts. How was I supposed to know it was *all* they were doing??

Least favorite enterprise software (so far) is Oracle JD Edwards (but more specifically the integration between systems).
Unfortunately a board member was friends with an employee who recommended JDE. It required full time maintenance and a few years later that employee left and the company wrote off over a million dollars to go back to the old (but slightly updated) system.
Following that, a board member (the same one I think) agreed to have another friend's security business install CCTV across the branches. The project was not scoped and no thought had gone into it, making a real mess for the IT department to sort out (provided hardware was under spec'd, existing networking equipment needed replacing, etc)

Who do these upper management people think they are that they can make decisions based on little fact or research and expect the people beneath them to just magically make work.
The huge salaries of those people is not justified. We're the real workers who actually get stuff done so the pay and appreciation should be spread accordingy.

Rant over.

You work in a team, for a team to move forward successfully the team should work in sync. A team always has a goal and a plan to get to it. There are times when the team needs to take a different direction therefore the set path should always be available for change because our environments dictate it.

We all have different styles of working and different opinions on how things should work. Sometimes one is wrong and the other is right, and sometimes both are wrong, or actually sometimes both are right. However, at the end of it all, the next step is a decision for the team, not an individual, and moving forward means doing it together. #KickAssTeam

The end result can not come in at the beginning but only at the end of an implementation and sometimes if you’re lucky, during implementation you can smell the shit before it hits the fan. So as humans, we will make mistakes at times by using the wrong decisions and when this happens, a strong team will pull things in the right direction quickly and together. #KickAssTeam

Having a team of different opinions does not mean not being able to work together. It actually means a strong team! #kickAssTeam However the challenging part means it can be a challenge. This calls for having processes in place that will allow the team members to be heard and for new knowledge to take lead. This space requires discipline in listening and interrogating opinions without attachment to ideas and always knowing that YOUR opinion is a suggestion, not a solution. Until it is taken on by the team. #KickAssTeam We all love our own thinking. However, learning to re-learn or change opinions when faced with new information should become as easy to take in and use.

Now, I am no expert at this however through my years of development I find this strategy to work in a team of developers. It’s a few questions you ask yourself before every commit, When faced with working in a new team and possibly as a suggestion when trying to align other team members with the team.

The point of this article, the questions to self!

Am I following the formatting standard set?

Is what I have written in line with official documentation?

Is what I am committing a technical conversion of the business requirement?

Have I duplicated functionality the framework already offers?

I have introduced a methodology, library, heavily reusable component to the system, have you had a discussion with the team before implementing?

Are your methods and functions truly responsible for 1 thing?

Will someone you will never get to talk to or your future self have documentation of your work?
Either via point number 2, domain-specific, or business requirements documentation.

Are you future thinking too much in your solution?

Will future proof have a great chance of complicating the current use case?

Remember, you can never write perfect code that cures every future problem, but what you can do perfectly is serve the current business problem you are facing and after doing that for decades, you would have had a perfect line of development success.

The 'geniuses' at Business doesn't seem to figure out why all of their systems turn out to be dogshit and outdated within a year or two.
Its because they don't even involve developers/IT into ANY of theirs decisions.

It's kinda like the patient telling the brainsurgeon how to do their job.

Hey, I get it. We are a bunch of antisocial wizards conjuring black magic at our computers all day. I would stay the fuck away from us if I were you aswell, but please for the love of Cthulhu, let us in on your great plans and amazing decisions before assigning blame.

Regards,
Th3 h3ckerz at IT

Google Business continues to piss me off. Just because I don't have a physical storefront at which to receive clients for web development doesn't mean I'm not working in a legitimate business. The fact that there's STILL no option to hide my home address from searches for web developers nearby is just inexcusable. And it's not just me. There are TONS of at-home freelance workers who RELY on organic searches to stay afloat. But Google only cares about people who make decisions about how to run their businesses in the way Google finds beneficial.

We were on track to provision Cassandra for logging and elasticsearch for business data store.
Now we are on track to provision mongodb and elasticsearch. That's right, two document stores.

Things go to hell when management think they are capable of taking engineering decisions.

Hey guys,

What books had the biggedt impact on how you live your life, conduct your business, the way you code or make decisions?

I'm reading "Zero to One" for the second time now and love reading it all over again.