Biggest hurdle? Probably other people telling me no.

- My parents wouldn't let me go to college to study CS because 'this computer thing is just a fad and you won't be able to make a living off it'. Instead they pulled me out of school early and made me go study automotive so I could be a mechanic like my dad.

- At 22, my boss at my first tech company job heard I was taking Java classes in the evenings. Told me to stop wasting my money because I'd never be a programmer.

- Got a job at a game development company as a document writer. I could code by then. When I was done with my work I'd look for bugs and send the solutions to the programmers so they could submit them. Tech lead found out and flipped out. Said I wasn't allowed to look at the code because I 'hadn't been hired as a programmer'.

Today I'm a senior developer and pretty happy with my career.

When people tell you that you can't do something, that should be all the motivation you need to work your ass off to prove them wrong.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

The everyday software development process:

I can’t fix this!

Crisis of confidence 😕
Questions career 😳
Questions life 😩

...oh it was a typo, cool 😆 🙌

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

!!!rant

I GOT THE JOB!

If you want a career where you can never do enough to make clients happy, choose web development.

Hello devRant! I was introduced to this app by a friend and decided to share my own rants.

Short tale from IT:
*User's laptop full of viruses upon 1 day of use*
User: It came like this! One of your IT guys must have put viruses on it.
Me: Yeah I'm sure that's the case.
*Sees rediculous download history in the last 24 hours*

I'm sure there will be plenty dev rants to come, as I am starting my software development career very soon.

The main reason I'll stick to development as a career for the rest of my life is the freedom.

I can have a 3 hour long lunch with my girlfriend, I can write code at 2am, and usually I can leave for short holidays with just a few days notice.

That freedom is saving the little bits of social life I have.

So there's a recent rant, about making a website work for IE.

I get it, you don't want to make it work for IE because you don't use IE.

But get this: you're not doing the site FOR YOU. You're doing it for the intended user, which is a lot of users that use all kinds of shit. If you don't want to do that, get the fuck out of web development, or from development overall. It's not for you.

I remember when I started my career, I had to make a web app that was intended to be used by, say, 100 people. As a developer I had the best tools for that - cool new 19" monitors, good GPU able to spit out a humongous resolution, and I designed that portal to look great. You know what my superior did then? He took away my 19" monitor and gave me a 14" monitor instead, saying that I became a spoiled brat that totally ignored the customer. I was angry at that, but immediately realized that he was completely right.

It doesn't matter! that it works on your machine. Who the fuck cares about your machine?

Does the software work for the intended user? If not, then you're a shitty developer.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

The software development process

i can’t fix this

*crisis of confidence*
*questions career*
*questions life*

oh it was a typo, cool

The problem is that timeline for a development work is decided by people who have only made PowerPoint presentations in their career ... So they feel everything is as simple as drag n drop 😆

Product manager: "Programmers are limitted to computer programs, that's why app developers can do mobile devices too!"

Me: "Programmers are not limited to computer programs, its a general skill"

Product Manager: "Then why App
Development is a career?"

The hardest thing that I've had to overcome in my career is the fact that I dropped out of college and do not have a degree. In addition to the personal shame and stigma I felt around being a 'dropout', it also brought along with it a raging case of imposter syndrome. The one benefit those feelings gave me was an almost obsessive drive to constantly improve my skills, which in many ways has proved to be an advantage in a competitive and rapidly changing industry.

After a decade of development, I feel like I've finally accepted that I'm more than qualified and capable of being in my position, and that I actually deserve the success that I've earned. I'm still mildly embarrassed about my lack of a degree, and I generally avoid bringing it up around my colleagues, but overall these feelings take a backseat to the confidence I've gained with each passing challenge and new role.

Management and other senior leadership have been really shitty recently, I got showed up in a meeting in front of about 20 of my peers and people myself/them and treated like a fucking child.

So I took a week off, uploaded my CV and today, after about 30 calls with offers, I attended two interviews and got two amazing offers of employment!

More money, less responsibility, better career development, modern company and less stress!

I’m so happy and can’t wait to go into work on Monday morning and tell them all to FUCK OFF!

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

I pretty much just copied code from Google for a good 2 years, following tutorials on Java, until I actually got a basic understanding of wtf I was doing. I could understand the syntax, loops, and conditional statements well, but for some reason I didn't quite understand the concept of an object until I took a class on Java development during my high school career, where it finally 'clicked'.

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

The software development process.

I can't fix this.

*Crisis of confidence*
*Questions career*
*Questions life*

Oh it was a typo, cool.

!rant, advice, !mine

Q: I'm [xx] years old [xyz] professional. Would that be a good idea if I try to change my career to software development right now?

A: Age is mostly doesn't matter. You can learn programming at any age. And, software is everywhere. Every background knowledge will be useful. Your prior knowledge will not be wasted.

But, should you change career?

- YES, if you deeply interested in programming.

- NO, if it's only because you feel there are better opportunities.

It's true that there may be better opportunities. But, without deep interest in the subject, you may struggle to become good software developer. Without being a good developer, your opportunities will be limited and you are likely to regret the decision.

Software development is easier for those who passionate but very difficult for those who doesn't....

When reading your old code, there are two feelings you may have:
1. I was such a dumbass back then
2. I was so thoughtful back then

If its #2, seek a position outside development, like product management, your coding career is probably over.

I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?

Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

They probably should have made me sign a NDA, but I never did.

I was a wee little front-end devloper for a really small dev shop. The lead devloper, who was also the only back-end developer decided to quit. The company was in the middle of a huge project with Rolls-Royce aerospace. I managed to learn ColdFusion and release the application in only a few months. It was basically a giant warranty management application for jet engines. This is one app I wish I can go back and redo because if I had the expierence then that I do now... I feel like it would be so much better. That application allowed me to advance in my career, and 5 years later, I'm working for one of the largest development companies.

Today, I had an interview with a development company that they request all developers to wear suits for work! From 10 to 7 o'clock, and no stable income salary, they work based on projects LOL!

Get into management is not a promotion but a career change.

But I saw a salary bump since I'm working as a software development manager.

I am good as Front End developer, using JavaScript I can do the job, the whole job. Developing, Styling, designing and deploying the web applications is my daily job for few years now...
Today I quit my job for a new position as Back End developer using a new programming language I totally know nothing about it!!!
I am not sure about my decision... but I would like to take the risk....

I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.

But at the same time

I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.

Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.

Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.

Communication.

I started coding at Engineering school (so like 4 yrs ago) and even if there were projects by group, I kinda learned it all the way by myself so I actually learned to code alone. And to resolve my issues alone.

And it costs me a job right after my internship. Was a big problem since I was almost alone (someone worked also on it but they was on multiple project at the same time so not 100% available).

That was one of my biggest fear in my career and one of my biggest challenge too in my personal development.

And so, like 8 months later, I got a job, I'm in a big team and no more problem of communication. That's something I'm very proud of. But I'm still young in my career.

I am a 29 year old with about 10 years of development experience under my belt. I have what most would consider to be a senior level job that pays well for someone who is self taught and never attended college or university.

Recently I have had the urge to obtain a formal education. I don't really have any need or reason to, but the urge is still there.

I know there are a ton of respectable and very talented devs without diplomas. Any of you ever regret not perusing a degree? Would you see any benefit it pursing one late in your career?

My mom told me I can be anything, so I became a masochist.

A.k.a. how I started a career in software development.

My developer career has ended before I even start. After failing to get a job, I have started a business men services company. Maybe in the future, I will include software development to the business. So no more rants from my side at least for one year.

Fuck you all fucking retarded companies who wants junior developers with the same experience of senior developers.

I freaking hate school curriculums, I have only 5 classes this semester, only two of them are career related and one is about QA, I want to focus on my code, projects, things that really matter but instead I have to do Socials homework, learn how to do research papers, learn about marketing. I really hate this. Besides the classes I have on development are extremely light. And I have to pay for this crap

Trying to push my development career towards being a full stack web dev and got a really sick job doing exactly this. Now my company is trying to go Salesforce. 🙁🙁🙁🙁

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

My client is offering me onsite project with 6 months of employmentship/contract/internship in Germany(munich)🍻
He is going to provide me flat, desk, macbook and transportation but final amount is not decided yet.
What all things I should consider while negotiating.
I'm so excited for this offer but no idea what should be expected salary and compensation over there.🤔
Ps: I have experience of 2 years in JavaScript development and I worked with him from almost beginning of my career.

Also shall I start learning germany or dutch?🤔

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

What was your most disappointing moment as a software developer?

Mine was the realization that when you're working for someone, all they want to see is the final product. The people paying you don't give a shit whether you put your braces on a new line, your domain model doesn't call a database directly or if you're applying the best practices. Your teammates do, but the people paying you don't.

People hire you to get the job done, and that job is to solve a problem for someone. Not in the way that's best for you, but in the most effective way for them. Since I realized this, I lost some pride in my work.

Do less development and more living. I’m tired of all of it. I need a career track change. I don’t know how anyone can keep up with all of it.

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )

Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.

Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.

Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.

Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.

Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!

Me: It's an insurance company mate...

The people. I find devs to be (obvious generalization) prone to: not take criticism, not understand the difference between fact and opinion, not understanding that it is perfectly acceptable to change your point of view when presented with new information that will conflict with what you currently believe in. It is a sausage fest brought to you by eons of very fragile male ego in the making, and many other qualities that were very much diluted in a lot of the other fields I have worked on: from retail (shitfest) to import/export all the way to military (another shitfest, for different and rather dangerous reasons).

I have met some amazing people in the field, don't get me wrong, but the quirkiest of mfkers i have met make me believe that maybe I AM the one that does not belong in the field (top kek).

On a more technical side, basic stuff like reading comprehension, attention to detail, the ability to translate complex problemd to pieces and that interconnect among the themselves, the ability to understand the grand mathematical scheme of things, the ability to be patient and despite what the above generalization would have you believe...the ability to communicate with other humans with tact and understanding as well as a spirit of collaboration, etc etc, are definitive traits to consider if you want a career in software development that leads above just being a code monkey.

Shit like that.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

delete unused code according to IDE

unit with context tests now fail

what is a good alternative industry or career instead of software development

I'll give you a few reasons to walk away from a dev's chair:

1. if you want your life to be simple and not challenging, if you just want to go with the flow - choose something else. Dev's life will definitely bring some challenges to your day (and sometimes night, and sometimes - your weekends). Especially if you feel you are a perfectionist, dev life could turn your life into a living hell if not handled with care.

2. If you like to see people smiling, if you love that feeling when you help someone and that someone has a better day thanks to you - choose something else. 1st line SD would probably do, but the further from technology you go - the more smiles (and human faces overall) you'll see.

3. If you prefer person-to-person interaction over to talking to machines - definitely don't be a dev. Go to management, administration or smth else, but development. >90% of the human interaction in this field is arguments and conflicts; ~8% are requests for assistance, and the remaining 2% are shared by saying "hi" to the office administrator and your (semi|)annual reviews with your manager. Not kidding.

4. If you have a personality where you find it difficult to stand your ground and not budge to the pressure/blame game/your managers asking you to stay in late. Like it or not, it happens quite often. Many devs have spoiled the management by budging to their requests/demands to stay for OT/unpaid OT to "fix the mess they have made". That's a blame game right there. And these people stay in and do what the slaves do - work for free because they are yelled at. And then management sees this technique work and (ab|)uses it on other devs. If you can say NO and stick to it, prolly wave with some printed paragraphs of labour law in front that manager's nose - it won't be a problem. But if your consciousness is too troubling - stay away from this field of engineering.

5. If you want to easily "disconnect" from work and go do something else - dev's career might be a problem. Yes, your computer might be shut down/hibernated/suspended after 5pm until 9m the next morning, but your brain will most likely keep trying to solve the problems you were facing. You'll prolly use your own computer to do some research, check some forums, docs, etc. - this is all your free time, this is all your family time donated to your manager (and to your personal knowledge base). Not to mention, all these things you learn will soon enough become obsolete, as new technologies will replace them. So if you'd like to easily "disconnect" after 5pm, doing that as a dev might be too challenging.

I work in a consulting firm.

I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.

I entered as a junior developer.

On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.

On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.

On my third project. i left due to office politics.

Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.

My passion has dried up.

I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

Several years ago I joined the company I currently work for, as a software support person, with the intention of eventually moving toward the development team.

After a few years doing that, I gradually realised that working in the development team for our products didn't seem that appealing after all, so I went for a more technical support role (essentially debugging all the really complicated problems and reporting the bugs to the devs) which I find fascinating - trying to solve these puzzles is an interesting challenge. It can take days, sometimes weeks to get to the bottom of something really inexplicably weird.

As part of this I get to do some internal dev work on the teams projects (nothing that gets used directly by external users though) and have learned loads of things from my boss over the years (even before I joined this team).

It has its frustrating moments of course but I am definitely glad I didn't follow my original intentions of just being a developer on our main products.

Sometimes what you think you want isn't actually what's ideal for you :)

Microsoft FrontPage. At the time I thought it was the stuff. I still cringe when I think that I started my career in web development with that overwrought, underpowered, non-scalable, inefficient, barely functional piece of garbage. May it, and its creators, not Rest In Peace.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Hey everyone, I want to start an IT company that focuses on web and Android applications development. I along with my teammates have planned to take freelancing projects from various websites in the beginning, I was thinking if you guys could guide me or give me some tips to jumpstart my career and the tips may help me in the long run.
Thanks in advance.

PS my team is fairly experienced since we've been working on local projects since 2014.

!Rant; Week40
Honestly, before starting my post secondary education in Computer science I had wanted to become an architect.
Since I was maybe.... 10 years old all the way till the semester before graduating from highschool I was sold on becoming an architect.
I love design; Interior design, art, unique use of colors, architecture. I love systems that looked good and worked as well as they appeared.
Over the winter break of my grade 12 year a friend said to me, "Why don't you become a UI/UX developer? You love technology, software and design, why not go into a career where you practice on all three?".
I was surprised to hear that. It had honestly never really occurred to me since I had always told myself I would become an architect.
I guess that leaves me to where I am now. Still a student, but loving my time learning the details behind software development. I do not regret choosing Development over becoming an Architect.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

Hired by large prestigious company to do web development. Understanding at the outset, I was not a web developer, just wanted my foot in the door with the company. 2 days after orientation, I am placed on a $20 million contract expansion with 3 other developers. All new to this contract. So: new language, new technologies, new team, no leadership, no mentorship. 2 months later after a month of asking for help, I'm asked why I'm not delivering solid code by the project exec and moved to the testing team. Testing team lead introduces me to people on the contract and answers questions or tells me vaguely where to loom. Spend last 4 months building a professional fuck you by making myself a yes man to everyone and their mother. Left the contract and have been getting regular hours with them since (including developing for them). New contract loves me and despite the project execs attempt to torpedo me, I have an excellent reputation and am positioned for career advancement already.

I couldn't give him the finger, but I made him regret lettimg me go. Original team lead has since been released for unrelated HR complaint.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

I started my career 7 years back (at the same company I am currently working) as an Asp.net developer. My company used to work in Microsoft domains back then. 5 years back one of our directors decided to dig into the open-source technologies and move away from Microsoft. And I was the first employee who was assigned to learn python. I thought about switching the company so that my 2 years of asp.net experience doesn't go waste. But I didn't as I started liking python. It was easy, powerful, clean, and same code ran on every fucking platform. And I was introduced to open-source.

Don't know best or worst, but this decision definitely changed my view about software development. I understood that money is not everything, passion is also important. The open-source community runs on passion and dedication. And I love the way it works. The bottom line is, I am happy. And python is beautiful.

Best career decision:
Doing many different jobs before programming, move to capital city to pursue first software development job without money, college degree, place to stay and plans for future.

Worst career choice:
Probably would be staying in Poland despite many opportunities to travel around the world, earn big money or work on really cool things as software developer but I won’t know until I die.

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Heard a story about an interview taken by one of my teammates..

The guy had approx. 9 years of experience of full stack development having current exp in JS based work.

He was stubborn on the condition that he'll work only on JS for the rest of his career and nothing else.

I can't understand people having a raging boner on one language...

P. S : I am a JS developer too!

My parents (mom and grandma) helped me buy my first PC. I had some money saved from mowing lawns and they supplemented the rest. Mom, a library director, got a bunch of DOS and Assembler and BASIC books and encouraged me to teach myself.

That turned into computer camps and helping with tech at the library and school. That turned into a computer science and aerospace scholarship to college where I learned C and Unix.

That turned into a degree in business information systems and a career in web development.

19 more years to go and I can retire.

Yesterday I had a discussion with a freelancing developer

Me: You're already earning good, why are you freelancing?
He: Freelancing is my hobby.
Me: !! Why don't you participate in some open source development? I do.
He: How much do you earn there?
Me: In terms of money? few bucks as donation for 1 coffee in a month.
He: few bucks only !!!
Me: Opensource development can be good for your career. You can get a good job or promotion....
He: I believe in certainty.
Me: Hmmm

So the last 2 devs who I really looked up to and respected at my company peaced out within the last 2 months. So I began seriously chasing offers while the market was hot. The new bigwigs that were brought in at the company knew I was one of the biggest flight risks, so they threw more money at me without me asking for it.

I just got an offer from a company that I really like that matched the salary that I was bumped to - to them it exceeds my expectations because they did not know about this preemptive bump.

Best part is, I applied to this company on my own, the old fashioned way. No recruiter as my hype person or negotiator. I made a good impression on them myself.

No, wait, the real best part - they offered me a senior level role after seeing my code in a day-long working interview (virtual of course). I mean I had to do some shit with RabbitMQ, which I had heard about and seen in passing, but never worked with before, which to my own surprise, I got working in a matter of a few hours. Blows my mind that someone outside of my old company actually thinks I'm good.

No, wait, the REAL real best part: I've spent the last 4 years - a large majority of my professional career - at my current company. I experienced a lot of growth, but they shoehorned me into a development manager role, which bummed me out as i found myself getting farther and farther away from the code. I'm so excited to get a fresh start and go back to spotify + code for 10 hours a day.

The first job I had, asked me to build a simple CRUD functionality in CodeIgniter (It was popular in 2017).

I wasn't able to understand the framework and its ins and outs.
(I only knew Core PHP at that point).

It took me 3 days to finish the task and I got yelled at by the team leader because of it and I almost broke down crying. At that point I was convinced that web development career isn't for me.

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

Just came across a few rants blaming coursework, which doesn't have anything to do with programming. To them I wanna say two things:

1. Programming is modelled on everything other than programming. So it helps to know a bit about that 'everything'.

2. The famous author James Altucher has had 14 careers in 25 years. Not 14 jobs. 14 careers, including photography, authorship, entrepreneurship, finance planning, and more.

So stop bitching and eat your frog/broccoli.

One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.

But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.

I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.

Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.

Fucking piece of shit.

Mobile App Development vs. Web Development as a career? It doesn't matter. Do your job well. Sometimes, you can't control where they put you.

Noob: How do I start my career in web development, do I do a course in Coursera, Udemy, or...
Me: Don't do any of this, use Mozilla MDN web doc.
I really wish the younger me followed this advice when starting up...

@lazyDev reminded me of the time my bid for a project was rejected because I'm a white man. Never mind the fact that I have built my career around data management, visualisation and modelling and the only other competing bid was from someone who had experience in mobile development and little else. I checked up on the company and the project just now, and they've posted the project up again. I've made a bid just like I did before, only this time I've tripled my price. Let's see if they change their minds.

I need to vent or I'm going to fucking explode like a car filled with bombs in motherfucking Iraq...

A couple of months ago I inherited a project in development from our team leader who was the sole developer on it and he was the one who designed every single thing in it.

I was told the project is clean, follows design patterns, and over all the code is readable and easy.

Those were all fucking lies.

See throughout the period he was working on it, I saw some of the code as it was going through some pull requests. I remember asking the dev why he doesn't comment his code? His response was the most fucking condescending shit I've ever heard: "My code is self-documenting"...

Now that I have full control over the code base I realize that he over engineered the shit out of it. If you can think of a software design pattern, it is fucking there. I'm basically looking at what amounts to a personal space given to that dev to experiment with all kind of shit.

Shit is way too over engineered that I'm not only struggling to understand what the hell is going on or how the data flows from the database to the UI and in reverse, I'm now asked to finish the remaining part and release it in 8 weeks.

Everything is done in the most complicated way possible and with no benefits added at all.

Never in my career have I ever had to drag my sorry ass out of bed to work because I always woke up excited to go to work... well except for the last 2 weeks. This project is now taking a mental toll and is borderline driving me crazy.

Oh, did i tell you that since he was the only dev with no accountability whatsoever, we DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT IS LEFT TO BE IMPLEMENTED?

The Project Manager is clueless.. the tickets board is not a source of truth because tickets set to resolved or complete were actually not even close to complete. FUCK THIS SHIT.

For the last week I've been working on 1 single fucking task. JUST 1. The whole code base is a mine field. Everything is done in the most complicated way and it is impossible for me to do anything without either breaking shit ton of other features (Loosely coupled my ass) or getting into fights with all the fucking libraries he decided to use and abuse.

1 whole week and I can't even get the task done. Everyday I have to tell the project manager, face to face, that I'm still struggling with this or that. It's true, but i think the project manager now thinks i am incompetent or just lazy and making excuses.

Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the what and why behind every decision he made with this code. But I'm sick to my stomach now thinking that I have to deal with this tomorrow again.

I don't know if I'll make the deadline. But I'm really worried that when this is released, I'll be the one maintaining that nightmare of a code base.

From now on, if i hear a fucking developer say their code is "self-documenting" I will shove my dick + a dragon dildo + an entire razor gaming keyboard up their ass while I shoot their fucking knees off.

oh... and there are just a couple of pages of documentation... AND THEY ARE NOT COMPLETE.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

Rock, meet hard place. I’m losing my employment again. I’m tired of web development, which I’ve never been super great at, and want to switch to something else. But how do I do that and what do I switch to if this is what I’ve been doing for over 20 years and I have to get a new job soon without time or money to get a whole new education and career path? Getting older also means this old dog is having a harder time learning new tricks. Wish I could just retire early.

So good to see flash finally be put to pastor. Am I sad no flash sucked from a developer standpoint but even more from a business standpoint! Why? Here’s why!

....Yes it was fast in the sense of quickly getting content out and functioning BUT this ment you are at the mercy of Adobe / Macromedia (depending on the timeframe) for support AND mercy of the company whom create the browsers for support.

Meaning your product is fully reliant on others for existence and can easily not exist if one of two other beings choose.

For developers shame on you for