Haven't slept in the last 72 hours, eaten in 24 and shaved or showered in 48+ .. but it is such a delight to move the project to production an hour before the deadline and two hours later to receive an angry phone call from the client because there is 'horrible bug' in the web system - the logo of his company wasn't showing, only the name ... the moron never sent us a logo to begin with, only a MS word document with the company's information and a compressed 200x80 logo in the bottom ...

Me: PHP, please load the images.
PHP: No.
Me: Come on PHP, the deadline is tonight.
PHP: Haha nope.
Me: What if I swap the libraries?
PHP: Still no.
Me: What if I add a symlink?
PHP: No. And also I hate you.
Me: *gives up and sends an email to the client saying we have to delay the release*
PHP: lololol jk here's the images haha
Me: :/

About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

😎 = me, 💩 = client

💩: "I must emphasize that I'm on a tight schedule. I need this done in 2 weeks."
😎: I cut some features and take the job.
As agreed, I send a progress report at the end of the week to get feedback.
💩: *nothing*
😎: He must be busy... I'll call him if he doesn't reply in a few days.
💩: *doesn't answer call*
😎: Time running out, still no feedback, I assume everything is fine and finish it a day before the deadline. Suddenly:
💩: "Hi, how's the project going?"
😎: "...good... WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???"
💩: "Oh, I went on a quick vacation"
😎: *wants to die a quick and painless death*
"There's only like a day left..."
💩: "Right... Soo, here's the feedback you asked for"
*dumps 4 paragraphs of stupid nitpicking on me (rants following)*
😎: *wants client to die a slow and painful death*

The beginning of my freelancing time. I was so naive. Didn't even used contracts...

This one client wanted a website with 2 specific features until a certain time. It should look nice, but only the features functionality was defined. All seemed reasonable at first.

I delivered 2 weeks before the deadline. The client was furious, as it didn't look like they imagined. They wrote me 8 lengthy emails with very fractioned feedback. It was becoming unreasonable.

But hey, I'm a newbie in this business. I have to make myself a name, I thought.
Oh was I naive....

This whole project went on for 2 more months. The client was unhappy with every change and 2-5 emails a day with new demands were coming in. I was changing things they wanted done 2 days ago, because they changed their mind.

Then they started to get personal. They were insulting me and even my family. My self-confidence dropped to an all-time low.

In the end I just sent them all the code for free and went to therapy.

BTW: this was also my most important experience, as things went up hill from then on. As Yoda once said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

BOSS: That icon is not centered, move it slightly to the right
ME: You're wrong, I can garantee you it's centered (it was centered)
BOSS: Well, my eyes are telling me it's not, so move it to the right
ME: (faking increasing margin)
ME: Ok, now it's 10 px to the right, what do you think?
BOSS: it's a great result, now it's perfect! Cant you see the difference?
ME: Absolutely, you do are the real designer here...
BOSS: Ohhh, stop complaining, you'll learn one day...
ME: Yep.

Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.

Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.

Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.

Didn't know jackshit about twilio.

Meeting with client:

Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*

Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

So was first day at new job ... Boss takes me around meeting everyone. One employee stuck editing file by typing in new records data, calls boss for help.

Boss to me: "I like to get handsy with data from time to time. "
*me smiling, watch how he copies and paste the new records*
ME to boss:"why don't you just write the script to update all the records?"
Boss:"I don't trust the automation of input. "
Me:" what about human error?"
*crowd of other employees gather around awaiting answer*
Boss:"we include margin of errors in our disclaimer to the client... "
*He hears himself*
Boss:"... and we bill by the hour why would we work faster for less money?"

*me grinning, going to remember that line next time I need extension of deadline*

Me*murmurs*:" Master has presented dobby with a sock"
*Girl in next cubicle snickers clearly caught the reference "

Going to love it here.

OG content

Deadline was 2 days ago.. Managment pissed off, bugging me every 2 minutes, until they get a call from the client asking to leave me alone to do my job. Awesome feeling..

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

Boss: "I know we just finished the first part of Client A's project but they also want this extra work done that wasn't in the contract."
Me: "Can't do it without pushing back Client B's work"
Boss: "Well we don't want that. We need to hit that deadline."
Me: "Cool"
Boss: "But Client A was really hoping this new feature which wasn't in the scope would be in."
Me: "Then we're pushing back Client B's work"
<<loop continues >>

My very first meeting with a new client:

Client: We need to launch in 6 weeks. Do you think you can hit that deadline?

Me: Do you have a spec for what needs to be done?

Client: No we don't.

Me:

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

Me: Whats the deadline?

Client: Asap

Me: And when are we getting paid?

Client: 30 days after you give us the invoice ☺

So we where given a project with a deadline already set behind our backs and we have to give our deadline despite not knowing wtf we have to do exactly ...

They asked us to don't ask too much time because the budget can't afford too much time...

I'm here thinking: WTF?!
THEY PASSED A FUCKING DEADLINE AND PRICES TO THE FUCKING CLIENT WITHOUT ASKING ANY! ANY MOTHERFUCKING DEV ABOUT IT!!!

We asked them so many fucking questions on the first meeting that they were fucking baffled about everything but kept playing cool like "well, this project is already set and we are gonna have to deal with it"

Bunch of motherfucking stupid cock suckers , go die agonizing on your own vomit and if ask my help I'm gonna answer "well, you gonna have to deal with it because you are already fucked"

About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.

A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.

We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.

Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.

He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.

He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.

I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.

One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

Me:, I built you this beautiful site it's super modular, it's really straight forward
Client: urm we aren't tech people if you could..... Set up all the pages for us using the modules so we can just input the data
Me: 😡 yes I could do that or you could take 5, minutes to learn this system. It's simple 😡 see that title there "left image right title module" . I've done the sample for the templates. So if you need to you can duplicate it! There's even a duplicate button!
Client: can you do it I don't want to waste time learning it right now since we are on a tight deadline

Me in head: fuck off you supreme bitch you try to get my mates dad fired! Now I've done you this huge favour getting you out of the shit 😡 and you won't take 5 minutes to just look at the admin section your old site was wix ffs.
My next move(not yet done): here is a word document it outlines what you need to do 😐

If after this see asks again I'm asking to work with someone else or quitting the project

TLDR: Fuck you, Client A

1. Want to change the business flow during UAT and decide the deadline to be less than 4 weeks, even though that's how the business flow stated on the docs
2. He threatening us not to pay if it isn't done, even though he's not the one paying us
3. He said time isn't a problem because he can provide a table and chair that is put in front of his table

Fuck you, Client A

Manager Logic: The project is behind, we have brought on additional managers to satisfy the client. 😲 The fuck is a manager going to do? "Meetings! We need more meetings to ensure the deadline is met."

I shall refer to the client as cunt for the purposes of this rant. All design work signed off. Near completion of project, cunt sends an email moving stuff around and changing the design. I send the cunt an email telling him that I will review his requests and send a quote through detailing cost implications and extra time added to his deadline to complete. Cunt says he wasn't aware there would be extra costs. I refer the cunt back to the quote and contract which clearly distinguishes the design phase and build phase explaining change control. Not heard back from said cunt.

Client: Hi Johny, we finnaly finished design of our eshop. Half of year of hard work. Can you code it in week? We have deadline. :(
I: Sure, i can code in speed of light.
Client: How about money?
I: Tripple of sallary.
Client: What?
I: My sallary also grow in speed of light.

Some clients can not understand they can't throw shits on my head. Take it, hire someone else or stop giving mi impossible conditions.

When you work your ass off to meet the deadline and once you miraculously make it, the client decides to wait with the launch for a few more weeks.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

So today was shite. I get done with classes for today after going to work in the morning( college student) and I get a phone call. SURPRISE! We have a client meeting in twenty minutes.

My class runs from 5-9 and the meeting was scheduled at 7:30. I was let out early thank god. Then made sure that we had deliverables for the project running and ready to go.

Meeting with the client went well and he was pleased with my progress.

Now I have been the only one developing any sort of deliverable for this website. It originally started out with three people. The main developer will call him Cunt and a front-end dev that isn't on the project anymore.

FUCKING CUNT DECIDED TO COME AT ME FOR SAYING THAT THERE WAS A MISCOMMUNICATION ERROR AND ONE OF THE TASKS WASNT FINISHED. THEN CUNT ASKED IF I HAD ALL OF THE FRONT DEVS PAGES TO WHICH I SIGHED YES. CUNT FUCKFACE PROCEEDED TO EDUCATE ME ON HOW TO TALK TO OTHER DEVS AND NOT MAKE CRITICIZE HER CODE. UM CUNT YOU HAVENT COMMUNICATED WITH HER FOR THE THREE MONTHS IVE BEEN ON THIS PROJECT. AND YOUVE CONSTANTLY AVOIDED BEING IN THE OFFICE WHEN ANYONE IS PRESENT AND EVEN SHOOED HER AWAY. THE FACT THAT CUNT ISNT FIRED IS BECAUSE I TOOK LEAD ON HIS PROJECT AND HAVE MAKING EVERY DEADLINE FOR THIS AND OTHER PROJECTS.

*breaths*

Moral of this. Don't be a CUNT!

How to get six pack Abs (Developer Version):

1. Do 20 bicycle crunches whenever your test fails.
2. 30 seconds plank whenever there's a issue assigned to you for your code.
3. 50 mountain climbers whenever the code breaks while you are giving a demo to client/boss.
4. 12 jack-knife sit-ups whenever you miss your deadline for more than 2 weeks.

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

When your client wants you to build complete amazon in a week.

After creating a 19 page survey in 1 day deadline client says this to me:

"We have a small change in the website. We don't like the page 8 anymore. Could you please remove that and rearrange the pages after that?"

😃
😃
😃
🙂🔫

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

When the stupid client is unable to explain the requirements correctly the first time and drops a frickin bomb 3 days before the deadline and boss still want to "meet" the deadline.

Me: "if this goes on, I will be dead on the line by the deadline"

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

Client: "My proposed deadline can't be met? Maybe we should go to your office and sit right next to you to see how you work."
Yeah right, that surely speeds things up. Even if the ever-changing requirements require at least triple of the time allowed.

Never accept a deadline you think you can can make if you work really hard. Just to please a client.

- Be me (Dev)
- Develop website for client that has an online payment integration.
- Notice there is no one for QA and testing.
- Try to raise voice about it but get shot down by management.
- Get order to push the project to production (because the deadline has arrived, therefore the project must be ready)
- Production performance has an error margin of 15% (customers getting their card over/under charged)
- Get blamed and flamed for everything cuz well, its all the dev's fault.

FML

Client sends multiple emails claiming that Im delaying n work and that he has a deadline. (In 4 hours)

I checked his revised briefing and started work in hopes of finishing it under my own deadline of 3 hours.

Received another email from my client telling me that the briefing is incomplete and that he will send me the final briefing tonight -_-

What the fuck man?

How many times have I ask my boss about the new project's deadline only to get "it has to be done by yesterday". Damn, boss, if you know, that we are occupied, then don't get a new project, only to blame the coder for promising an impossible deadline to the client!

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

To client: "I will have the project ready in 4 weeks" - starts work on the last weekend before the deadline.
Why do I always do that?

Boss quoted Yoda today, to my answer to if I would be able to deliver today a freaking huge project I've been working on, 14 days before the rescheduled deadline I was given, just because the client is pissed with them.

Worst Project: Project Managers that don't trust their team.

Our PM before didn't want the developers included in the client meetup because she said the developers wouldn't understand anything in the meeting.

A month after the proposed deadline after, I free up my time (I'm handling different projects), and I decide to speak with the client to see where thing went south.

Apparently, what our PM promised/understood is far off from what the client wanted.

The project was a simple "show the drivers where they need to go next" mobile app while she promised a "Traveling Salesman Problem"-esque solution.

Client came in this morning. Not even angry about the results so far even though deadline was a month ago. It's good to see a client as passionate about his product as this one

Client wants to deliver August 1st. Bust our butts to make the deadline. Changes the entire layout on July 29th and still expected 8/1 release. Blames us for missing the deadline.

This is the worst day in a while...

- The weather sucks
- I'm out of coffee
- I'm late for work
- I have a deadline very close... that was put there by my coworker who made promises to a client without my knowledge and without knowing the real state of the project...

The gif below explains pretty well how bad I feel today and how much it hurts.

You utter &@£#s. You give rediclious promises to clients without consulting Devs how long items will take, when issues with project are clarified with client months in advance you turn around week before last and do a massive U turn. Expect junior developers to be masters of Photoshop, flash, server side technologies and to get around and code the front end. Then developers who are putting in the over time already you demand a massive load of overtime extra and threaten us if we don't meet the deadline?! Sat here blood boiling. last guy here litrually rage quit because of issues like this and #&## I think I'm going to too, so hard to try stay professional! ##&##&# I have had it!

When theres no deadline and then suddenly... "I need a solid build by tomorrow for the client".

New discovery: The best way to deal with tight deadlines is to work no more than 4 hours a day, sleep a lot, vibe a lot and using the newfound energy make the client move the deadline.

Got a client who Always delays payment (~2weeks) and is rude and ignores me after I deliver. As a freelancer and Student I rely on the money and on my time. So I will deliver tomorrow the next project, guy promised he will pay on monday, but I count with weeks again. I have developed a locking mechanism so I can lock the whole Software from my Cloud in case he wont pay on time. What do you guys think?

Most unrealistic deadline I've had?

The client gives us a project with A 3-month deadline. All good, at first.

3 days later they told us that they're cutting out the funding and they gave us two options: Either stop the project right away and get paid for the work so far, or somehow finish the project in 7 days and get paid for the 10 days worth of work.

My idiot boss chose the second.

Saturdays and Sundays were declared working days, everyone screaming at each other, devs running around scrambling code to make the webpage render and keep it responsive.

Forget unit or automation testing, we only did not null and undefined testing and submitted the project.

Yeah, I hauled my ass out of the company just after that.

Clients wants a complete reworked of their e-commerce website - sure will cost X amount.

It needs to be done before black Friday - nope

So I fucked up.. I assigned a small wordpress/woocommerce project to myself to avoid my team members from wasting their time on it. I had a two month deadline, which was insane, so I kept postponing it until I forgot about it. Today my client contacted me by email to ask if she could preview the site before our meeting in two weeks..
QUE BULLSHIT EXCUSE:

- “I had to migrate to another server because of some access/permission issues with my current host. They gave me their word that they would be done with the migration thursday or friday, then I have to correct some permissions and database settings, and the DNS update may take up to 24 hours to finish. I will personally make sure that you know as soon as the migration has finished.”

- “Thank you so much! I feel so safe having assigned your company the job! I am really looking forward to our meeting and seeing the site!”

Oh and did I mention that deadline was around 65 days ago? And that I haven’t even started yet? I know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 days..

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

PM: stressed out and during the briefing, keep reminding us how urgent is this project:

"This project need to go live this Friday"
"We only have 5 days to complete this."
"Client need this campaign to go live as soon as possible"
"We need to have a quick catch up every morning to ensure we are on track"

I have been working in digital agency for 7 years. When you heard something like this, there's a high chance that the deadline is a FAKE deadline. Very likely it will be delayed for another few days.

PM: "so I need you to deploy this new application to some new server. The deadline is in 2 days"

Me: "yeah I can do that, is the application ready and has been tested? Have the servers been set up properly by the IT guy?"

PM: "yep, all is set up and good"

Couple of hours later I try locating the server, only to find it didn't exist.

Me: "the server you mentioned earlier, is doesn't appear to exist?"

PM: "it definitely does, IT guy said he set it all up"

I dig around a little more, but this server definitely doesn't exist. The IT guy was on holiday for a week, so we had to wait for him to get back; delaying the release. On the morning the IT guy got back,

PM: " I though you said you set up that server for the application, we've had to delay it now!"

IT: "I just set it up this morning. Like I said in the email to you before I Ieft, I will have to do it first thing when I get back after holiday"

Turns out the PM had asked the IT guy to spin up the server, but never bothered to read his response. Assuming it was done he told the client he'd have it deployed in a couple of days.

The application was deployed successfully later that day, but not before the PM blamed us two for its delay.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

When your team's hard work receive such a mail from the client and still your Project Manager treats you like shit :|

A little back story

Me (hybrid app guy), backend (php api) guy and ui guy (html-css) worked fuckin day and night, to chase the fuckin less than 10 days deadline for this App

We hard to create the App for all 4 platforms including win mobile and blackberry (god bless UI guy and me :|) ~ 2013

Those were the coolest days of our lives , we had a super blast - working (slogging) + drinking + just having fun cursing + not giving fuck to anything and anyone + more drinking..

Cool thing is, our client was in an impression that full backend and front end TEAM is working on this App 😀

This mail still makes us laugh
"professional team" 😁😂

Unfortunately I got paid only half of the salary for next month and left the company shortly
(because official company timing was from 10:00 AM or else half day paycut and I am a night guy, I used to come at around 12:00 noon)

useless fucking client bastards. i sent an email to all clients 2 months ago about gdpr and the impending deadline. Explaining that they need to update privacy and check webforms and internal procedures etc are compliant. I said I would help them implement any changes to their respective sites. Heard nothing from these fuckers... except this morning an email “what does the new gdpr mean for our website?”
FUCK OFF AND READ MY EMAIL, FOLLOW THE LINKS DO THE RESEARCH AND FUCKING SORT YOUR CUNTING SELVES OUT, I AM NOT YOUR FUCKING LAWYER.

Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.

Developers: Sure.

After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.

Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.

Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.

Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?

Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.

Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.

Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.

Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.

Boss: we can't accept your MR request until you fix the problems we highlighted, everything is blocked and the client is getting angry

My brother in Christ, I understand your concerns but I need you to understand: you decided to block a perfectly working and documented PR because you didn't like having "<!-- -->" in a couple of HTML files and menial bullshit like that.
It may not be the most elegant thing ever but don't put on me the responsibility of your blocks or I'll smash your face with the coffee mugs I've used to work until midnight so that you could deliver the product in time after someone else delayed the deadline twice already.
Thanks and get fucked ASAP.

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

I can imagine the client throwing a dart at a calendar and saying "This will be the deadline!"

As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.

So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.

I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.

What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.

So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.

We are all good now :)

In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)

But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.

Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.

P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)

Got yelled at because super important feature for a client was two days overdue.
The kicker is that they never even talked to IT about the feature let alone give us a decent spec/assignment.

So I guess my most unrealistic deadline was the day before yesterday...

This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.

Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.

Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.

Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.

Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.

At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....

So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...

So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...

It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)

Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs

And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window

when the client treats your estimated time on a work as a deadline.. fucking hate it

Client asked for time line for website I told them 6 weeks from moment they provide design (I had other active projects and would have to split time between them ) . For next 4 weeks they would send me design and then after few hours tell me to stop working and that they are going to change design.
After 4 weeks they sent me final version of the design and informed me that it needs to be done in next 2 weeks. We expected 10 more websites from them and it was 7-8 pages so I put other projects on hold and finished it in around week and sent link to them for review, 2 days before deadline they informed me that there are around 20 pages missing pages that are not in final version of design but only in version xx sent more than 2 weeks ago. In next day and half me and 2 other developers had more then 20 hours each to finish it on time

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

Email from Client:
Hi, we'd like this and that done to our website. I know you aren't finished building it yet but I believe we can change what we agreed upon.

Me:
Let me see what I can do, I'll try squeeze in some of those changes but the bigger ones I'll have to check with the boss.

Boss:
Yes, we can do those changes at an additional cost, quote them $1000 (example)

Me to client:
Hi there, yes we can do that but we have to charge $1000 for those additional changes that weren't initially agreed upon, and we'll need an extra week on the deadline.

Client:
Oh no no no... I know how this works. If I wanted to do this myself I would. You will do the work and get it finished in time, and I will only pay you $200 for it. I don't like being scolded for money.

Me and Boss: Yeah.... this isn't working out. Please find a new company to deal with.

Conclusion, this client was always giving us problems and telling us how we should be charging and how we should be doing our jobs. It was so satisfying to just them let go.

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

* 1 day of requesting the feature, deadline not for a while*

switch{
case 1:

Manager: How's the new feature going?

Me: I've done a bit of the front end. Here's how it will look.

Manager: Oh great it's done! Does it do ABC as the client requested? Does it also do XYZ that I just thought about this second?

Me: eh this is just part of the front end, I haven't even connected it to the backend - I haven't even started the backend.

case 2:
Manager: How's the new feature going?

Me: I've done a bit of the back end.

Manager: ok. Can I look?

Me: we'll it's just code... *shows them the code*

Manager: oh... so it's nothing really. Call me when it is done
}

So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?

I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.

The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?

I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)

My life is totally fine. Right?

Another unrealistic deadline from our non-software developer PM.
He agreed to client upon delivery of a complete system consisting of 4 micro-services in Node and 4 front-end Angular application integrated with each micro-service accordingly.

Project Delivery date is December 31. I have told him It is impossible to deliver complete solution on December 31.
Now he wants me & my team to come to office even on weekends.
What an idiot !

I am not sure which 24 hours was the craziest one, but I will pick 2.

This one happened just a few weeks after I started working for the one and only company I have ever worked for. The huge-ass multi-tenant website stopped working. There was out of memory exception and nobody knew what is going on. I was still very new and knew shit about how it worked + plus my PHP knowledge was limited back then. Everyone was looking for the culprit but with no luck. Then the next day I finally managed to find a fucking infinite loop in our weather plugin.

We were working on a moderately big project for a client. There was a lot of work lately (on different projects) and we were *very* behind schedule on this one. Deadline? You guessed it - tomorrow. What was worse is that we couldnt move it any further, becuase we already did once before. So I had to work for about 20 hours straight to kinda finish the work. Worst part? Client turned out to be moron and half-scammer, so they are not our client anymore and the project was never deployed to production. Never again.

Working as a part time student on an app and until now I thought I was the king of software development.
Well, fuck me and my high horse.

Today the stuff we send from the client to the server didn't arrive, so I asked the backend guy if he could take a look at the packages arriving. He did and told me the data was messed up.
I did only design stuff the last week or so, so I was very confused. After reverting back to one old commit after the other it struck me.
I still don't know how such a dumb mistake could have happened to me, the king of Android apps, but apparently I replaced all occurrences of a specific keyword in just the strings and comments of the whole project. Key became KeyList, so instead of <Keys> my XML contained <KeyList> which made no goddamn sense whatsoever.
Did I mention that we have an important deadline tomorrow? Yeah...

So now I leaned my lesson. Never trust XML.

JK I'm dumb. That's the lesson here.

Working on photo contest site, no design, no specification. 2 weeks until deadline.

CEO: Deadline is one week earlier, and client wants to have video uploads and automatic facebook share too.
Me: We don't even have a contract and design to work with yet.
CEO: No worries, the contract will be signed by the time you finished the website.

Site done in 1 week, including weekend days and overtime. Production on client's server as asked by CEO.

3 weeks later...

Me: So van you pay the overtime I worked?
CEO: Sorry client not payed and says they don't like the end product. I can't afford to pay you overtime.

2 days later.
CEO: The online department is lossy so you have to work harder in the next month, we have 3 sites to be done.

Me: Do we have the contracts?
CEO: No worries...

When you deliver that feature after the deadline and the client doesn't care anymore.

So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".

This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.

So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"

Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"

Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"

Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"

Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???

He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...

Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!

Let's hope it's not more of the same!

P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.

Client to Company :This is a complex 1 month approx task. We need this feature

Company forgets to tell employee developer about this.

Meanwhile Client to Company after one month.

Client to Company: We are just 1 week away from the deadline, what's the status of the work in progress.

Company to client : It's going well, we will get back to you on the day of demo.

Company to employee developer: We have this complex task, you need to complete it in 1 week.

Developer mental status gets fucked with over burdened hectic work which has to be completed in a week having no idea of fuck up by the company which already had the information of the task one month ago but just forgot to tell the developer.

I just overestimated the fuck out of some tasks because I knew the client would come back last minute and cut the deadline in half.

2 days later they do just that, luckily I overestimated the work so now it's all good.

The annoying thing is that they keep doing this, but since I work for an agency I have no power to drop this client since they give us a lot of work, so that sucks

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

When I got the current job I started to work on an Android app that a coworker which left the company was doing.
The app was ready at about 40% and was barely usable, it lacked a lot of features and multithreading so with a huge amount of data it used to crash (Android doesn't allow you to make the app freeze for more than 2-3 seconds, it considers that the app is not responding anymore).
After a week or two the work to do was still huge, but one day one of my coworkers came in and ask me if I was able to release a beta for a client the same day... Unexpected deadline.
I spent 8 hour fixing as many bugs as possible and adding multithreading in the most weak parts.
I did it but it was so stressful and the result wasn't even great. In fact I finished the stable version 7 months later.

I have a huge deadline coming up. It's important for the future of the project that we show a mostly complete version of the product to the client that day.

They ask if I can do it. I say yes, but it will be very taxing. And by taxing, I mean it's going to use up the remaining energy and motivation I have for anything. And I've made that clear to everyone.

Coworker:
Here's an unrelated task that will take 6.75 hours of your day and I will hound the boss until he makes you do it. And I am going to send you messages after work that foreshadow another day of doing things that aren't deadline related.

So when deadline day comes around and I have to present something that has two work days of work missing, they're going to look at me like I failed. And not that I had two of my days stolen from me doing miscellaneous chores that could have waited.

I don't understand how is possible that programmers today are developing applications that are storing plain password in the database.

I know it's kinda boring topic since everybody here is talking about it this week, but it's really confusing to me.

Every now and then some DB gets hacked, millions of passwords are leaked and then you have developers, who should be smart and logical people, who decide to do that.

Ok, maybe the project deadline was close or something similar, but I think there is no excuse for something like that. No matter how close or behind deadline project is, you should always be able to explain to your boss/client what could happen.

I work in a dev company. One of our clients hired us to help them out as their devs are failing with their deadlines.

I had to expose app services via an api. I did it. Client company devs didn't like the way I did it as I rewrote their datamodels and declared them as api-use-only. I was demanded to return bkend services' data structures.

I didn't agree and waited until deadline to submit my code.

Now they are honestly thanking me for what I did as I've saved them from a forever-mutating-api-and-angry-integration-customers hell.

Not sure whether should I be happy or worried. I forced my solution onto them. It's not proffessional. But yhe customer is happier now than it would've been.

What do you do in such situations?

When your client talks trash, and the deadline is near.
Just designer problems 😶

PM pushed me to finish all of my tasks last friday because he told me we have a demo with the client this week. He even asked me to OT.

It is already fucking thursday and I am still waiting. I haven't heard any updates from our PM.

I feel pissed because I did my task crudely due to "imaginary deadlines" imposed by this son of a bitch PM. I could have written a better code if I have this week as the deadline instead.

Working on a 92 hr estimated task for a client. Client adds 3 urgent tickets from another unrelated task and asks to finish those ASAP.
I do my best and it takes 3 full days to to complete the urgent tickets.
Today I receive a mail from the project manager stating how I'm behind the deadline on the original task and how I should complete it within the deadline date however possible.
Shaking my head.

Hi all,

This might be a long post so bear with me. I work for a company and there was a project for a huge client. I'm junior in skill (been programming for about two years) but my job title doesn't reflect that. Anyways, I got the design about a month ago but I was on deadline for two other projects so I couldn't pick it up until last week Wed. Ironically, that's when the final design was delivered & told me it was due next week Wednesday. I built it as fast as I could. Finished mobile but for some reason, this last part for desktop just wasn't working out and it just so happens to be the most crucial part of the piece. (I was also sick the entire time and didn't sleep for the last two days nor did I eat). I was supposed to demo it yesterday but I still needed to make a few updates and the project coordinator took me off the project & gave it to a dev with more experience. This has never happened to me before. I'd go as far as to say this is my first big fuck up. I've always delivered on deadline and I'm taking this pretty hard. Has anyone been in similar situations? What do I do? Any advice?

so this client asked me to build a fully functional financial education app for kids that she needed to present as a project in the next two days...

I did attempt it and it felt good but failed to meet the deadline cos I almost died

Client: Can you give me an estimate of how long this change will take?

Me: (meets with other devs for a good estimate, around 2.5 weeks, and gives to client)

Client: Great. Oh by the way we have a one week deadline.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

Two day off from the deadline, stressed asf- haven't really slept in two days and client is becoming impatient... My back hurt.

Most hours of work at once?
A coworker and I did an allnighter because our boss gave us a tight fucking deadline (luckily that almost never happens).
We started normal work at 06:30 and were finisted at 09:30 the next day. Summed up break time: 1h 15m.
I remember that my coworker went home after that but fell asleep in the train and woke up 2 hours later half across the country. Poor soul.
When he left, my boss just arrived in the office and I had to stay 2 hours longer to fix bugs we implemented during our caffeine overdose...

It later turned out that the whole mess was useless, because the client put the project on hold. That was about 8 months ago, or 12, I don't even remember.

me: I'll start making the site today. To make sure the project is up and go by the deadline, I need you to send some missing content. Please find attached a spreadsheet (with perfectly tought cella :) ) abot the missing content.
-- weeks go by, several mailing and phoning. site is ready. content zero --
client: why is the site not public yet?! you promised a deadline! I'm nőt paying, if it is not ready by tomorrow.
me: ok just send the content I requested.
-- 2days pass. no content --
client: thats it. i'm not payin'. here is the content ( much mire than designed ) upload it and we are done here!!!

Product owner and scrum master prioritized a not important user story. We are just new to the assigned team without proper turn over, KT, vague user story(one sentence) and no time to prepare our local environments. Then after sprint 1 the client wants a demo by next month but the PO and SM had prioritized the wrong user story so now they are pressuring the developers on finishing fast the other correct important user story. They mismanaged it and now they say the development was slow thus blaming us?! WTF. We hit the deadline of the first user story with unpaid overtimes.

The other PO was always asking us on how to fast track the development lol.

I'll tell them all their faults in the next meeting. As usual we are just high paid corporate slaves with golden hand cuffs trying to escape the rat race.

Spend literally two days trying to figure out why I have a 2 hour offset in my timezones for a lamp web app. This isn't even close to my first timezone rodeo.

Check logs, reset Apache/MySQL/PHP timezones in like 100 places. Use 3rd party server side and client side timezone libraries. Moment.js you say? Shit works like a charm... but is, of course, still two hours off.

MySQL is right. PHP is right. Apache is right. PHP libs are in place. Finally convert the entire damn project to use epoch time because I have a deadline, I have no more time to read backwater AWS docs and try to figure out why the hell this Ubuntu EC2 is fucked up, and I literally cannot figure out why in the hell the damn clock is off.

Several days later notice a variable in the main .config file... right in root... 2 hour timezone offset.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

when a client demands that a deadline be moved to an earlier date...

me:

The moment a client tells you to decide what they should pay and there is no deadline. I am amazed, really.

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

Have you ever committed to an impossible deadline simply because your client would have been completely FUCKED if you didn't?

this would have been remotely doable if the existing code base that was handed over was just mildly reasonable. But how could this shit ever have worked the first time?!

Gilfoyle would just have said no. Why can't I be more like Gilfoyle >.<

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

Our approach is to get a loose feel for what the client wants, lift some visuals from Theme Forest then spend the next few weeks persuading the client to use our crappy server rather than their preferred AWS solution. Then once the project is behind schedule we break the work down into disparate tasks each of which gets a single line brief from the PM (such as 'create admin' or 'do css'). These then get assigned to different devs with no consideration of their skillset. The PM is available for 10 mins every day to answer queries, the rest of the time our devs are expected to work autonomously. Meanwhile we'll tell the client that we're back on schedule and arrange a demo for an impossibly short deadline. We have the mantra ”dont worry about it” which the PM uses to quash any dev's concerns up until the day before the deadline at which point we'll swap some devs on to unrelated work whilst others concentrate on getting "just the pages the client wants to see looking right" (we have a policy of making it look like it works before it actually does.) Following the demo we will announce all the missing features we had forgotten about from the initial undocumented agreement and set the project aside whilst we service another client.

When you have a deadline in 2 days for a huge project and the cunt of a client keeps giving you other random assignments

This happened a few years ago. We started this new project that was estimated to take 3 devs around 5 months to complete. We had a meeting where the client, the project manager, me and two other devs were present. When the client asked if we were still on track to complete the project by the end of September, the PM just said “yeah we are totally on track, no worries”.
Me and the other devs looked us straight in the eyes and nonverbally agreed that this guy has to be sniffing glue or something. For context: it was August.
After the meeting we immediately raised our concerns with him and our boss. The deadline was shifted and a freelancer was hired to assist. The PM quit shortly after and a way more competent guy took over. But the damage was already done.
In the end we finished that project in February or March the following year. Client was still happy but this shit triggered a whole clusterfuck of a year. Other projects were lagging behind because of this and we had to push out project after project that had accumulated in our backlog.

Hey fellas,

So, our company is taking up some consulting projects to survive this pandemic since our main business is a little down. I've been assigned to a RN project and the client company has 2 other devs. Those devs are so incompetent that they don't even know the basics of JS and RN. They don't even understand how to split code into components and make it resusable. Okay, fine they must be new devs. I get it but can't you even fucking follow the instructions and guidelines that I'm giving you!! The code is very bad with a lot of pitfalls. In the first 2 weeks I reviewed all the code they were writing and gave comments for improvements. They didn't even care to do that! Now I've given up!

Every single day looking at the codebase makes me sick and not want to touch anything. I've practically started hating the project. How do I deal with this situation? Now, we are reaching the deadline and they're piling up the work on me. Any suggestions on how to handle this?

Thanks!

P.S: This is my first actual rant!

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

Client asks for a thing. Cancels meeting. Says I have all the details and it should be easy...

Did I mention there's a deadline. You bet it's ridiculously soon.

Client: Sure, take your time. It has to be done yesterday.

How do you feel when in the middle of tight deadline, your client calls you and tells you that he has changed some little detailing in the requirements, like naming, color schema etc. This needs to be done within the deadline. You tell yes and tell him to send email.
After receiving the email, you find out it's not little it's bag of new features listing.
Now either you have to overwork or let the client go....

Long time no see devRant. This rant is dedicated to an MQTT implementation we use. Mosquitto, mqtt.js - FUCK YOU.

I spent the last fucking 30+ hours trying to find why the bloody fuck the stupid server / client won't connect to the shitty mqtt broker. From changing all possible config, enabling & disabling specific code nothing abso-fucking-lutely works.

But then it will randomly decide to connect to the fucking broker, not causing any issues at all. And each fucking day when I wake up again and think to myself: oh today I can actually leave when it is still somewhat bright outside - NOPE. Because guess what? The fucking shitty abomination doesn't work anymore.

I just love these types of problems that are almost impossible to debug because the only logs you get is: "SERVER disconnected". It's impossible to get a proper reason out of this shit show, it's just turned into randomly guessing what the error could be (and especially where it could be).

And each time I got it to work, tested it and let the testing team know that they can start testing it will just stab me in the back and be like "fuck you, I'm not working any more". Luckily it's not like the deadline is next week... otherwise work is great, trust me.

Another case of "couldn't you've told me BEFORE I started working on this?"

I'm making a training in Unity3D for a client, and they want it to integrate with their learning management system (LMS).
I made a simple SCORM package that gets the userID and then uses a custom URL scheme to launch the app with the user data from the LMS.

Tested on multiple platforms, all works perfectly fine.

Than, during a meeting, some says they "can't download it". I ask "which browser are you using?" and he says "I'm using the LMS app."
... the LMS has an APP?

So I start figuring out ways to launch the system default browser from within a app's embedded browser, and nothing so far has worked.
target=_system, nope.
all kinds of weird javascript shenanigans, but the LMS APP browser just blocks everything.
Probably to protect students from malicious software that could be injected in courses, but now I'm stuck trying to find a workaround for this too.

But what sucks the most is that this happened DAYS BEFORE THE DEADLINE!
Well, at least the deadline won't be my problem anymore soon.

If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.

The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.

Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).

The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.

To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.

Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.

Having to work until past midnight on some shitty site amends because one of our account managers made a promise to client with a deadline attached, but then didn't bother getting any Dev time booked for the task.

I found out about this the day before the deadline when I was about to finish work for the day. I was not amused...

The 'farewell great manager Jim' party on Monday.

The [insert name of a department] Christmas party on Wednesday, which you shouldn't miss because they want the company to be more integrated.

The [insert name of your department] Christmas party on Friday, which is separate from the other party because they want the company to be more inte... wait.

The hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, because coding all night for free to create buzz around the company's name is always fun.

The team meeting where the product manager presents all the shinny new things they're thinking about presenting to the client while our deadline is still a couple of weeks away. "And the engineering team knows exactly what to do, right?" Yeah, sure, if you say so.

Well, our client had purchased some inbuilt e-commerce platform and that was assigned to me for customization.

From last one month, stripe connect payment issue was stuck, I was looking into it but no luck, I even updated my boss that I need help from some senior dev. But no luck. Ultimately Today I want to give up on this project, just making my last tries.

And found the issue its just one variable is not set and causing whole payment method to failed:(

huhh.. But Finally relax , Today is deadline of the task. Happy that I completed.

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

This is a general question to freelancers or devs who works on only projects, is this worth only £100 pounds:

A survey website with 19 pages. Questions changes based on previous answers. Must have drag and drop, mix and match functionality. It must be mobile friendly as well.

And we have to parse the data we get from survey to a nicely rendered webpage so the client can see it.

The deadline is 2 days

Haven't even finished the wire frame prototypes and my client is asking if I can get the site complete mid-December because they want to advertise via radio.

Maybe if you stopped changing your mind about the layout and features then I could get this done a little faster. Glad I'm charging per hour!

On the plus side, at least they asked this time - last time they had purchased a load of radio time and then gave me a deadline.

Now then... where do I begin 😐

TLDR - fuck charity

A bit of backstory first, I was in my first year of college when I started this project for this charity.

It started in December of last year, my tutor approached me and asked if I’d like a project to work on, for my portfolio and what not, I agreed as I thought it would be a great opportunity. Saying yes to that question is my biggest regret so far. Oh boy the pain it has caused me.

The projected started a few days after I agreed. The stack and stuff was already agreed upon by my tutors higher ups. The stack was Wordpress and a theme called ‘X theme’ I understand the use for Wordpress, they are a non tech savvy client, it will be easy for them to manage.

The project was to basically modernise the current site the charity had, simple task you might think... ohhhh no. We agreed upon a deadline, January of 2017 (spoiler, we didn’t make that headline). However the charity wanted change, after change, after change, after change, after fucking change. Every time I’d show them the new revision it was never right, they’d always want another change.

Once we hit the deadline I asked my tutor if we could just drop it. His higher ups said we had to keep going (I could of abandoned my tutor and left him to do it but I’m not a prick). Anyway, we are now in November of 2017, a whole fucking year later and the site has only just been handed off. A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR OF THIS MOTHER FUCKING COCK SUCKING PRICK WHO WOULDN’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER.

Please may god be with me as we have to provide support for this site 😥😥

If anyone’s really curious as to which charity it is or the site. I’ll post it in the comments if you ask nicely enough

Last year, 2nd year of Uni, we had to create an app that read from CSV file that contained info on the no of ppl in each class and things like grades and such and had to display graphs of all the info tht you could then export as a pdf.

This had to also be sone in a team. I, however, hate doing anything other than programming (no team leader, pm bullshit) so I tell them I want to be one of the programmers (basically split the roles, rather than each one doing a bit of everything like my professor wanted) and we did.

I program this bitch wverything works well, I am happy. Day of the presentation comes, one of the graphs is broken... FUCK. I then go past it and never discuss the error. We got a 70.

I swear to God it worked on my computer -.-

I also have to mention that our professor was the client and he had set an actual deadline until we can ask him questions. After the deadline I realized I didn't know what a variable in the csv file was for and when I went to ask him he said "You should've asked me this before. I can't tell you now". My team was not the only one that didn't know and he gave the exact answer to everybody else. Got the answer from another team. Turns out it was useless.

He was the worst client ever. Why tf would you put a deadline on when you can ask the client questions?! I should be able to fucking ask questions during production if you want the product as you want it >.<

How many people do unit testing?. Am always caught my deadline. I just fix errors in production. The client timeline are not feasible

Trying to make a deadline, waiting for more info from an analist so I can implement the science stuff correctly

Today I receive the email with the info I need. Email is cc'ed to the client. And it starts with complaining about me not having implemented the science stuff. The info I need is attached in this email. Arghgh, how am I supposed to do that if I don't have the information I need.

Apart from that she was testing in the production environment. How do you work with people like this.

But hey, I just got my devRant stickers ;)

I'm sure everyone has their freelance client wtf moments, here's mine: was given literally 1 day to finish a list of pre-publish updates for a website, after waiting 2 weeks to hear back from them since sending them the website to review. Of course I pushed the deadline to a week later, I have no idea what they were expecting...

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

Client: Thank you for this and all your hard work we will review and get back to you EOP Friday before final submit.

Us: We have been working to a deadline and have actually finished early which meant that we would be able to submit on Friday, at the very least by the afternoon. One question...is this your time EOP Friday?

Client: Yes

Us: That'll be 2 in the morning here and a Saturday.

Get given two asset packs for a project I confirm with project lead, project manager and CTO which one they want to use. They then confirm with client and they all decided asset pack 2. Ok great, 3 months later week before deadline "we need asset pack 1 used instead"... Different resolution, different aspect ratio and now get nagged every few minutes how done is it, and that it's vital we meet the deadline. So close to just walking out that door.

I feel a whole lot better. The project that I was so incredibly stressed out over has finally been invoiced for, albeit two months late, and my client has been understanding throughout the process. I now realise that although pressure is great for working to a deadline, too much pressure is heavily impacting on my thought processes and extends my deadlines more than I can manage at the moment.

The words of encouragement in the comments on my last "rant" really spurred me on, and the criticism made me reflect very much on how little squeeze time I'd given myself. I'm very grateful to this community for those inciteful fragments, and I promise to do my bet to take all of them on board.

Thank you devrant community, for giving me a leg up when I needed it.

"rant"
client asks for something he says it has never been done before then insists in getting a deadline to finish it

A top food chain client wants a feature Fx
and has a deadline on Friday.
We are still working on it and already estimated hours and set deployment on Monday.
(No deployments on Friday)
And the business/sales guy comes up with new deadline to submit it at Friday morning.
And was only discussing with one of my team member already working on it. And i knew there is more hours required for testing and need to deployment pre deployment phase (staging of dev)
I was over hearing the conversation between them and I got pissed off and jumped in and said Not Possible at all.

He tries to argues about giving something to him. I said we can give it to you but will not garauntee anything. Now project manager jumps in. PM and my team already know that we will be delivering on Monday.

He arguing that if the Fx is not ready then I will call client developer to office to test it directly on my team members laptop.
I said, No way. We are not ready yet and havent finished yet. Major work will be on Thursday and on Friday we will be testing till end of the day.

PM explains him blah blah stuff.
He calms down and says no worries we will check the status on Friday afternoon amd roll out something to Client.
PM, developer and I looked each other and I said, sure will deploy but will not garauntee anything. He goes back to his desk.

Seriously.
WE ALREADY ESTIMATED F* MAN HOURS AND WILL BE READY ON MONDAY MEANS MONDAY DONT F* BUILD MORE PRESSURE ON US. F* SALES

That feeling when client tells us one week before the deadline that it should configured for IE
FML

Terrible project with unclear requirement, lots of legacy and a client that doesn't know what he wants. Quite a bit of procrastination because of this situation, then crunch day & night to hold the deadline.

Then the project was scrapped.

So I am a Software Engineer at a small scale company.
I need to coordinate with customers, understand the requirements and design and develope the solutions.
These sometimes include changing the current product a bit and customize it to fit the client needs or maybe creating a plug-in that could work with the current product and get the job done.

I love the research, design and planning part of the job, I would be super focused and will find solutions for complex stuff. Plan it all to the smallest things.
I know the solution so I can think of what code would be there what would be needede whats already there etc.

But when it comes to coding the solution my laziness kicks in.
My mind is like you already know the solution why you need to code it to.

Then I start procrastinating and end up putting myself under a pile of stuff when the deadline approaches.

FML

I'm mostly .NET Dev, working on OCR thingy, but I started as Java, Android Dev. After my boss's crappy management and burning out our two mobile devs he has assigned me to finish one app. For past four days I've worked around the clock to finish as much of functionalities as I could but it simply wasn't possible, especially because project was still changing when though deadline was around 15.12.17. Yesterday I've done as much as I could and now we have to wait for the client to either accept it or break the contract.
To be frank, I think that losing money would be like a bucket of cold water for my boss. All of us, me and those two mobile devs I have mentioned earlier, are students. We have exams right now. "Senior" Dev is only year older and will soon be applying for his engineering degree. Year after year situation like this occurs and boss haven't learn a thing.

So, I have to begin with saying that I was 19 and my first real job. I was assigned to ongoing project for big german web company who outsourced project for german government. I am fast learner so I quickly ended up as a only developer who works on this project, because company had another important projects. And since I studied outside of my native country and I can speak Polish and English so I was also responsible for explaining everything to customer during meetings. I worked for around 4 months on the project and was heading up to the end. 3 weeks before production deadline client wanted show the results to the german government but I was still working on the functionality. My boss decided to put the web team leader to my project around 8 hours before this presentation to speed up the development. around 30 minutes before the pitch I realised that some of the latest functionalities stopped working. I was trying to figure out what I did I asked my team leader, he said that he have refactored some parts of my code. When we found the right commit it was around 3 min to presentation and after the checkout some of the .htaccess file was broken so I fixed it quickly but Germans started the meeting a bit earlier. The website was crashed almost half of the presentation. After 5 minutes my boss come to my desk and he says that he just talked with our customer and they are so freaking mad and pissed that they will not pay us. At this point I was certain I'm fired...

Suddenly the web team leader joined the conversation protecting me that it was the fault of the project menager because he should assign someone else to this project because even though I am good it is always good to have someone more experienced to work with you and review your code.

Project manager was fired about 3 months later. I was saved 😀

When your project manager accepts a contract with a client with a hard deadline but the time needed is nearly twice.

How do you balance what your boss wants, and what the client wants?! 😣

We had design and requirement discussions with clients and they said they want method A.

After doing internal design review and writing up documents, client agreed and sign off on it.

However, during last moments of development, I encountered a minor issue in the design and brought the team together to discuss about it.

Boss went on about how his idea, method B would have been better and is what the client wants, etc. Mind you, method B is quite different from method A that clients want.

I explained to boss that his method is different from what the client wants and also what have been documented and signed off.

He told me he doesn't need comments of such from me and they can always tell the client that method B is better and should be the way.

I feel so fucked because we are currently rushing with only 2 days left in our deadline and there will not be a bonus if we are late.

I'm so excited before tomorrow, I'm a little bit afraid.
Just had my very first deadline in my life (started my apprenticeship a few months ago). I can lead and develop a complex and very large project, which is nice but it's very hard.

Tomorrow I've to present it to the client and has to convience him.

Wish me luck! Any tips or advices dir the presentation?

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

Meeting deadline after day and night of hard work, and you come to know client postponed the launch date to a month :rage:

There’s an interview question that i was asked years ago, and I’ve sometimes thought about it but haven’t still figured out an answer. The question is as follows.

You’re working on a project for a client and there’s 15 minutes until it should be delivered, but the solution is not finished yet. What do you do?

The only logical thing I thought of was to just contact the client and tell them it’ll take some more time, but at the same time, telling them 15 minutes before the deadline seems like a sign of bad planning and time management. And it’s probably not realistic to finish everything in 15 minutes. What woold you guys do?

just yesterday, commiting a pile'o'shit code which u know is pile'o'shit but you had to do it like that because correct non-hacky solution wouldn't meet non-negotiable, client-critical deadline, and getting back a code review criticising precisely all the points which you are aware of and want to kill yourself for but you had no other option under the circumstances.

p. s. still under probation because it's a new job, and the review ends "no time right now but we need to talk at the end of next week"

p. p. s. second best job i ever had. week of fear of losing it commences.

Sigh Im getting depressed from going to work whilst a few weeks ago it gave me a bunch of happines.

I think its due that management is approaching a triple deadline (?!?!?!) project in an agile/scrum way (?!?!??!)..

We can not change our data model completely when we have to be in acceptance in 3 weeks and do a demo in a few days..

Yes we can work around that but fuck database design theory and lets ignore all primary keys and foreign keys, great idea

We have to create and prioritise user stories on our own? We have two product owners and a scrum master.

Scrum master offers to deal with organising and creating tickets to organise Infrastructure without having a laptop of the client, so no Service Now access or any other system..

Guess who has to do it in the end..

Many question marks about this project

How do you explain to your client/boss that you couldn't finish on time because you were too busy occupied freaking out about the deadline?

Have a "technical advisor" arrive 2 weeks before deadline on a year long project, only to convince my client to reject it because "we bought parts of the software". It seems he's new to npm. Btw, he says applicative instead of app.

The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing!