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Search - "clients from hell"
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*Builds a web component for a client website*
CLIENT: I don't like it, can I have it a tiny bit over to the right more
ME: Taps the arrow key a few times making it look like I'm doing something.(Which actually does nothing)
Client: 👌Perfect
😂😂😂 Wut 😂😂😂18 -
Happened a while ago but I still find it funny.
*phone rings*
Me: good morning sir, how can I help you?
Client: MY WEBSITE IS OFFLINE, FIX IT RIGHT NOW.
M: I'm going to take a look, what's the domain?
C: *gives domain*
M: I see, that domain expired already, it was cancelled through our customer portal by the client, you maybe or someone you know?
C: WHAT?! MY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DEPENDS ON THAT DOMAIN, I'D NEVER CANCEL IT, THIS IS BULLSHIT! I'F THE SITE GOES OFFLINE FOR A MONTH I'LL FUCKING GO BANKRUPT, YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS RIGHT NOW.
M: if I may ask, how is your business doing right now?
C: HOW IS THAT QUESTION RELEVANT RIGHT NOW?!
M: well, you said that if the site would go offline for a month, you'd go bankrupt. The domain registration ended about half a year ago so that's why I aske......
*beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep*
Well, okay then.14 -
Client: we need you to give us access to the code ASAP. We don't like this black box approach.
Me: You have always had access to the code. It is here on this bitbucket repo and your usernames have admin access.
Client: We want the code moved to our GitHub before EOD.
I check out how to move repos over and it's fairly easy.
Me: just give me access to create a repo on your GitHub account and you can have the code moved over.
Client: Sorry it's late in the day and we stepped out to get drinks. (It was 2:30 pm). Not sure why you think there is a rush on this, we'll handle it first thing next week.
Me: WTF16 -
Asshole trying to steal credit for my work. Can't wait for the next meeting to light this shit.
So this client hires me and this person that I'm gonna call 'B'. B deletes my name from the comments and description. Then proceeds to present it as his.
But B can't get it to run now, so they have me have a look at it. B thinks that I don't notice that he is trying to take credit for my shit. Now I'm sitting here with evidence for the next meeting with the client. Ignoring all of B's communications.54 -
So apparently my boss knows the "new senior dev", which I will call 'B'.
Backstory:
Program which I worked on for a year, my baby, is doing fine. Suddenly B decides to update it to "standardize it", against my suggestions/protests. Fastfoward to the following morning, I get to work and there's a bunch of emails from B waiting for me. I'm like "Well there's a meeting in an hour, so no point in answering all of these". 30 minutes go by and then boss shows up in my team's area. Asking for me.
(I didn't know this at the time, but apparently boss knows B. And thinks that B is this amazing programmer and super nice.)
According to boss, B has been trying to contact me all morning about my program failing.
It is at this moment that my mentor stands up to defend me. She basically tells our boss that B is a piece of shit. And I'm just loving it, ++ to mentor for bring awesome.12 -
Client: Where are we with the project, it's been a week and I see nothing.
Me: You asked me to do something that was not in the agreed scope of work, which has kept me from starting on the project.
Client: Do I need to plan out everything in advance on paper for you to get it done in a timely manner?
Me: Is that a serious question? Yes, you should. That's the whole point of creating a scope of work. It's to allow me to schedule out the time necessary to build out a product in a "timely manner".
Client: I don't appreciate your attitude. This is not how you should be doing business if you like making money.
Me: I don't appreciate your condescending, unreasonable, dickhead mentality that makes you think it's remotely okay to act like you're better than me. Money doesn't grant you the right to be a dickwad, and just because I'm being paid doesn't mean I have to put up with any level of arrogance or disrespect.
I am in this business to make money, but not at the cost of my dignity and self-respect. You will be receiving a full refund later today, not because I have to provide a refund, but because I never want to communicate with you ever again moving forward. Take your unacceptable bullshit somewhere else.14 -
You go to an accountant to file your itemized taxes in a couple of hours, you pay them at least $200.
You go to a lawyer to incorporate your business in 2 days, and you pay at least $800.
You hire a photographer to take pictures of your 4-hours wedding and you pay them at least $1500.
You go to your car dealership to fix something and they charge you about $125 hourly labor rate.
Now, ENLIGHTEN ME, how did you come up with the idea that the web application I will create for your business in 8 weeks (design, code, test, deploy, server administration) should not cost more than $500????!!!!!18 -
This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃33 -
Client: can you fix the slider on my homepage please?
Me: It seems to be working just fine
Client: it works but it’s not how I want it, fix it
Me: well what do you want me to change then?
Client: don’t change it, just fix it!
😒2 -
I just had a client complaining on the phone that she read my database design documents and that they are all wrong and need to be done again. Because things like varchar and int are confusing. And nobody understands what they mean. She asked around and nobody understood it.
Ooh, and I should place the customer name in more then one table because it would be handy to have in several places.
Spend a hour on the phone trying to explain that these documents are not intended for her. They are not for her to understand.
I make these documents to build a stable product and in case something bad happens to me its easier to pick up for another developer.
Long story short.. I'm currently making a document that explains the database design... Getting paid for it..... But fucking hell. Somebody save me.10 -
Confessions of a Programmer
#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.
#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.
#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.
#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.
#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.
#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.
#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)
#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.
#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.
#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.21 -
Client: Can you build a Snapchat clone but better?
Me: I’m going to say probably not logical given the resources they have and what we have, but for curiosity, what kind of budget do you have?
Client: $2500.
Me: Get out.7 -
Trying to make a not realistic deadline,set today for yesterday. Pleasing clients is what I do.
With a little #catsupport, she is probably wondering why I'm not in bed so she can sleep on me.12 -
[Thursday afternoon on a call...]
Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?
Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.
[Two hours later...]
Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?
Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.
Client: So when are you going to get it done?
Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.
Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.
Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.
By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.
If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.
I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.
Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.
I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.
[Next morning...]
Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.
-----
Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.7 -
Client: I want you to reverse engineer this piece of software!!
*posts some link to an exe on altervista along with some unrelated crap*
Oh and "I PAY"! (Because you can't even take that for granted anymore these days.)
Me: Alright, I'll look into it but I'm not a reverse engineering expert so don't expect too much.
*Closes Facebook*
Client, day after: Hey have you looked into it already? Have you finished it already?! HEY, RESPOND ALREADY!!!
Me (thinking): YEAH AFTER 1 DAY AND NO PAYMENT DETAILS WHATSOEVER, I INSTANTLY DROPPED EVERYTHING JUST TO PLEASE YOU, FILTHY RAT SACK!! You fucking wish, motherfucker. Down to lowest priority you go! And if I don't feel like doing it, how about I just drop your request and tell you to suck my fleshy snek, HOW ABOUT THAT HUH? Fucking piece of shit 😤12 -
Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.
Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.
We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.
Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?
Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.
All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.
Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.
Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.
---
I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.6 -
The university system is fucked.
I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.
What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.
It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.
Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.
Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.
Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.
And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.17 -
Been lurking here for a while. Finally pissed off enough to post.
Been programming in Ada for nearly a decade now. One of the few younger devs who knows the language well. Have a large collection of libraries and tools written in it, open source. Done contract work. Looking to get out of my current line of work, which is medicine, because fuck this recent legal climate. I'm spending all my time dealing with legal compliance and it rapidly changing.
I see a job posting from a company looking for a programmer to mostly write testing stuff for clients. They mostly work with Ada. I've written a whole unit testing and integration testing framework. Perfect. Apply. "You don't have the required skills." Oh... K then.
Wanna guess what I was just offered as contract work. Same company. I guess i'm fucking qualified if you asswipes sought me out to ask me to fix your fucking bullshit.
What the hell is wrong with management and HR in recent years?9 -
So, our clients missed their internal deadline this weekend so we as vendor were also forced to work for the weekend and implement new features in a very short period. I implemented new features and my project manager stayed to support the testing and sent me home as I already had tickets bought for the movie.
As someone who hasn't done any developing in a long long time he even tried to implement some changes and complex JavaScript dom manipulation that they asked during testing so that I could be with my gf.
Few hours later he called me and with a sad voice said he is simply too slow and needs my help after all . I came and we stayed until 00h and solved everything. He paid for the movie and taxi.
The thing that impressed me was that he was willing to took over my job so that I wouldn't break my deal.
Best project manager ever!
P.S. Yes my gf went alone at the movie and yes we are still together xD4 -
So this other senior dev got seriously ill a couple of weeks ago and the project he was working on was assigned to me. His code was so aesthetic, loved his work, the structured code helped me a lot in meeting the deadlines. He returned a few days back and now the company has given him two weeks notice because "his pace is slow". I am frustrated, PM is frustrated. The guy is such a gem that he is still helping with all the new requirements client is throwing at us.8
-
That's it. I fucking quit.
Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.
First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.
An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?
"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.
2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.
🖕19 -
Client: [sends design as a tiny, badly compressed jpg] "I need this site done by tomorrow"
Me: ok, can you send me the psd?
C: "no, I don't have it"
Me: ok can you send me the images you want on the site?
C: no
Me: what about the text?
C: no
Me:.....
C: I have to go to bed5 -
Without even talking to me, why the fuck did you announce that I would be taking the project manager role. Who the fuck wants to do that monkey job? What the fuck is fucking hell wrong with your fucken brain.
You bloody piece of shit with masters from university and can’t handle fucken projects and client’s. Clients are complaining to me about you. Whole day looks for women to fuck during the night while we are dying virgin over here. Fuck you and I wish your dick falls apart.9 -
Wannabe entrepreneurs approach for building their app.
Them: So you're familiar with Android?
Me: Yes but it's been a while, will take some time though.
Them: Not a problem.
Me: So shall we talk about the payment?
Them: Yeah, about that.. Listen, we don't have any funding now but we're sure this idea will be a hit and take off, then later we can pay you.
Me: Ok
*Gets up and leaves*10 -
Client asked for Two Factor Authentication as a part of the webapp we're building and then were confused as to why they needed a second password to login
"we don't want to add an extra step into the login process, can you remove it please"
fml6 -
How to get your long time pending payment?
I stopped the website and then client told me that website is not working and asked me to check what's wrong.
Me: Your cloud server has been disturbed by the recent cyclone, and I won't fix that until I get my pending payment.
Got all the pending payment instantly.2 -
tl;dr stupid clients with their stupid requirements.
Client: (on Monday) hypothetically could you implement "A"?
Me: (on Monday) yeah I could do that by Friday, let me know if you want me to start it.
Client: (on Thursday) hey remember we talked about "A" well do "B" instead and I'll need it by Friday still.
Me: "B" is completely different than "A" and will take probably twice as long.
Client: but you told me you could do it by Friday.
Me: ............ I want to smash your face.4 -
Haven’t been on here for ages, but I felt like I needed to post this:
Warning:
This is long, and it might make you cry.
Backstory:
A couple of months back I worked for a completely clueless dude who had somehow landed a contract for a new website for a huge company. After a while he realised that he was incapable of completing the assignment. He then hired me as a subcontractor and I deleted literally everything he had done and started from scratch. He had over promised and under explained what needed to be done to me. It took many sleepless nights to get this finished with all the amendments and I had to double my pricing because he kept changing the brief.
Even after doubling my prices I still put in way too many hours of work. At one point I had enough and just ghosted the guy as I had done what he asked, and when he submitted it to them they wanted changes. He couldn’t make the changes, so I had to. He wouldn’t pay me extra though. I decided it wasn’t worth my time.
A couple of days ago I heard from him again. He had found another subcontractor to finish the changes. He still needed a few things though, so he promised me that I would get paid after fixing those things. I looked at the few things he had listed in our KANBAN and thought it was a few easy tasks.. until I opened the project..
I had my computer set up to sync with his server because he wanted everything done live and in production. So I naturally thought I would just “sync down” everything that the other subcontractor had done.
Here is where the magic started to happen.. I started the sync and went to grab a glass of water, and it was still running when I came back. I looked at the log and saw a bunch of “node_module” files syncing - around 900 folders. Funny thing is; neither the site nor server has anything to do with node..
I disregarded this and downloaded the files in a more manual fashion to a new folder. Interestingly I could see that my SCSS folders had not been touched since I stopped working on the project.. interesting, I thought to myself..
Turns out, the other subcontractor had taken my rendered and minimised CSS file, prettified it and worked from there. This meant that the around ~1500 lines of SCSS neatly organised in around 20 files was suddenly turned into a monster of a single CSS file of no less than 17300 lines.
I tried to explain to the guy that the other subcontractor had fucked up, but he said that I should be able to fix it since I was the one that made it initially. I haven’t replied. My life is too short for this.8 -
I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.
Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.
It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?
I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.11 -
- My client on regular day.
U can manage your tasks by your own. App looks stable and you are doing well.
- Same client when I'm on Vacation
This thing is not working, that thing is not working. This is do or die situation for us. you have to cancel your vacation plans.
- Same client after I come back from vacation in which I wasted precious hours of my vacation time and fixed all the bugs.
I didn't release your changes yet coz I wanted to release it together with you. I was like "THEN WHY THE FUCK YOU RUINED MY VACATION" -_-4 -
Client: We need this site up and running by the end of the month.
Me: Ok we need them to send creative over. Please provide it in Photoshop format.
.... A few days before due date.
Client: We have sent you all the creative. Please see email attachment.
...... Opens attachment. Creative was created in PowerPoint.
FML!! I CANNOT BELIEVE!!!
*starts twitching*5 -
I’m doing this guys website for FREE. As a favor to my mom. This is the shit I have to deal with as thanks.
He gave me some images he wanted on his new site I’m developing on Tuesday. Woke up to this email.9 -
it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.
In my case I am talking about documentation.
At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.
Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):
Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.
Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.
- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.
Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)
Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.
I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!
Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.
Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!
Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.
For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.
This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.36 -
When you are talking with Client and he wants alert that you can't use password because it's already in use...5
-
What is it with clients who have never even seen a single line of code in their entire lives telling me how long they believe a certain change request should take to code.
I mean, what if I told you that your "seemingly simple enough" change needed an update to 36 class files, 9 oracle stored procedures AND several database schema changes. Also, who the fuck is going to perform a regression test to make sure I didn't break anything? Your Uncle Bob??6 -
Client writes me in slack two hours after my 8 hours are done:
“We have a bug, can you fix it now? We need to have it in two days”
Me, smoking pressing cmd+q, closing laptop , listening fools gold by the stone roses, curtains down6 -
When you get a client from real MOTHERFUCKING hell.
You just really FUCKING want to say this:
Scorched earth MOTHERFUCKER. I will massacre you. Now SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME DO MY JOB.
First, take a big step back and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE.
I will rain down an ungodly FUCKING firestorm upon you.
You're gonna have to call the FUCKING United Nations and get a FUCKING BINDING RESOLUTION to keep me from FUCKING destroying you.
I am talking SCORCHED EARTH MOTHERFUCKER.
I will MASSACRE you.
I WILL FUCK YOU UP!
But for your own sake you keep it at this:
Yes sir/ma'am :).7 -
I'm not even that old and I've had it with young cocksure, full of them self language/environment evangelists.
- "C# is always better than Java, don't bother learning it"
- "Lol python is all you need"
- "Omg windows/linux/mac sucks use this instead"
The list goes on really, at some point you have got to realize that while specialization is great, you have to learn a little bit of everything. It broadens you horizon a lot.
Yea, C# does some nifty stuff, but Java does too, learn both. Yea I'm sure Linux is better for hosting docker containers, but your clients are on mac or windows, learn to at least navigate and operate all three etc. Embrace knowledge from all the different tech camps it can only do you good and you will be so much more flexible and employable than your close minded peers :)
Hell even PHP has a lot to teach us (Even more than just to be a bad example, har har)9 -
A client obsessed with *security* won’t give us access to the server that hosts the website we built.
Code release involves building templates, compressing the changed files into a zip folder, and emailing them to the client with instructions on where the changed files go8 -
That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.
I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.
I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.
Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT
secretly hoping to get fired over this10 -
Client: You are bad developers. Your code has bugs and the site isn't even pretty. And why is it so damn expensive??
Us: ...
Same client (a month later): I need this campaign landing page with the option to register and an admin for user management. It should be done till the day after tomorrow because the URL is already in print. Here's the catalogue (in .pdf) in which it will appear. Use it as a style guide.
FUCK YOU!2 -
Customer logic - "We'd like a website but we don't know what we want...so can you do a whole thing so we can change 80% of it day after day until we are bored of it? Thanks"4
-
Fucking hell, that's now the fourth time in a row that I see my clients getting ripped a second asshole by previous developers, this one charged 1500$ for a "python script" that only calls ffmpeg with couple args, claiming tons of shit like the video being e.g. better quality after conversion - even though all it does, is a straight convert from one format to another. (no filters, anything, just a convert) I feel always so terribly bad discovering that shit and them proudly telling me about the "solution" they invested in..4
-
Client: "Something is missing, like a type of BOOM or some fancy stuff, but I can't pinpoint what exactly. Do you know what I mean?"
Me: "Sure, give me one sec."
Changes font of a single word on a Web page to italic.
Client: "Perfect!"
My face: Priceless and trying not to laugh out loud.3 -
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. "
-__-""""undefined asap deadlines planning fail nope deadline clients from hell projectmanager christmas no planning triggered polite4 -
Client: (via email) Wondering if this link is available and active.
I click the link. It takes me to the page, which is working and functional.
Me: Yes, this link is both available and active.
Client: Great, thanks for checking that.
Me internally: Did you seriously just SEND ME AN EMAIL to ask me to click a link for you?5 -
A few months ago, I decided to let go some old clients with bad behavior and/or bad projects, since I noticed this was affecting my mental health (lowering my self esteem, make me feel depressed, anxious, etc).
I was exhausted of doing miracles in projects without git, build files, staging enviroments (yes... you can imagine), and receive all sort of curses when sudenly something stopped to work.
I set some requirements to work with any new project/client: 1) project needs to be under version control, 2) it must have staging enviroment, 3) I must work with build files.
As I still have contracts running, I'm communicating this to clients as soon as I finish my obligations.
Today, one of these clients told me they are leaving to work with another developer.
Reason: They said my new requirements are unreasonable and they prefer doing the old way.3 -
I am receiving this type of one liner mail more often from our clients.
"Application is not working properly."
Me:
Typed : explain properly idiot.
Deleted.
Typed Again: Sir, can you be more specific.
Sent.
Or
"Application is not running."
Me:
Typed : of course it can't run. Bloody hell.
Deleted.
Typed again: inconvenience caused deeply regretted. Our representative will contact you about this.
Sent.
Man i am tired.4 -
Me: ok, we're 4 days from launch, here's the most up-to-date version of the app, and here's what's been added since yesterday.
Client: ok, looking good, still needs a little more here and here.
Me: yes we've made note of that an-
Client: oh ya, and that thing that's been in there since day 1, take that out.
Me: oh, ok, we're gonna need so-
Client: and that thing we specifically asked for, take that out too.
Me: that's fine bu-
Client: oh, and add a fucking Christmas wreath for them to jump through. -
*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*
years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work
faith in humanity restored3 -
One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.
CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?
*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*
All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.
*After an hour*
So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.
Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.
*an other hour passes*
Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬
Me: me 😰
*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.
Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.
(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.
*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*
Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )
Head: okay do it now.
Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.
* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂2 -
Developer: Changes are difficult from here, are you sure this is how you want it. 🤔
Client: yes. 👍
Developer: ((3;"'&}×π{sk*[=¶^[|) ☕😴
Client: Oh, actually can we have this too and maybe remove this bit because we don't need it now thanks. ☺️
🤐🙃🔫3 -
So this client wanted a demo on Dockers. So I gave the demo with some microservices running on different containers. Later the clients come back and say, "Docker is good. But please fit all the microservices in one container." I say but that defeats the purpose of microservices. But no, the client say. I tried explaining but no is no. Shit!! Fine! Have it your way!!5
-
Been working on this project for a month now. Everything is going fine, meetings are short and to the point. But then...
Client: "I'm leaving the project, this is the new person taking over."
Me: "Hello new client."
New client: "Burn it."
Me: "Uhm, what?"
New client: "Throw what you have away. It doesn't meet our new specifications. We're starting over."
Me: "Ok..." 🙃🔫3 -
True story.
Some clients (especially in India) don't want to pay, but they want everything to be implemented in the project.
Big data.... Check
Machine learning.... Check
Deep learning..... Check
Espresso maker.... Check.
They want all the buzz words that are buzzing to be put in your project and they want you to put it in the 'cloud', for which you have to pay.....10 -
This fucking kid has the audacity to ask for me to decompile someone else's work and recompile it for a newer version. Wtf man4
-
Bad news:
Everyone now wants their damn solution done "ASAP". Yet they fail to provide basic information. They never show up at any meeting. And ignore all my emails. FUCK!
Good news:
It's Taco Tuesday.1 -
Congratulations? For fucking what. So you built a wix website. Now youre a web developer and the whole world knows it, my services aren't needed anymore.
Congratulations you bypassed half a decade in 50 hours a week of coding, then you have the bone and fucking marrow of emailing me because your like buttons are causing users to create a new instagran account. Good one kid.3 -
When the client blames a css issue for a decrease in sales.
No you idiot. A missing slider that I removed because it was breaking your site is not causing your sales to drop 30%5 -
Client: We want to onboard people with sign-up wizard just like (Massive Industry Leader) so remove the sign-up process from the app.
1 week of development later...
Client: We need to take photos of their information, but we think its easier to take photos on the phone so once they sign-up link then to the phone.
Me: How will they get the apps if it not in the app stores?
Client: Get the apps approved for the app store! duh!
2 weeks later... 4 failed app submissions..
Client: Would it be easier if we just add the sign-up on the app?
Me: Yes... like it was 3 weeks ago?
Client: Yes! Why did we remove it?
Me: You did in an effort to be more like (Major Industry Leader)
Client: ....but we're nothing like them! Change it back!
Me: >•<!!!
I have to fire my client...3 -
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"2 -
Wk1:, Client wants stack deployed to AWS in a day... Does it in 30 minutes...
Wk2: client complains about cost of service so requests I downsize the stack they asked for... Does so... Just to save some £££ at loss of any DR or HA capability
Wk3: Client wants stack moved to a different AWS account just cos... Advised could cause issues... Client says carry on. Migrates to account as requested on the days they requested.
Wk4: client complains that said migration caused issues and that proper change control wasn't followed..... That was never informed on..
Wk5: issue discovered to actually be network fault linked to clients wanting every £££ saved in AWS... And as the stack specialist I still have to write up a summary and findings?
Wow just get a decent AWS admin will ya....3 -
Client: we need a big data implementation in AWS to be fully HA and DR.... Money is no object
*3 weeks later when the bill comes in *
Client: its too expensive we don't need this HA stuff we don't even know what it stands for anyhow so can you take it out? But the system still needs 24/7 availability....2 -
*In the final weeks of development with a project on a short timeline because the client "needs it".*
Client: "We've hired a consultant we want you to work with."
Me: "Okay, can we push this to after the delivery?"
Client: "Of course"
Wake up to an email from the consultant with a list of scripts he just ran on the production database server for the currently live app.
Get follow-up emails about bugs and app crashes from the client.
My rage is so hot it can keep warm an Eskimo tribe over the winter season.2 -
Client has a hand drawn logo. Which is really bad.
We build a website with the same concept.
Client keeps telling us the website doesn't look sophisticated enough.
How do I tell them it's the childish logo?8 -
Client's API returns a very weird response that changes its structure depending on its content.
When a array field has more than 1 children it returns:
{
"field" : [
{ "name1" : "value1"},
{ "name2" : "value2"}
]
}
So far so good. However, the fuckery happens when it has 1 children:
{
"field" : { "name1" : "value1"}
}
WTF! So the client API can return either a JSON object or an array and we cant trust the specs they gave us.4 -
I work at a school and am involved in building the new website. Specifically as an ex Web developer myself I am acting as intermediary between the leadership team and the company we have hired to build the site. The company has a "the customer is always right" approach and will do what they are asked for so my main role is stopping the school from making stupid requests.
For example yesterday they complained that the site looked different on mobile compared to desktop. Then they complained that the (long paragraph) welcome message appeared below the menu and quick links on mobile instead of above them (forcing users to scroll down to get to navigation controls). After many more complaints and mind boggling suggestions, and my attempts to explain responsive design and reducing cognitive load, I left the meeting with a headache and an urge to spend the next three hours drowning Lara Croft.
The most difficult part of any developers role: not throwing the keyboard at the client every time they say something stupid.1 -
Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.
Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.
Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.
The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.
To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.
Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.
When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.
Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.
In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.
I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.
The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.
Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.
If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.
Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.6 -
So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.
This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).
UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.
Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.
I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.
It wasn't an image. It was the host server.
In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.
Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.
The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.
Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.3 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
Clients always add up:
- The time it took you to create the project.
- Enhancement times.
Client: "How are we still working on this a year later?"
Me: "Well motherfucker, you requested a change recently. It has nothing to do with the original request, nor the last 39 updates."
Like it's my fucking fault you keep changing your mind.3 -
Today one person called me to ask if he could create a corporate email without buying the domain.
*More people that wanna be rich without spending a penny *4 -
i am fucking tired of companies that come to me expecting to magically fix their STEAMING PILE OF BULLSHIT AND TRASH CODE. how about when i ask "can i get a project brief", instead of saying "just fix it" or "it just needs to do this", GIVE ME A FUCKING COHERENT AND DESCRIPTIVE WRITEUP OF EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED. i can't read your minds, let alone read the code the previous cock sucking developer wrote, so guess what? i'm left with no other option but to completely rewrite it. to top it off, instead of giving me god damn excuses as to why you can't get me the api key for your order processing, MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT AND GET IT TO ME. how the fuck do you expect me to test an application when i don't even have access to the fucking api the whole shit pile is based around? i swear to god if these people expect me to have this done by the end of the week but want to be little cunt nuggets they can go eat shit. fuck you, fuck your "contract", fuck your company, FUCK EVERYTHING. greedy, shit faced bastards2
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Has any of your clients asked you to disable inspect element and right click on webpages to protect their COPYRIGHT images from being downloaded...19
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Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
So today one of my client told me that my script is freezing their website on IE browsers. I tested and told them that website is being freezed even without my script.
Now they sent me analyzed scenario and they concluded that it freezes 4 out of 10 times without script. But it freezes 12 out if 15 times with script -_-. So there is something really wrong with the script and I need to fix it urgently otherwise they will kick me out. #fuckedupLogic
Funny thing is that same script is loaded in so many other client's website and it doesn't freeze any shit.5 -
I am an I.T Admin currently responsible for the URS, Validation, oversight of outsourced development and deployment of a new application for our company...
I've been saying once a week now for 2 fucking months that this thing will be ready to deploy at the end of the week.
With enough technical knowledge I know the hell business people put developers through, the lack of contextual understanding of the Job between the two sides is insane.
(I mean holy shit when you tab through various fields, even that ordering needs to be explicitly programmed.)
I refuse to put the pressure on our devs that I am told too, I cant submit a request and phone ten minutes later to ask if itll be done today, people plan their lives, the devs have other clients and projects... what the mother of fuck makes us so special that they must drop everything.
On top of that all the testing I do over and over and over and over reveals some pretty huge operational risks and I keep making changes so as to not blow up the operations of half our company.
I am not saying my boss is horrible or anything but Holy Hell, most people just can't put themselves in someone else's shoes for five short minutes
I try to please my boss while trying to protect my devs from abuse and sadly it results in me being in the middle of two sides playing tug of war and it is ripping me apart...
Why can't people just be more understanding and communicate and understand better... But don't worry all you beautiful game changing, world improving devs... I will always have your back6 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.
TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.
So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.
This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.
Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.
Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.
Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)
I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.
At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.
But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.
Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.
In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.
A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.
Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)9 -
I’m dealing with the worst client I’ve ever had. The project has gone on for way longer than it should, mainly because of them adding a tonne of features to the scope. I should have told them to fuck off but I felt sorry for them because COVID was hitting them hard. So I put in a lot of extra unpaid work to try and get them through it and now they repay me by asking for a refund because they’re now broke?
They blame me for their now being broke when it’s clear they’re broke because of COVID absolutely decimating the restaurant industry. They say that because it took so long to add all those extra unlaid features it’s now my fault?
All this just as I’ve finished the app and am going through the process of releasing it to the stores. I’m probably going to have to take them to court to even get my pay out of them... Thats if they even have money to pay now.
I’ve spent all year trying to get this app out the door only for them to turn around and start abusing me on the phone when things start going down hill for them.
This whole project has been a complete waste of time when I could have been focusing on clients that don’t treat me like shit.4 -
Got a ticket form a client reporting a calculation giving the wrong outcome.
In return I ask her what she thinks the outcome should be and why.
"The right answer because I said so."
Yeah thanks that's going to help a lot. -
There's this huuuge project I was a part of for half a year. I was kicked off along with a few dozens of other devs (>60% of total manpower) a while ago for particular company reasons.
Now the remaining devs are oh-so-enjoying their time there..
1. workload has not changed
2. deadlines have not changed
3. no one will have Christmas-NewYear vacation
4. a new k8s-based infra is scheduled to roll out to PROD on Dec 23 (k8s is still far from ready - might need a few more months)
The most fun part is that it's not client's mgmt who has decided for #4 -- it's our own....
Boys.. Girls.. Save yourselves.3 -
Got my first serious project about a year ago. Made it clear to the client that we are developing a Windows app. After around 80-100 hours of work client just goes "how about we make this a web app?" Got a "financial support" instead of the agreed payment. Got around 4 times less money than agreed upon. They never ended up using some parts of the software (I ran the server so I knew that they weren't using it)
I once had a nightmare explaining to the client that he cannot use a 30+ MB image as his home page background. Average internet speed in my country is around 1-2 MB/s. I even had to do the calculation for him because he couldn't figure out the time it took for the visitor to load the image.3 -
First few times being made to make mobile responsive emails (from scratch, not generators) was an utter psychedelic mess I never wish to have the pleasure of returning too.
I since have had the pleasure of refusing this, as being able to maintain this chaotic mess created which has to be able to work across the major email clients is just a living nightmare.
There’s hell, then there’s a whole other level.1 -
I sent an email to a client asking for values in the database only they can access so I can finish an application and test it.... they reply asking for a new feature on the application and completely ignore my request for said values. then another person CCed on the email replies and agrees with the feature request and we should do xyz. still no values from him either. wtfff?7
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Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).
I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.
Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.
Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.
And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).
This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).
What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?6 -
"Coding is free dude, why are you charging me for that when I can just use Google to copy-paste code from there and there, boy.. think about it"
-- Typical Client5 -
Clients that add you on Facebook and start asking at 3 AM how their project is going.
No this is my personal life, how about you get lost and call or email me during working hours. -
[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?
Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible
Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device
Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw
> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010
I'm fucked.4 -
When I request that a client sends me the images they would like on their website. I do not expect 25 Emails each with one fucking image.1