Manager: Alright, we've decided we're gonna just going to accept PayPal and also credit card checkout through PayPal in the next two days!

Dev: ...

Manager: We can achieve this timeline, right?

Dev: ...

Manager: Alright, awesome to see your motivation! Let's do it!

Dev: YOU ANSWER PHONE CALLS, TALK TO PEOPLE AND 'STRATEGIZE' ALL DAY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE USING THE APP WITHOUT ERROR. THAT'S ON ME, NOT YOU, SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Stupid fucking project managers, just posting some slurry in Slack:

"User can't get into app!" _sends useless screenshot_

Yeah? And? I have no context on what time this was, what device, where, how, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

You want me to just telepathically jump to their location on earth, sniff the electromagnetic spectrum waves to sleuth out what exact requests they made and when to figure out what the problem is?

Just shut up. Shut up

Manager: "We can't have new releases breaking older versions of the mobile app!!!!! We'll lose all our customers!!!!"

fullStackChris: "That's fine, we can do API versioning, but it will take some time to implement, I'll have to be quite careful and write some tests to implement it. Probably 2-3 weeks..."

Manager: "NO WAY, THAT TIME ESTIMATE IS WAY TOO LONG, WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!!"

fullStackChris: "So how do you wanna support multiple versions of the app without doing any sort of versioning?"

Manager: "...we'll think of something!"

Dev: "..."

And with 99% certainty, I expect to hear this in a week or two:

Manager: "fullStackChris, we'd like to introduce you to the highly technical concept, API versioning. It's a way to version the API so we can support multiple versions of the application our customers use! It's amazing! Please implement this immediately so we can support multiple versions of the application!"

Sigh... each day managers learn a bit more how physical reality works... you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Managers on Slack at 08:30: Hey frontendJunior, can you accept that meeting for 09:00?

frontendJunior: * No response *

Managers: * Clueless why nobody would see a ping literally 30 minutes before a meeting *

Fullstackclown, watching it all unfold: lol 🤡

Manager: Here's the design for the next feature, we're ready to hand it over to the consultant

FullStackClown: Uh... okay... is it spec'd out with requirements?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Well, already look at this design and user flow, did you consider what happens when <insert edge case X here>, <insert edge case Y here>, or <insert edge case Z here>? How is the consultant going to know what to put in for business logic if you don't even know or define it yourself?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Sigh... yeah, I'm too busy right now to be a kindergarten teacher, come back in a few days once you understand how your own feature is supposed to work

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

Absolute asshat level clownly clownshipness:

Manager: Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... what about this? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... and then this thing here? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: Well, I hate to tell you, but it's a huge surprise. Guess what?! BECAUSE YOU DEFINED THE FEATURE LIKE THIS!!!

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: Any other absolute asinine questions to ask me to continue breaking me from flow?

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: ...

To those interested, I believe there is an evolution of my devRant career in order... I'm passing the clown phase... and entering the full-on circus phase...

Listen, I get you're a junior.

But please read the fucking spec I spent quite some time on writing for you before you ask me a bunch of irrelevant questions, which you know would be irrelevant IF YOU READ THE SPEC!

Trust me.

Read the spec.

It will be clear.

Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

At a large enterprise-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from outside / bad actors constantly trying to break in. (🧠)

At a medium or small-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from clueless customers or users who can potentially break things for themselves. (🧠🧠)

At a sTaRtUp, you are protecting the code and product from being destroyed by the incompetent owners themselves. (🧠🧠🧠+)

Managerspeak: The search bar should follow the scrolling

Devspeak: You're an idiot

sprint started two weeks ago, it's due today.

yesterday, most tasks for the sprint were done, but was still waiting that whole two weeks for updates on two new tickets, guess they'll be in the next sprint...

project leaders yesterday: oh here are those updates for the sprint! (not to mention the meeting was at 5 PM yesterday, not even the BEGINNING of the work day)

project leaders today: what's the status of the sprint?!

...it's a joke, right? do you think I'm a fucking magician?

its always the same no matter where you go, slowly starting to realize...

tl;dr; adding new feature requests the day before a sprint ends and then having the nerve of asking the "status" of the sprint the following day.

Product owner (who is also the application administrator): please build feature to allow administrators to create automatic alerts to be sent to application users

Me: ok
Feature gets built, tested and deployed to production

Two months later:
PO: I've noticed in our monitoring tool that there haven't been any alerts sent out to users. What's going on??

Me: well have you created any automatic alerts?

PO: umm, no. How do we do that?

Me (inside): 🤦

I've just realized the very root cause of the frustration of devs everywhere!

It has everything to do with the manager's thought process:

Manager: HUR DUR, ME NO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING!!! MUST BE WRONG!!! ME CREATE BUG TICKET!!!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ ...sigh...

They call Python, C, Java, Ruby, and stuff like that programming 'LANGUAGES' for a reason. I just wrote a Python dictionary literal in my C# code and was clueless as to why it was failing to compile for five minutes straight. Maybe that was because I was working with Python like 30 minutes ago.
It's like I have to have one 'brain' per one language and need to switch between such 'brains' to write code in another language. And such switches take time.

Assumptions are a terrible idea, yet I find myself making them all the time about other people. I am finding the very sobering reality about people who use technology vs people who create technology. The users have zero intellectual interest in how the technology accomplishes a task. While the creators get absorbed into the details and often relish in being able to maximize capability.

A point of frustration for me is users who are in a semi technical field yet take zero time to learn how to configure a piece of tech. They get a plug and play attitude and seek in panic when things don't work. The work is semi technical because they need to understand some of the fundamental physics involved to assess things using instrumentation. Yet when asked about a system they actively modify as to how it is normally setup they are clueless. Me, who helps write the software to control these devices, is stumped that they have zero interest (or capacity?) to understand how the system is normally configured. This is not the first time I have made assumption about what they know in technical contexts. I have run into this before with managers, but not with technicians.

How do you manage your expectations with people who won't invest any time into how their equipment actually works? How does someone operate that way to begin with? Where is their curiosity about how things work?

On the flip side, I swear at my fucking phone because I don't care how it works, but I just want it to stop doing everything besides being a phone... Fuck you, we are not the same, I think...

Man, some days, these fucking managers just make me want to get fucking drunk...

clueless questions, annoying fucking fake priority shit immediately asking for this and that with absolutely no planning or thinking ahead

its really like guiding kids through kindergarten some days

i want to bring some seriousness and structure to this company but some days.... man, i just am done with it

I hate my scrum calls so much. People go into the fucking weeds and the scrum master is so clueless. Doesn't stop them and let people ramble. Jesus christ.

If scrum calls last more than 10 minutes, I think you're doing it wrong.

Leave it to an investing company 'dUe DiLigAnCe' document to list the following requirement:

"Schema of computing infrastructure setups for development, testing, and production"

Ah yes, the highly technical and well-known term of "schema of computing infrastructure"

God I hate business people, so clueless

BRB going to start my own business and make real money. if these neanderthals are top investors, i can be too

So.
They mill round
Zimmerman states something as an interpretation
This infuriates someone further
Are they totally fucking retarded or just that clueless?
I remember many times that they got their come uppance no pun intended at all.

TIL RVM and I are on different assumptions. I'm talking about RVM allowing unbound variables in its scripts.
I don't because I literally have run "rm -rf /" on my Mac because of an unbound variable in the past. So, when I write a shell script, the second line is always "set -eu."
And because RVM allows unbound variables, this line crashes RVM.
Then for some stupidity on my part, I looked into GitHub for its codebase first to get even more clueless about the issue before finally googling to see if anyone had experienced the same problem 🤦