Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "co developers"
-
For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.
*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*
I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".
R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".
I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...
I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.
Some of the other highlights of R include:
- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.
- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.
- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.
- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"
Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!12 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!6 -
Finally I found the community where the developers feel happy, pity & LOL for each others delight and distress.
Thanks <devRant&&Co*in>3 -
Okay so my co-workers explains why they give me the title "GitHub Maid":
Basically most of the time the engineering didn't have the time to scroll through issues, and that includes me, so a lot of this stuff does not get triaged properly when reported. When I stumbled on the tracker, I knew I had to do something, so I sorted and sorted and managed the tickets by my own.
So being a "GitHub Maid" is not something to be embarrassed about after all, in fact, I think the dev team owed me a lot because the issue tracker is more organized, and the issues are getting triaged and assigned properly now compared before.
So if they call you like something similar, be proud of it because some developers wouldn't even bother to tidy up issue tracking.12 -
Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.
It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.
One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.
While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.
During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.
After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.
(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)
But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.
One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!
Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.
Weird and scary.
Very scary.
Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.5 -
I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!
You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.
Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.12 -
Okay, y'all!
Thank you for being remotely interested in my post. It really cheered me up :-D
Here's the definition I submitted, also attached the proof of my humiliation.
devrant
It's the ray of fucking sunshine in a developer's perpetually annoying lifestyle. It is developer-made for developer-use.
An anonymous social platform where the app owners/founders/creators ACTUALLY LISTEN to user feedback!
Developers who have made up a million fucking ways to ask their fucktard co-worker/boss/client to go die, can exchange their creativity for ++s.
It's a platform to channel their rage into a creative rant and calm down a bit. It's like taking a long, deep, virtual breath.
Useless software/apps that behave like they were developed by 5 year olds, also take a hit sometime.
PS - Addiction is a common side effect.18 -
Are there any other developers out there who find that people judge their skills based on the color scheme they use in an editor?
I started programming with software that only offered one color scheme and have never felt the need to move away from it since I'm used to it.
While I'm sitting in the office, co-workers often come up to me, take one look at the fact I'm using a light color scheme and feel the need to try and convert me to the dark side as if that will make me a better developer.
Does anybody else experience this?26 -
Got contacted by "cosmicjs" ( https://cosmicjs.com ) to build apps using the platform and blog about said apps.
Googling them, they got articles spread all over medium, by either the co-founder or the developers, praising it to be the better wordpress and how some seemingly paid twitter posts praise it too.
Apparently "Deutsche Bank" and Volkswagen, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, JPMorganChase use it, which I highly doubt, maybe somebody here can figure out if thats actually false claims, since googling any of those together obv. doesn't return anything, nor makes it sense why they would spend such a large amount on... nothing?..
That one might be just me, but then theres those comments from themselves on producthunt, praising it, though it seems they failed to logout or something? the one co-founder seems to be praising how easy it is to install, by talking about it like an external user?.. (screenshot in comments)14 -
I often want to scream at co-workers because of their lack of attention to details.
I believe attention to detail is important for software engineers.
I tell my junior developers that "it works" isn't enough, you need to make sure it works as perfectly as possible and paying attention to detail helps with that.13 -
Best:
Having one of my projects go so well, that the co-ordinators asked me to speak at a conference they are hosting next year (will be my first time).
Worst:
Hiring 2 developers in a row, for the same position, both unable to debug a problem, both unable to use google, both with a tendency to just stop working if they get blocked.
Sadly my 2018 interviews will now contain these questions:
- *opens www.google.com*, Have you ever seen this?
- What do you do with it?
- *shows screenshot of a 'file not found' command line error*, tell me what this means?
- Bonus question, how do you fix it?1 -
When your co-worker thinks the Onion is a legit publication and believes in all its tech news 😁
"OMG Google puts metal chips in their developers' heads, thats why they are so efficient"
Me: ok :|
"Artificial intelligence is real and it has taken over the world, all world leaders are bots"
Me: ok :|
"Obama is not a real person but a robot and he is not just ruling America but the world"
Me: sweet :|
"Even Lisa Ann is not real"
Me: FUCK YOU, Dont fuckin kill my wet dreams6 -
So at the moment I'm developing a RESTful API for an internal project at work and I'm starting to learn and understand about HTTP status codes.
So I started incorporating proper response HTTP status etc, but my co-workers don't understand what any of it means. They think that just sending a JSON response is enough with any messages should be enough. I think this mindset stems from people who just do simple AJAX calls in JavaScript just to get or store data.
It's these kind of developers that I find are lazy or have no motivation to improve themselves, which is disappointing.5 -
Have a t-shirt saying "Sysadmin - Because even developers need heroes" fellow co-worker said "that's not precise enough" I am looking forward to what he will come up with5
-
So this just happened,
Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.
We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.
He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.
Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.
He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!
" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.
He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.
His smile was creepy though :/ -
Got stucked in a problem with recursion in php, almost 2 days no sign of progress until i told my co worker how my code works, then i found the error and it work. I think developers need to talk about the code to realize whats wrong with the code.9
-
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
I have noticed I have had great success using another co-worker as a metaphorical rubber duck (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally). It improves my productivity vastly. However, I know that it probably distracts others when I am using them in that way.
That's why I want to buy a literal rubber duck and talk to it. I could do it very quietly and most of my close co-workers use noise-cancelling headphones 80% of time while sitting at their desks. My only concern is other people passing by my desk would think that I am weird. My desk is in an open space and several people pass by it every hour. (however on my floor besides developers we have HR, marketing and people from high up who might be unfamiliar with the rubber duck method).
Is it unprofessional to talk to a rubber duck at the office?4 -
When co-developers talk to non techies with tech talk expecting them to understand. Like, where's that going to get you? An essential skill for a developer is to be able to translate tech talk to help people understand fully!!1
-
The founder of the company saw my profile in linkedin. He dm me and said that he and his co founder reviewed my profile and saying that they were interested to hire me because my profile was good. And after a week. I officially joined the team, eventually the person that contacted me admitted that he's msg is just templated and sent to all related developers. I realize that they didnt even check my portfolio I thought they appreciate it. FML!
-
I have co workers who laugh at me everytime I discuss to them how we should create clean code. (create functions for repeating code, naming conventions, generic code).
They would brag instead how they make another javascript ui library/plugin work(we are web developers by the way). Looks good in the front end but a mess in the backend.
I already created generic classes, generic database views that can be used by them if they want. But they create a new one with the same functionality.
I am a bit of a shy guy, and they are bit of loud, and I don't want to look like a know-it-all-guy, so I just let them do what they want.
I am just concerned how we can work easier by easily reading each others code.5 -
So I've been back to work for 2 weeks after going on a holiday. Getting back into the flow of things was easy, but seeing the status of the project that I am a part of, and seeing the kind of implementation work that my co-workers has done, it's kind of a no surprise.
So the past 2 weeks I've been completing features that I left my co-workers to finish, but didn't. And rewriting other features that they worked on, but does not meet the specifications.
Will I ever be able to work with reliable/competent developers? -
Co-worker that is non-tech oriented:
"So what do BI developers do?"
Me:
"Well...." start simple then get uber complicated.
Co-worker:
"Oh ok cool. Well my LAN isn't working, can you help me?" -
Service based companies and Nepotism
In India, most IT companies hires their own family members. Even they promote their own family members. One of the my friend worked as dev he found that mostly his co workers are relatives of founder or managers. He told me that he understand if they get hired from some kind of references but that's not case here. Even HR is also family member of manager/founder. Most of this guys don't know any language. Even they don't have any kind of professionalism
Imagine that working on companies where your co-workers and HR is family members of managers and founder. Where you find help because everyone will against you because all are family members.
they deduct PF of workers who are not relatives and never pay tax to goverment. In india, most developers are desperate to get job because that's what education system and society taught them.
Hope startup culture will kill all these shitty companies1 -
Ever since I started out in a programming job, I have always been a sole developer. I have worked in teams before but it was usually me being the mentor, despite my own knowledge being very limited.
However years ago I worked for a successful ecommerce business and it was the first time that I felt like a junior. At the time I was the type that never cared much about front-end and design. But the senior developers there had taught me how design of the website, and how we treat the customers is important. By making sure that we give them the best customer experience, they will come and shop again.
Although I still primarily focus on backend development, I still hold onto what they taught me. Even now at times I give my input to designers and project managers about design, UI/UX, and the customer experience. But more importantly bestow that mindset to my fellow developer co-workers. -
at the co-working space where I work today there was an argument between the CEO of this startup and their developer.
not really sure what it was about but at the end the developer was getting really frustrated and he shouted: "I'm telling you REST means HTTP!!".
I think all the developers around vomited on their keyboard.2 -
This is a true story when I was working as a application technician a couple of years ago!
Before I started working there, they had a couple of incidents with ppl with less knowledge accidently deleted stuffs in prod databases, and only a handfull of ppl get the full access to them. I started working in this team, and one day I was asked to run a snippet in one of the prod databases from a co-worker with less privilege.
Loged in, run the snippet and the server STALLED for a couple of minutes! When the snippet was finished I looked at the screen and saw the output "1724217 rows deleted". The fun part here, was that we went to a coffee break right after this, and after a couple of minutes we started to hear ppl mumbling that the network was slow as f*ck, servers didn't respond etc etc.
Well, I responded that I got a snippet that deleted 1724217 row in a table and we ran back to our computers and started to work backwards to solve this.
The best part in this story is that:
* Was not my fault! Even thou I was the one that executed it.
* The tables was deleted from a live prod server that was not heavily used!
* I asked for a life line for us in this team, that we needed a prevented output so we can "match" the actual output after we ran it in prod from the ones from the developers!
Even thou it was not my fault, this is the worst mess up I have done working in IT over 10 years. O_o8 -
Co developer jumps to take the lead on our new project. Already overloaded and claims about her work load
I on the other hand just finished all my projects, guess I'll just sit back and wait.4 -
Do only developers have to do such tasks like Cinderella sorting out the lentils from the ashes?
Poor co-workers
* who had to program against the undocumented closed, ever changing API from Exchange Server, supporting over a decade old versions
* who had to compile a c++11 compatible clang or gcc on some sick old OS and almost got it working with compiling a fresher gcc with one that got stuck in one of the build stages.