Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

We are a hosting company.

That means that we host websites and servers.

Hat does NOT mean that we manage your FUCKING APPLICATIONS.

THE NEXT FUCKING PERSON WHO'S GOING TO ASK ME APPLICATION RELATED QUESTIONS OR TRIES TO CONVINCE ME THAT IT REALLY IS A MOTHERFUCKING HOSTING ISSUE IS GOING TO GET A FUCKING FIST IN THEIR EYES.

FUCKING FUCKING FUCK.

I'm a little late to this, but that Python master/slave issue.. what the fuck is up with that?!

You say that you're offended by words.
=> Fuck off. If you want to serve social justice, help people in third-world countries that need your help.
=> Also, you do realize that the use of master/slave is just as much applicable to technology as client/server or host/guest are, right? It's a relationship between fucking machines or code blocks, not humans.

You say "why the outrage over this?"
=> Fuck off. Your SJW bullshit has no place in technology. It's a fucking word in fucking code!!!

You say that you're improving the Python project with this.
=> Fuck off. It breaks existing documentation and needlessly abstracts terminology that is used pretty much everywhere. What do you prefer, conciseness and a language to be easy to understand or for it to become all cushioned to soothe your frail feelings?

You know, there's something else that I wanted to talk about that's related to this. I have Asperger Syndrome, which on paper is a disability. In practice it's difficulty to socialize while having an above average IQ. That "disability" is what drove me into technology. When I see job listings actively prefer people with disabilities for social justice, you know what? That offends ME. Because I wouldn't want to be chosen as the best applicant just because it ticks social justice boxes. I want to be chosen as the best applicant because I outcompeted every other applicant with actual skill and fitness to do my job.

Also, when a company sells you a defective unit, would you be happy? Of course not. So why are you happy when they employ a defective? I am someone that would - on paper - be impeded by natural selection, because I am "handicapped". But I'm all for it. Humanity is what it is today - shit - partly because defectives have become widely accepted into society. Call me a bigot, but I'd rather be called that than to not raise concerns about this trend.

On the subject of handicaps, that's a term that's used in games, what for aiding the player that can't win against the regular opponent (which is usually just a fucking bot, wtf yo). I am handicapped, therefore YOU shouldn't use the word in a sense where it's totally reasonable to use it!! Says no one ever, me neither. Grow a fucking pair and realize that code isn't written with the intent to offend anyone. So why are you?

So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵

Been getting rejected for Linux related jobs all over for the last few months. Yesterday I emailed a company yet again because fuck it.

Got a call today from their recruiter! Genuinely nice guy and he's going to call me back tomorrow! Let's hope this finally goes well 😄

I buy rubber duck related gifts for people in the company I work for. And somehow I have gotten unicorns back. Today I think they won.

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

I was *not* on the list. I was devastated, to the point of depression. I refused to get over it, sulked at home, fell sick, skipped college for next two weeks straight. It took a few more days for me to recover.

After several visits from my friends and a lot of convincing, I decided to go back to college. I felt hopeless and had pretty much resigned to my fate. Being the idiot that I am, I missed several other interview opportunities during that interim when I was despairing-away.

Semester exams were about to start and I get a call from my staff saying I had cleared the coding exam for one of the companies that was coming for recruitment the next day. I had written this exam like several months ago and didn’t even remember having written it. It was such a short notice and I had zero time to prepare and my psyche didn’t want to(remember how I had resigned to my fate?).

I did manage to make it to the interview. I was expecting a tough interview (this company had a reputation for having tough interview rounds) but all I got was a bunch of tree and linked list and search algorithm related questions (internship interview). I had two rounds. It did really go well but I had learnt to not get my hopes up. Then I noticed other interviewees being called for a third round and they asked me to go home. I was like “meh”. I was used to it at that point in time.

Very unexpected to me, (but i’m pretty sure y’all have guessed at this point) I get a call saying, they have recruited me as an intern! 6 months later, I was working as an employee!

When I look back today, I realize that my current job, in every way, is waay better than the one I had so desperately wanted! The pay, the timing, the location, my actual job description, all of it! As a bonus I have an awesome manager who trusts me! I work with remotely with a team with such high standards and I learn something new everyday.

In my two years here, I have built a couple automation systems from scratch, I have mentored an intern and got him a full time offer, I have had two free two-week trips to the US and I have been promoted once! I’m so glad I was rejected that day (:

Thank you for reading!

Skipping all the "Women in IT" sessions my company tries to enforce, along with ditching such questions like "What attrocities did I experience related to my gender, during my first month of working here?"

Well, fuck, we are few, all right. But can I just be a dev instead of a girl dev, please?

I discussed this whole feminism trend with many of the women colleagues, but not one of them could mention a case where they were distinguished by their gender. Ever.

Boss: we are going to build a blockchain. ( he is smiling proudly)
Me: we are doing data visualization boss!!! Why we need the blockchain?!?!?
Boss: I am disappointed in you!!! You don’t read any Tech news or follow the market trends? BlockChain is tending nowadays... ( showing angry emoji using his face)
Me: it is not related to our work by anything!!! What we will visualize? A success of the transition? The amount of it? A visualization of the nodes?
Boss: (shouting) there are a lot of opportunities using the BlockChain in our days, and it is critical to our business...
Me: boss, there many opportunities using the ******* BlockChain, and I am leaving this company by the end of the month... find a ******* BlockChain developer to visualize the ******* process...
Boss: ........ (silence)
Me: .... (already resigned)

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

So today I receive 23 emails on DMCA takedown notice from last year project (which is a personal project). I asked Github why they think it is violating their policy, they told me they receive tonnes of complaints from a company, they shared the chat and that's the ex-company that fired me.

Even the project is not related to them, they seem to want to "Cancel" me on Github. Bro this is Github, not Twitter! Cancel culture does not work here.

Some of my IoT projects they flag it In Github, which I believe my ex-company they don't do any IOT projects. How the fuck it is violating their so called "code nondisclosure"?

Being a programmer on a non-tech startup company is not too bad. That means aside from coding:

- You have to check if the office printer works
- You need to figure out why the phone lines aren't ringing
- You have to teach a stupid colleague on how to unzip a file
- When they give you a task, they'll say that it's "not urgent", but, they just "need it by tomorrow"
- You have to be a "mind-reader" because if something goes wrong, they don't know how to describe what's going on. Or probably, they're just too lazy being specific. They'll just say, "Hey, I have a problem.", and you will be like "What problem? Your dog is sick? You shit your pants? You lost your faith in God? Fuck what?"
- You don't have a time to "focus", because everyone interrupts you for just about anything related to "technology". Yeah, because you're the IT guy
- You always have learned and applied the latest practices/stacks, but no one gives a fuck
- You will start to re-think your life and devrants make you feel better

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

I just had the most bizarre experience of my life. I handed in my resignation letter today. About an hour later, the CEO comes and collects me, takes me into his office, and rants about me leaving and other random not even tangentially related bullshit. Accusing me of not believing in the company and not talking to him. I have no idea if I'm fired.

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Kiki, I want you to, for the first time of your career at %company%, quit worrying about deadlines and just wander free. Forget about due projects, forget about everything, and just do your crazy experiments till the end of this month."

This was the one-to-one with our CEO today. Yes, I'm being paid to do whatever I want without time restrictions, as long as it is related to my field.

And you know what? At this stage of my life, I don't even want to exploit that, to weasel my way around definitions and justify doing nothing. I legit have three AI experiments to run, I have money to run them, I have time, and I for sure have motivation.

Good workplace is when doing nothing isn't the most desirable thing to do.

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

rant¡

Client: "Can you add some logos to the homepage?"
Me: "Sure, I've just added it, take a look at staging."
Client: "Great, we can move it to live"

** 5 days later after it being moved to live and telling them I'm going on holiday. **

Client: "EMERGENCY change logo now, we need to change x logo. These logos look crappy too. How did this happen?"

Fuck this. I'm not employed by you, you don't have any right to speak to me like that. Especially after working tirelessly for your company.

**sent email back explaining how to upload files**

Told them not to contact me unless it's technically related.

Is anyone else getting REALLY tired of seeing emojis in production apps? Pic related.

It just gives a really generic feeling, and I feel like more and more projects are getting comfortable with just throwing in an emoji and calling it a day. IMO it looks so trashy.

I can understand if it's a small company, but at the same time it's like, couldn't you fork over a few buckaroos to a designer on Behance or Dribbble and make your design a little more YOUR design? I wanna see what your brand represents. Emojis don't really help. Whatever.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

I recently interviewed for a job at company where I had 20 minutes to code a solution in python (whose standard library I know nothing about) to a question, which also included googling certain finance-related APIs, with not one but two technical interviewers looking over my shoulder THE ENTIRE TIME.

TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤

I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.

He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.

After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.

Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.

He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.

Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.

This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

So, a friend of mine just called me and asked what is it that I do in programming, and if I knew Java, because her stepfather owns a company, and they're currently hiring. Since she's not a tech person, I answered "basically, websites", but the stepfather was asking something else in the background, and she couldn't understand what the heck he was saying, so she put me on the phone with him.
I then explained, I do all kinds of web related stuff, from simple HTML single page sites, to WordPress themes and whatever, so I know PHP, Javascript, and all that crap.
And then, he asks me this wonderful question:
"And programming languages... ?", as in "do you know any?"
... I was like... Wut?...
I mean, I see where he's coming from. He probably meant compiled languages or something, but still... I felt like screaming at him "WEB DEVELOPERS ARE REAL PROGRAMMERS AND DESERVE SOME LOVE TOO YOU KNOW?! 😢"

I decided to go with a "nah, not compiled languages, no..."

It's possible that you should take a basic HTML and CSS course before you start a company based on teaching resources related to progressive web apps...

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

One of the biggest reality checks you will run into when starting your first dev related job - and which they don't teach you about in school - is that a lot of the time will be spent working with other people's code, and rewriting it into "your own" is rarely an option.

You might be super into making things, but not everyone manages to maintain that same spark while taking over a 15 year old project with fundamental issues that have to be triaged "for now" because you need a hotfix on this other specific thing out in prod before lunch.

There are no gods now. They left the company years ago and nobody knows why they used the windows registry as a user repo.

//An okay long rant..

So i work at this small robotics start-up company I Copenhagen.
The first dumb part is that it only uses interns as staff, because then they don't need to pay people. (I am working part time, for free. Just to get experience (I am only 20 btw))

So.. I often get into an argument with my boss, since she is a designer with a "passion" for robotics (she has no clue how to do anything related to the work) But I often try to explain to her some current limitations in the staff, and what is possible for us to do, but she will never listen. She really wants us to design our own microcontroller board PCB, and she want it at the size of a coin. However when I tell her that none of the, non paid works has the experience or education to design such a thing, she never wants to acknowledge it, and it really pisses me off.
And her dad, who is the top boss, only care for esthetics when he is making a work environment, which is dumb when we just need to develop stuff...

Sorry if the rant was too long but had to get it out..

I love it when companies take 3 weeks to reply to their mail.
I love it when said company plans in a meeting during a 3 hour period, any moment through which they could arrive and you have to be available for.

Additionally, I love seeing companies use an @gmail.com for their business mail. The professionalism just oozes off of a Gmail account, when it's used for business-related stuff.

I love this kind of professionalism. So professional, much business.

…

Get a fucking domain already. And MAINTAIN YOUR FUCKING MAIL!! And why the FUCK am I waiting for these incompetent motherfuckers to arrive already, for 90 bloody motherfucking minutes that are way overtime for me as I've been awake for fucking 18.5 hours already?! Fucking incompetent pieces of shit.

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

!Dev but still a work related wtf moment.

A company has lunchtime sessions where people could present their hobbies or interests. All went well until one guy presented about his and his wife's interest in BDSM, complete with props and photos. The sessions were quietly abandoned after that.

I hate cliched lines in office.

When someone I respect leaves the company I don't say "Good luck for your future. Keep in touch". I shake hands, look them in the eye and say "It's been an honor"

On a birthday I don't say "Happy Birthday". I say "May you grace the cover of Time magazine" or something else related to their aspirations.

The entire IT department was HATED by the rest of the company at the last place I worked because of the complete ineptitude of the IT director and the executives refusing to do anything about it.

I was hired as a sys-admin and on my first day I knew I was in trouble. The help desk was just two guys and the only other sys-admin was the IT director. Our tiny team was supposed to handle everything for a company with a couple thousand employees spread across the country.

There was a budget for staffing but nobody would stick around for too long because of the IT director.

Here are some highlights:

- Servers were so far out of date that it was scary

- There was no documentation besides an excel spreadsheet with some passwords and IPs

- He just DISAPPEARED for a month ???

Turns out, he's related to one of the executives and was given the position with next to no prior experience. Nepotism is a bitch and I'm so glad I was only there for six months.

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

The joy of being a junior programmer in a marketing company...

Lately it's been 25% programming, 5% fixing other people computer, 70% doing stuff not related to my job

I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.

I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.

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?

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

Not dev related but still a rant:

My company decided that all the network traffic should go throu a virus scanner. But they don't know what the fuck they are doing, so now EVERY valid SSL cert gets rejected by our browsers because the virus-scanner breaks the SSL encryption.

Anyone open for a pishing attack?

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

Story Time.

TL;DR - Because of Corporate PTSD, I replace the word "everyone/folks/guys" with "Team" when I'm addressing my colleagues, whether it be an e-mail or verbally (F2F/Zoom/GMeet).

In 2019, An office job I worked at, a new Vice President joined the company (the same one who told me he saw me in his dream).

We were required, on a daily basis, to form a circle and one-by-one everyone would out-loud say their yesterday's and current day's tasks updates.

So before the VP joined, everyone was free to initiate their turn however they wanted. Phrases like "Hey Everyone", "Good morning all" or "Hi All" was all around acceptable.

But the moment he started joining the stand-ups, he felt the need to change this phrase to a standard "Good morning Team". No other variations of this. Only and ONLY these three words.

Why you ask? Because saying Good morning is good manners and using the word "Team" strengthens the bond between co-workers and increases collaboration and creativity.

Some colleagues were bound to forget this and they did, which resulted in the VP blasting at everyone for doing so. He would show genuine rage over this, almost as if the company would go out of business because of us, not complying to do so.

Now imagine, you get up at 8 AM, get ready, commute, and get ready to speak for the standup and you get yelled at in front of everyone, FIRST THING before you start working.

Needless to say, it would kill everyone's spirit for getting their day started but nobody could speak up against him because obviously, he was the VP of the company then.

And oh yes, our CEO fired him 5 months after that because he (the VP) got slammed with a pedophilia-related lawsuit, by the parents of a 5-year old.

When I landed my dream job in 2009 (which is also be my first job in the industry), I had no clue about python. The company just asked me three months after starting with them for something related if I'd like to join the automation team. It sounded like fun to me, so the company paid for me a private remote instructor for a week. Then I went across the world to the main office to work directly with our automation team for two weeks. I picked it up quickly and well (or so I thought) and was churning out scripts for a few years.

Through a series of unfortunate events, I and many others no longer work there. Five years later, I have a renewed interest in Python so I take online courses to relearn it. Why is it so much harder this time around? I do remember it, but not in great detail nor as well as I did, but I'm baffled that I'm struggling so much the second time around.

It's only Python! Still getting enjoyment out of it as I did before though.

Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...

I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...

And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????

This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?

Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <3

I work for a small company with about 10 employees working full-time in the office. We all report directly to the CEO, Phil. When the pandemic hit, Phil went into full panic mode and had us all move our desks 12+ feet apart, wash our hands every 20 minutes, sterilize everything in between uses, etc. Nothing super weird, and better than having no reaction at all, but it was a hypervigilant process that made me expect him to be very accommodating when our state went on lockdown.

Boy, was I wrong. Our industry is considered essential so we’re still open, but Phil is being odd when it comes to working from home. For background, about 95% of our work can be done remotely. The other 5% would require about 15 minutes in the office once a week. I was the first one to pose the idea of working from home and Phil nervously agreed, but only let do it three days a week. My coworkers were given similar instructions but were “encouraged to come in every day, if possible.” A few of them do.

Since then, Phil has gotten pretty weird about the situation. He refers to people who are working from home as being “off work” (which is NOT the case, we are all working and available while at home, which he knows because he calls us for work-related things during work hours!). Today, Phil asked me if my coworker Travis was in his office, and I said Travis was working from home, and Phil replied in a sour tone, “So he’s not working then, great.” He has made similar comments about my other coworkers. When I’m working from home, he’ll call me and ask in a sarcastic tone, “What are you even working on today?” Or he’ll give me an assignment and end with, “Can you actually do work on this today? I need you working.” One time, he called while I was in the bathroom and when I called him back less than five minutes later, I was told that I “need to be available and not screwing around.”

The weirdest thing is that none of us has had productivity problems! My job is such that I can tell when anyone is slacking even a little and I haven’t noticed any issues. Personally, I’ve actually been MORE productive! And I’ve never been accused of “screwing around” while at the office before, so this attitude has baffled me.

He is so convinced that we aren’t working that he cut our work-from-home time down two days a couple weeks ago, and now it’s being cut down to one day as of next week – when COVID cases are higher in our city than ever!

My guess is that because Phil isn’t physically seeing us work, he assumes we aren’t working. CCing him on stuff to leave “proof” doesn’t work because he doesn’t read his email. He is also naturally a nightmare of a micromanager (and an across-the-office yeller) so not being as “in control” is probably freaking him out. But what is the best way to handle this?

It’s been two months, and my last two “high-priority, drop everything and work on this!” tickets are *still* in code review.

I finished another ticket, “semi-high-priority” this time… whatever that means. It’s been sitting in data security review for a week and a half. I just convinced someone to do a code review on it.

In our virtual standup today, we all have our updates, and the boss replied to all of us with this fancy animated “ty” reaction. I got a 👍🏻 instead. So minor, but feels very off.

My “company AI hackathon” idea got co-opted by someone else (on the security team), changed into a security-related project instead, and I got put on his hackathon team instead of the other way around.

Kinda feeling unwanted lately.

so I had coworker that I hardly knew that started hitting me up on our Lync chat system in a sort of creepy way. at first he would just ask my advice on things a lot but he seemed like he was always looking for an excuse to come by cube. then I completely changed divisions within my company. there was no reason why this guy should still be hitting me up with tech stuff but he would still every couple weeks out of know where wanna engage. he'd try to find some technical reason but nothing we did now even remotely related. so one day I kind of said to him why are u coming to me with these issues still. he said "u haven't figured it out yet. u don't know this but we know each from a long time ago". so now I'm like going through all my early schooling, college, other jobs with him. he says no to all of that. he finally says it's in the spirit level. like from another life and he's surprised I have noticed it. 😮😮😮

Similar to other countries if you work in international projects and companies.

If you work for big government related / small domestic company projects you can meet with comments and variables named in native language instead of english.

Just because there are probably only 2-3 companies who win every government project, they take all money and pay shit to developers.
To meet requirements they mostly hire fresh graduates to do the job.
CEO of one of those most famous quote is: You can replace every developer with finite number of students.

Was invited to work on a new startup which had 2 founders and 3 devs including me.
Within 2 years, founders started fighting related to equity and stuff. Those mfs Finally dissolved the company.

We 3 became jobless but continued as a team and with the contacts we got from previous startup we started working on projects outsourced by other companies.

I was the designer, and the other one a passionate android and ios dev, last one was a pro php, node.js dev. We were super productive and fast. Worked together alot until one of us got a really good job in a company.
We still work on some crazy projects, discuss random shit, help each other with their projects whenever we meet on weekends.

I'm so tired.
Got enough sleep but tired nevertheless every day.

Situation in the company isn't helping, would really like to get a review as I'm really close to a 'final' version for productive use, none given.
Didn't think far enough and didn't include various OO-things when starting to program this application, so I had to rewrite lots of it. It certainly got better by the time but as it's a grown structure I'd feel happier if someone other than me had seen and cursed the code.
Coworker that has most experience in C# only once implemented something with multiple threads, couldn't help me there.
Could not test the code yet because the hardware was inaccessible and is now potentially broken.
I really like working independently, nevertheless I feel a little bit lost at sea - I can deal with that, but it's exhausting.
Also, trying to get an answer from the colleague who should act as my supervisor whether or not I can work remotely during a CS related course in the semester break for > 2 weeks now. Course admission is the mid of January so I'd like to have an answer this year so I can repeat the basics I'll need if necessary.
Also, Midterm is coming.

It's a lot of little things piling up right now I wouldn't mind if there were only 1-2 of them.
I'm just so damn tired.
I'll go to sleep now.

(In happy news: my internet connection is working pretty decent now, technician that fucked it up apologized and said that he probably needs glasses, he misread the connection number. :D)

A back-end developer at my company thinks CSS is easy, tries to fix some styling by himself without consulting front-end developers and messes up the styling of multiple web apps that rely on those styles. The next Jira ticket related to fixing those styles is, of course, assigned to me (with the highest priority)...

FML

People around me be like "Why you never take a break?? I see you work all the time. Doesn't your company offer you a paid holiday??"

Yeah they do offer a paid holiday, but even on holiday I still have to work because I'm the IT manager, full stack developer, database admin, helpdesk and everything that is related to IT.
:(

a client today wanted a specialized high performance, extremely stable, stock management software for pharmaceutical products, he also wants the software distributed, cross platform, and expect the delivery to be in a week or so, oh and did i mention that he also wants it to have an extremely good looking ui,
he got offended that i said you can only have one or two of those things not all of them,
for context, I'm just a freelancer not a big company and doing what he wants is impossible for me, also it was a billion ages since i worked on anything desktop related, web is all I'm diving into lately

My urgent, drop-everything, “bad actors have access to merchants and we can’t block them!” ticket that I rushed to finish didn’t make it into the release. It passed QA; everything works. There’s no complaints on code quality, either.

The blocker? My code uses the word “whitelist” (which is already present in the greater codebase in a related feature), and that made the woke VP (who happened to review the ticket) go REEEEEEE!! and demand I fix it to use approved language, therefore delaying the security fix until the next release cycle.

Yes, seriously.
It would be comical if I wasn’t so disgusted.

Oh well. Enjoy your bad company PR, dude. I hope it all burns.

I work in a team where I am the only person not belonging to the main company. We have been a year and 3 months working together and they still don't realise that I have very restricted access to many of the things related to the project. So every now and then, something breaks and we have a meeting where they all tell me how disappointed they are at me because I was responsible for that and then I try to show them how I could not possibly even access the information where it is stated that I was responsible for that thing. Or that that thing even existed.

And then, the move the conversation to why they won't pay for my ramping up. This is not ramping up, assholes, this is you allowing me to access the information I need to do my job as you want!

I really don't know what to do... Other than looking for another job

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

/* Not a rant, more like a story with a good ending */

Le me finally got an interview for a big company, started preparing for technical questions, white board test, basically anything related ti a technical interview. The role was for a graduate software developer as i just finished my college and is my first ever interview with a company.

At the interview, he sat down and said " it will be a friendly and a very informal type of interview " and then carried on to ask me about my interests and past experiences and shared some details about the company and technology they work with. At one point i started ranting about some problems i was in due to javascript's nature of compiling even though syntax isn't right and we both had a good laugh as well about it. Idk but i felt like the interviewer made me feel really comfortable so that anything we were having a chat about was without stress, as i was nervous the whole time before the interview for being my first expereince ever.

After leaving the office i felt like this was too simple for the role i applied for and thought the company might not be interested, 4 days letter i got a mail that they are offering me the role as the feedback from interviewer was excellent.

Pretty wierd but fun experience frankly.

(in 2008)
my boss in my first job. in general every time when he randomly burst into office. one specific time when he burst i to office and INSISTED that we've got to go to a parking lot to see something.

that something was a remote-controlled helicopter he just bought. (this was before the age of drones).

oh, and he was a chain smoker, always had a cigarette behind his ear (wat), and was dragging me out to have a smoke (i was the only other programmer smoker, but not as heavy as him) every 10-15 minutes under the implied pretense of needing to discuss something about the code, and frowned heavily when i refused (because i was actually in the middle of actual work), because he took it as me refusing to have a work meeting with him.

no, we almost never talked about anything work-related, while on that smoke "work meeting".

also, my boss' boss in my first job, when she entered the office asking "we need a clickable map of our country where clicking each region brings you to a search page with filter set to results from that region. how would we do that?"

i answered "html imagemap linking to the right search url for each region, or embedded flash doing the same, if you want the region buttons to be animated", and turned back to my work.

upon which she proceeded to talk about it with the second programmer, both pretending they're solving some aspects that my answer didn't already solve, INSISTING that i stop doing "whatever nonsense you're doing" and pretend that i'm paying attention as if anything they said was in any way relevant or important. i kept returning to my work because i was solving an annoying bug and their talk was empty and useless.

this second incident was then cited as one of the reasons i was let go, because "he ignores important conversations with his superiors about upcoming tasks"

in general, my first job was a shitshow where nobody had any time or energy to do actual work because they all expended all of it to PRETEND for their superiors that they're working, since the superiors had no clue how it looks when we actually do our actual jobs.

(one month after i was let go (because, in my boss' words, yes, the one with the helicopter, "the IT productivity is very low and I have to hold someone responsible") , the second programmer was let go as well, and one month after that, our boss (head of IT) was let go too. to this day I keep being fascinated how did the company manage to survive long enough for me to even be there, let alone how it STILL manages to survive. i guess being part of a nation-wide conglomerate is very effective in covering your company's losses and uselessness)

The story of how I got my new job (I will start in december) even though it is not a dev related one:

I was about to reduce my work hours, because my wife was getting a really good job. We couldn't both work full-time, because our son is in kindergarten. Then she broke her ankle and the job was gone. Right at this point I was offered a job at a friends company. I knew him by being an intern in his company.

Things always go well in the end.

Ok here's the story,
There is this girl older than me by 5-7years and I worked with her for 2 years in the past...
She's fun to be around, and lights the mood in the workplace...
However one day I found her CV in my machine so I went through it. (It's no crime and it was there in my machine idk y)
And as I went through the list of projects, I was surprised and taken back to see she listed one of my solo project which I managed and developed from scratch as if she contributed to it. 🤯
The management specifically handed me the whole project and I singlehandedly carried it out and finished it and that was one of the projects I was super proud of and elaborated in my interviews.😎
But since she was sitting beside me and she knew basic requirement and the solutions I developed she had the knowledge on the project.
I was bewildered to see she has mentioned that project in her CV which she had zero contribution. I didn't feel like confronting her thinking when someone asks full details on the projects she would have to lie in the interviews cz she wouldn't know much details on it. And hey not everyone has my ethics and lets see how far she goes with hers.(may be this was stupid but I just thought hey we go our own ways lets see how far you go with lies and I forgot about it completly)

But now she's trying to apply to my current workplace where I dreamed of joining and finally succeeded and happy, here they value trustworthyness and quality work ethics above anything else... and without even telling me she has added me as a reference person to get more points to get an internal recommendation.
I certainly don't want to put a good word on her work ethics. Her team spirit and everything is fine but I just CANNOT with correct conscience ignore her bad ethics and recommend her.
What should I do? I don't want to loose her as a friend but I will not and do not want to recommend her to any place knowing she cannot be trusted with work related stuff. I know if I just tell the truth to the company when they ask she will definitely will not be chosen and I might feel guilty knowing I stopped it from happening.... but I don't want to recommend her truly knowing her bad qualities which in my openion cannot be overlooked also.
Should I just overlook it and help, or should I just tell the truth to the company... errgggh

So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.