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Search - "competence"
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Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"
Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"
Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"
Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"
Boss: "What?"
Me: "Not the team, the servers..."
Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"
Me: "I get why he left you"
Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."
Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"
Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"
Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."
Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"
Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"
Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"
Boss: "That's what he said"
Me: "You're using that meme wrong"
Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"
Me: "That would work"
Boss: "Why are you grinning?"
Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"18 -
Devs regularly complain that our skills are not valued enough and that people think what we do is easy.
But, we don't really help the cause when we run around casually claiming to be "full stack" and not turning down work that clearly isn't in our area of competence.
We act more like Victorian amateur scientists.
Every seen a "full stack" doctor when you go to hospital? "Brain to feet---I can do it all."
OK, we have general practitioners, but they are really the BAs of the medical world. When it comes to getting into the weed, everyone specializes.
Full stack lawyer? "Hey, you did an excellent job of dealing with my house purchase. I've just been accused of murder. Can you represent me?"
While we continue to say that we can provide a high quality "full stack" experience I think we are signaling that this stuff *is* easy.19 -
A year ago I would have said:
"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"
Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.
I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.
The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.
So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:
"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"8 -
That's it. I fucking quit.
Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.
First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.
An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?
"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.
2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.
🖕17 -
I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).
So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".
I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.
If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.10 -
There have been so many low quality posts lately, ugh. They’re almost all poor attempts at humor in a pathetic grab for internet points, and many showcase a distinct lack of understanding.
Where are the rants?
Where is the competence?
Where is the anger?
Where is the rage?
... Where is the effort?31 -
got a mail 10 minutes after I finished a 10h shift that my contract won't be refreshed after 4 years ripping my ass off for this fucked up organization. apparently not because of lack of competence but of personal reasons. that's what you get for not being a sheep and having an opinion. my (ex)boss didn't even have the balls to say it to my face.
fuck them! I don't need people like that around me - neither in my spare time nor at work - and I wish them all the worst.
happy holidays motherfuckers!5 -
2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.
Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.
My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/
As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.
"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.
First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.
Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.
Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."
"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"
I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.
Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.
Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.
PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.2 -
When a company comes at you with a skills test or a stupid whiteboard interview, while completely disregarding your portfolio/GitHub/other proofs of competence, run far away.11
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Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.
So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).
So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.
Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.
So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.
Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?
Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.
Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.
So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.
Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.25 -
We used to use Trello for our team boards and was starting to transition to Gitlab's issues for better code integration...
I became aware that my boss was being "demanded" to have a better analytics of our team performance so I started digging more insightful issue/tasks software like YouTrack ( Jetbrains ) and Jira ( Atlasian ).
After 2 months of trial and learning I suggested we go with YouTrack.
"We" are now using it for about 6 months already and it is a fucking mess.
My peers have no clue how to scrum, even after my efforts to teach them and they even spent a fucking 3 days workshop about it on fucking Google (!?!?) without me ( there is a rant about it ).
My boss is a nice person but the dude lacks any trace of competence to manage anyone other than him.
I'm tired of babysitting a man that is 10 years older than me and has a car that costs almost 10x mine.
I'm two days back from vacation and I almost rage quited 5 times.3 -
Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.
Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.
A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*
(shorten but you get the Idea)
At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.
Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.
What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.
And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.
I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.6 -
When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.
When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.
Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.
In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.19 -
You know what i hate? Applying to jobs and never getting feedback--if a polite "we didn't hire you because x and y" is too damn hard, i would still rather a royal refusal over not hearing anything back at all. It's happened to me 3-4 times in a row now, probably going to be 5 - 6 soon enough. Seriously though, what is this shortage of devs everyone talks about? Because here i am with both hands and a leg in the air high as i could manage and you're not even acknowledging me? I even made a small React SPA once to satisfy a company's questions and show a bit of my competence--you think i ever got a reply from them? Shit, i didnt even get an auto reply. And from what ive read here on others' rants, im far from being alone. At least i could understand why they dont look at me (Bahamian, no degree, never had a dev job, etc.), but for proven programmers to go unnoticed the way they do is ridiculous.7
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TL;DR age != competence
My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.
Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...
But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...
I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...
I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck
He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...
He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...
I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...
We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:
Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?
Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.
( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)
Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.
Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!
Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.7 -
I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.
Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.
I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)
And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.
But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.
You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.
Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.
The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.
This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.
If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.
No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.
But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.
Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.
As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.
When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.
I fucking hate esoteric code.
Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.
This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.
As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.
Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.
Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.
That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".
I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.
It's just the community.
Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.
You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.
Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.
You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!
On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.
And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.2 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
i kinda hate my job, but i also enjoy my job. i hate that I'm overworked, i like being recognized for my competence. i hate the bosses, love my colleagues. i hate the shitty code i have to maintain, but i love making something better to substitute it.2
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Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
Sharing one of my father's great wisdoms:
- "You know, the truth is that world is run by surprisingly little competence..."2 -
Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.
I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.
=====
What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.
Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.
At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.
Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.
Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.3 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
Looks like Matrix just got educated on hiding administrative stuff behind a VPN, by the guy (or gal, but those don't exist on the internet) that hacked their production infrastructure. Coincidentally, it reminded me of that time when a dev wanted to educate me, a sysadmin, about VPN's 😄
https://devrant.com/rants/2030041
What I've learned from this incident are 2 things.. well mainly 2 things.
1. Never *ever* entrust developers with production access. Let DevOps take care of the glue that sticks dev and prod together.
2. Trust nobody's competence but your own. Matrix was advertised as "highly secure", and then they do a fuckup like this. Only trust yourself, and ensure that you're in control.4 -
If you're currently in college and wish to get placed in a major tech giant like Amazon or Facebook:
Don't learn React.js, instead learn Linked lists.
Don't learn Flutter, instead learn Binary search trees.
Don't learn how to perform secure Authorization with JWTs, instead learn how to recursively reverse a singly linked list.
Don't learn how to build scalable and fault tolerant web servers, instead learn how to optimally inverse a binary search tree.
These big tech companies don't really care what real world development technologies you've mastered. Your competence in competitive programming and data structures is all that matters.
The system is screwed. Or atleast I am.18 -
Finally got a new job! Outta here!
Just got out of a meeting that I drove half an hour for (that could easily have been a damn phone call), for hand off stuff with the agency my company has hired to replace me.
I've talked to their senior dev a few times in the past, and he always struck me as an arrogant asshole. I assumed this meant that he had some level of competence to justify this attitude, but evidently not. Turns out he and his employees are a bunch of fucking idiots who don't even know how to use the command line, or anything but a cms with stock themes.
I'm taking all of the specific public stuff I've done for my employer off my resume as soon as I get back, because these dudes are going to fuck it up worse than a soup sandwich. -
@Owenvii made a post over at (https://devrant.com/rants/2359774/...) and I want to write a proper response.
The biggest thing you have to look out for as a new dev is the jobs which you accept to begin with.
This isn't minimum wage no more, this is "big league", well, maybe not apple or google big league, but it's not $9.25 an hour either.
Basically you don't want to work anywhere where 1. your labor will be treated as a highly disposable commodity. 2. where the hiring manager doesn't know how to do the job themselves.
The best thing you can do is, if you're new, and just breaking through (and even if you're not), is ask them common questions and problems/solutions that crop up doing the work. If they can answer intelligently that tells you the company values competence (maybe), enough to put someone in place who will know ability from bullshit, merit from mediocrity, and who understands the process of progressing from junior dev to a more involved role.
It also means they are incentivized to hire people who know what they're doing because the training cost of new hires is lowered when they hire people who are actually competent or capable of learning.
Remember, an interview isn't just them learning about you, it's your opportunity to interview *them* and boy, you'll be making a BIG mistake if you don't.
Ideally you want them to ask you to pair program a problem. If your solution is better than theirs then they aren't sending their best to do interviews, and it tells you the company doesn't fire incompetents. The interviewers response can tell you a lot too, if they critique your work, or suggest improvements, and especially if they explain their thinking, that is an amazing response to look for, it says the company values mentorship and *actual* teamwork (not the corporate lingo-bingo 'teamwork' that we sometimes see idolized on posters like so much common dogma).
Most importantly, get them to talk about their work and their team. If they're a professional, it'll be really difficult to pry anything negative about their co-workers out of them, but if they're loose-lipped and gossipy thats a VERY bad sign, regardless of what they have to say.
Ask to take a tour and do a meet n' greet of who you will be working with. If they say no, then it's no thank you to a job offer. You want to take every opportunity to get to know everyone there, everyone you'll be working with, as much as possible--because you'll be spending a LOT of time with these people and you want to rule out any place that employs 'unfireable' toxic assholes, sociopath executives, manipulative ladder climbing narcissists, and vicious misery-loving psychopathic coworkers as quick as possible. This isn't just one warning flag to look out for, it's the essential one. You're looking for the proper *workplace culture*, not the cheesy startup phrase of "workplace culture", but the actual attitudes of the team and the interpersonal dynamics.
Life is really short, and a heart attack at 25 from dipshit coworkers and workplace grief can and will destroy your health, if not your sanity, the older you get.
Trust and believe me when I say no paycheck is too grand to deal with some useless, smarmy, manipulative, or borderline motherfuckers at work constantly. You'll regret it if you do. Don't do it. Do you fucking do it. Just don't.
Take my words to heart and be weary of easy job offers. I'm not saying don't take a good offer that lands in your lap, I AM saying do some investigating and due diligence or the consequences are on you.1 -
So I get home from work, sit down infront of my computer and start browsing a few sites.
The loading times was not as fast as they should so I checked out my network setup. I had been auto connected to my ISP provided modems WiFi, which happens every now and then, so I reconnect to my faster and better WiFi AP.
Invalid password. What? Ok.. Let me just type in the same password, slowly..
Invalid password. MF..... Same password, looking down at my keyboard.
Invalid password. GDMF...
Browse to my AP config site, type in username and password.
Invalid password. Oh no you fucking did not just deny me entry as well.
Ok. Something is up and I'm going to get to the bottom of this!
Boot up Kali, fires loads of crap at the WiFi and the site. Still no damn luck! WTH!
I go upstairs to my AP, turn it off and on again.
I can now login on both my AP WiFi and config page.
It had frozen.
Thats two hours of troubleshooting for a "have you tried turning it off and on again" solution.
I feel great about my competence after this.2 -
Android development sucks assssssssssss.
They FINALLY made a design system that doesn't look ugly so I thought might as well upgrade my old apps to it.
Publish and tonnnnes of crashes hours after launch.
Test on older devices and turns out some @color/material_xyz was missing in a lower API code BUT available in higher ones? No fallback, no error in AndroidStudio, just a runtime crash. Amazing
Then the location permissions glitch up. On lower androids even if you aren't actively tracking the user, the system tries to call some method which if you haven't overridden, the app crashes at launch.
And no amount of wrapping in try-catch-ignore helps (https://stackoverflow.com/questions... helped)
OH AND THEN the above solution if used on latest Android code33, CRASHES ON RUNTIME. so more sets of 'if VCODE this then ask this else that' bullshit.
I don't even need location it's just for better ad money ffs.
I've been team-android since Froyo and hate apple's monopoly, but if this is the level of their competence, many will jump ship sooner or later.
PS: yes I know I should've checked for lower versions before hand but Im not gonna make 8 android VMs to test all when different things fail in different versions.
I did have to do that in the end, but for a meh pet project one shouldn't have to. The system should have enough fallbacks and graceful fails.3 -
I want you all to think back on how "transparent" and "helpful" everyone was to you when you were useful to the company.
And then as soon as you were gone, did they just complain and say something like "how could fullstackclown leave us??!?!?!"
I swear, the last call I was on, I literally heard the phrase "we are such a good team, we think up great MVP products and you guys execute so well"
Let me translate: "we are whimsical fucksticks and you are our slaves to implement it because we ourselves are too incompetent to do it"
Well no more.
Fucking tools, all of them, everyone just wants to use us to get ahead. No competence, no self-understanding, just encapsulate the "IT" or "tEcHiE" people to some department - doesn't even have to even be near us, they can be from any geographic location; they can just be replaced at a moment's notice!
Yeah, well fuck you, because we're growing in skill and understanding, and fighting against you.
Fucking 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡s
The unionized revolution of software developer is coming soon.3 -
MarSecOps: "Marketing Security Operations, the idea is that security is not just the realm of website developers or the IT department anymore, but rather the marketing department has an equal if not greater interest in, and even responsibility to security."
Source: https://strattic.com/5-predictions-...
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? The marketing dimwits responsible for security? Whose IT competence ends at Powerpoint drivel?!
I LOLed so hard that I could have shat a cactus!8 -
No way. I hope this is a joke...else its not helping building up trust in their competence (Australian vpn provider)1
-
Last week I had to make a presentation with two others before finishing school, to test our "competence while working with other people".
My old MS Office license expired, so I thought I could make a presentation with HTML.
Me and the two others met so we could discuss what each of us did for the presentation so far.
"Dude why are you opening your browser and not PowerPoint"
"You'll see"
I showed them the presentation and then the file behind it so we could edit the content.
"Dude wtf is this"
They ended up just sitting at their phones and I did all the work, one week later we had to present "our" work to the teachers.
"So, who worked exactly on what?" the teachers asked, and while the two others were struggling to tell them what they did, I gave the teachers a small glimpse at the file.
I ended getting the best grade and saving my graduation, while one of the others has to go to school again. :D3 -
!rant
All computers are great and not all people are compilers
please use a Semicolon for God's sake
Though coding is competence
I believe in readable code2 -
I AM IN RAGE !!! MY MANAGER IS A FUCKIN SNAKE ASSHOLE!
FUCKER RATED ME 3/5 !
i feel like destroying my laptop and putting my papers right away. this is absolute shit hole of a company where corporste bullshit and multi level hierarchy runs the system, ass licking is the norm and still me, a lowly sde dev 1 was giving my 200% covering their bullshit to deliver outputs on time.
let me tell you some stats.
- our app has grown by 2x installs and 5x mau.
- only 3 devs worked on the app. the other 2 can vouch for my competence.
- we were handled an app with ugliest possible code full of duplication, random bugs and sudden ANRs. we improved the app to a good level of working
- my manager/tl is such a crappy person that if asked about a feature out of random, he will reply "huh?" and will need 2 mins to tell anything about it.
- there is so much dependency with other teams and they want us to talk to them personally. like hell i care why backend is giving wrong responses. but i cared, i gpt so good handling all these shit that people would directly contact me instead of himal and i would contact them. all work was getting done coz 1 stupid fellow was spending 90% of his time in coordinations
- i don't even know how to work with incompetence. my focus is : to do my task, fix anything that is broken that will relate to my task in any way and gather all the stuff needed to complete my task
i am done. i cannot change this company because its name is good and i am already feeling guilty about switching my previous jobs in 1 year but this is painful.
in my first company i happily took a 10% hike coz i was out of college and still learning.
in my 2nd company, i left due to change in policies ( they went from wfh to wfo and they were in a different state) , but even while leaving they gave a nice 30% hike
in my current company idk wjat the no. 3 equates to , but its extremely frustrating knowing a QA who was so incompetent, he nearly costed us a DDOS got the same rating as me
------
PS : GIVE ME TIPS ON HOW TO BE INCOMPETENT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT8 -
I've seen a lot of people design great websites here on DR. Since I'm being dragged into quite a bit of front end, I've decided to quit complaining and up my design game. Suggestions and advice on good design considerations?
Our creative lead sent me a few reference websites that had a lot of "wow factor". It had stuff like trailing text animations, slow motion menus and what not. For some reason, I found all of it to be annoying and pointlessly bloated. I'm more into minimalist design and simple transitions but idk if this is just my taste or lack of competence in making such fancy ass design that makes me not appreciate such sites. I need advice and I'm not sure on what. You'd probably know what if you've been in a similar situation before.14 -
FIRE DRILL!!!!!
Customer who decided to deploy our system in the middle of their busiest time ... and kinda ad hoc-ed their ... human processes (not sure what to call it). Just to get by, and then sort of let things rot.
So last week they contact us and say "OMG some poor soul at this company was spending hours making spreadsheets to track what they were doing... and they keep fucking it up because it's nigh impossible to get right".
Real story, big shake up at the company, and someone said "lets look at our process" and they discovered "holy fuck we have this software but we're doing shit like it's the damned civil war".
This naturally raised questions about the competence of the folks we work with ... who chose our software, and thus our software.
So now we're flushing out all the stuff we asked the customer to figure out months ago that is usually done via a months long implementation / integration ... in a few days. Also ... I'm making some new things for them.
WEEEEEEEE
Granted, we're billing them like mad for this so no big deal really.1 -
An UI guy which actually complimented my will to work with non-dev professions in order to deliver quality features.
Spoiler: I am willing because you are awesome and are not offended in me asking questions outside my area of competence in order to be sure what I do is what you want, so if you happen to read this post kudos on you M. , not on me :) -
My biggest challenge is moving from framework to framework or language to language.
It takes me a good day or day and a half to get used to it. I'll finally have a eureka moment and figure things out. But until then, it's quite hard and I end up questioning my competence. -
I was today years old when I learned about "shadow jobs". This is where companies list jobs without any intention of hiring anyone. You could also call them "fake jobs", or "lies". Why they do this is anyone's guess. Maybe they want to look like they're expanding for their investors or something. Maybe they're harvesting resumes to train AI. Maybe they're just bored, and this is how the sick fucks get their jollies now that it's harder to find snuff films on the public internet. I wonder if HR didn't exist, would asylums still be popular? Is HR as a field just a way to keep prison populations lower?
For me, this is more of a matter of "want" to change jobs, over "need a job". For example, I've got a friend who is a way, way, way better programmer/developer than I could ever claim to be, and he's been fighting tooth and nail to get the time of day from some of these companies. Despite his extensive academic background, professional credentials, and high levels of skill and competence, he's been out of work for months now. At least they're going to "keep your information on file" though, right? Can definitely pay a mortgage with that.
Maybe I don't get it, but if you're hiring, post the JD. If you're not hiring, shut the fuck up and stay off the job boards. Everyone wins, except for the recovering snuff film addicts in HR.1 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
How is there no open, accepted, widely used standard to store & tag things like old family photo albums, diaries, books, etc.? Surely I can't be the only one who wants to digitise all this stuff to preserve it many years from now in case the drunk Uncle pisses on it, or Grandma's dodgy electrics burn the house down and it's all lost permanently. Or perhaps I am; it does seem that most other people doing genealogy work have the technical competence of a lemon.
Like, I get it, there's *some* online solutions for this stuff (not many and they tend to cost a fortune), but if I want to store it locally or in a private git repo or whatever... well, no-one seems to do it. I want to be able to interlink individual photos with their contextual pages in albums, store metadata about them, store audio recordings of older relatives with transcripts linked, etc. - and it just doesn't seem to be a done thing.
Ah well. Perhaps I'll do it all anyway as some kind of side project, then all being well my great great grandchildren will be immensely thankful if family history stuff ever becomes popular again.18 -
When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?
Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.
Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.
It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.
This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.
In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.
Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.
It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.
I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?8 -
It's amazing how companies like Autodesk and Adobe see Linux as some "toy". When we talk about Linux we are talking about a professional workstation. My entire company uses Linux (currently Fedora 39) on its workstations, and all of our servers use FreeBSD. Not because it's free, but because it proves to be better than the alternatives to what we produce. We pay for licenses for JetBrains, BricsCAD, MATLAB and I still happily pay STEAM to play my Civilization, Doom Eternal, CS2 and I use Proton to continue my adventures in Diablo and Star Craft, all PAID. Adobe and Autodesk, be ashamed and instead of talking about market share, admit that you do not have competence.7
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My job is decent, but now I've got one developer who's been there a few months longer than me who pushes back on stuff that's considered standard, good practice.
We have a domain with lots of business rules. He's opposed to any sort of domain-centric architecture that puts business logic in one place. He doesn't give any coherent reasons. He can't describe his alternative clearly. He just wants to put stuff all over the place.
If I don't cite any references he says it's just my opinion. If I do, I'm talking down to him.
Then he decided that the database shouldn't have concurrency checks. His reasoning is that as the application grows we'll have more and more concurrent updates, and they all have to succeed.
What if that corrupts our data? He mentions "eventual consistency." which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
The idea that our code should carefully ensure that our data is correct is "extreme." What are we going to tell people when bugs happen? That expecting the application to work correctly is extreme?
He's not a terrible developer. He's an advanced Expert Beginner. He's convinced himself that whatever he doesn't already know isn't worth knowing. That's fine if he wants to stop learning, but this affects the whole team. He makes such a fuss that it everyone gets stressed out and eventually I have to back off.
The problem is that someone with a reasonable degree of competence can pass off his experience as superior to all knowledge from outside sources.
I've been doing this as long as him. I don't claim to be a rock star genius, but I do keep learning. I don't tell myself that I've reached the pinnacle. But all of that learning goes to waste if I can't use it.3 -
At what point did IT stop focusing on outcomes and start putting all energy into rhetoric? I feel like every IT department is “all show” and “no go” these days. If after 5 years your idea keeps blowing everything up in production, it wasn’t a good idea, regardless of how many buzz words you’ve implemented.9
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First time:
- using github/desktop
- working on a little personal testing website
- learning and understanding CSS/HTML
there's basically nothing at the moment, just a proof-of-competence-to-myself thing right now
http://parkcitymedia.github.io/ghPa...
(original repo name i know hhh)
happy i have somewhere to host my web stuff1 -
Our company is remote-controlled by one or two customer companies. Our CTO is remote-controlled by them also. And if that wasn't enough it feels like he has no competence in the development of normal software (not customer projects).
Officially the management in our company doesn't have the right to give direct orders to the development teams. In reality, they just ignore this rule and play dictator.
It feels that the management thinks that all developers in the company are just asses and idiots who screw up everything.3 -
Working in an expanding business is mostly fun, can be kind of challenging (for those who don't like to step in and do what's needed). One thing in particular you need to do a lot - is interviews. Lot's of them.
There are alsways two sides of the coin, for sure. But, just a little tip/hint to everyone looking for a job - please, please, please make sure your CV and letter at least makes sense for the position you're trying to get.
This (screenshot) is just one example of things in a CV which really makes me want to shout and kick people out.
It's part of the front page of a CV, for someone who is looking for a position as front-end developer / UX specialist. This person claims to be very interested in UX, and has done wome work already in this field.
Can ANYONE explain to med WHAT THE F*CK this actually means?
1) How many stars can a row have? 10, 6, 8?
2) What does it mean to have 4 starss in PHP knowledge? What's lacking to get 5?
3) What's the scale based on, at all?
And you want me to hire to to do UX of loyalty communication (e-mail, mobile apps, websites/landing pages) for our customers - who in turn have millions of customers/prospects?!?
ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?
If you can't even make a visualization of your _own_ knowledge which can be interpreted into some sort of competence matrix, but you just use something you think looks cool... Damn, you could at least have tried.1 -
rants[0] =
"tl;dr: the account creation process at salesforce.com is really flawed.
In a lecture we were supposed to try out different CRM tools, one of them was salesforce. They are the worlds largest CRM software provider - not relevant for the rant, but it means they should have enough $$$ and competence to make something better.
When you create your account, you do not set a password. Instead they send you an email with a link, serving both as account activation and for setting your password. However, if you close the tab without setting a password, your account is still activated and the link in the email won't work anymore.
Alright, rather annoying, but that's why you can reset your password via email, right? Wrong. When you try to reset your password, they prompt you with a security question. Even when you never set them up. And obviously can't give the right answer. Who designed this logic?
On top of that, they nicely tell you to contact your sys admin if you are still having issues. My account is private. Not associated with any company.
So yeah, burned 3 emails until I figured that out and created 3 accounts I can never access again."; -
Why is tech management so f-ing distant? Very often NOT in meetings which they created and very not interested in anything the team/teams do. It is really a large offset between the work actually being done, the day-to-day operations that we do and the competence of management to acknowledge the fact that we actually do those things.
A lot of times they just stay silent in meetings and in the end they say something to try and make some conclusion and perhaps something ”funny” to try and lighten up the atmosphere. They fail on both of their tasks. They have no clue and are not interested in learning.
I feel like many of them don’t actually do anything. They are often ”away” but it is really unclear what that means.
I think it is symptom of a truly dysfunctional tech process. Bad leaders tend to hire more bad leaders and it is a toxic circle ending in good competent people leaving wanting more in the leadership.2 -
I tried to convince my boss that choosing ruby on rails would be a great framework for the projects they want me to develop. I even put together a presentation to show why it's capable.
I did it because I've completed a great course on coursera, and wanted to gain more experience in real projects.
Yet they've dismissed the idea cause there is noone else working at the company who has any competence in rails, so I have to do all the work in yii. There are lot if similarities between the two framewoks but I have no interest in php and I haven't touched php in like, 8 years...
Need to find a way to practice rails in the meantime.1 -
I am not overly excited about my team, the team lead, my manager, my managers manager, my managers co-managers or my managers manager manager.
Further, I am not that confident that management actually became management due to competence. I now believe that management got to be management because they think (wrongly) alike. This is not a comfortable thing to dwell on.5 -
is there even anyone who thinks natively in rust
if someone knows someone with YouTube channel or something that'd be great
I don't mean explanations but they actually intuitively design in it inside their own heads
generally my brain catches onto that fast but with rust I find i prototype stuff then have to go back and rewrite everything... which is a pain
and now I'm trying to do a complicated iterator object with sub functions and my brain evidently needs to make a leap over like 5 new concepts and I don't know if it's worth the effort or it will go nowhere
but if there's videos of somebody who codes natively, unconscious competence in rust then I could pick up the intuition way faster from watching them
just the problem is any content for rust is made by people who don't seem to really know rust, but are just moonlighting through it or fanboys of it10 -
"[Designers’] primary competence lies not in the technicalities of a craft but in the mastery of a process." - Ralph Caplan
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How is this for competence...
To push new features or fixes on one of our clients production sites that runs on AWS with auto scaling instances, we have to manually change the files in each instance that is running by ftp, and the template in S3. -
I never had a lot of faith in my dev competence to begin with.
It gets even worse on my current (and also first) job. So far I have been handed solo projects that I need to deliver in a small amount of time using tools I have no experience with. I have two other colleagues I can ask my questions, but they are too busy working on other projects they got handed. Which leaves me 80% of the time on my own.
The bright side of it is if I make it alive somehow, my resume will be diverse.4 -
Somewhat sad when team lead names a Sharepoint document library as ”a repo”.
I am not surprised. I am used to this level of incompetence. But…still.
I am aware of the generic nature of the meaning of the word repository. I just find it very sad that people with no actual competence try to make it look like they actually knows something.2 -
The only valuable life lesson I have ever gotten and I could give is 'fake it till you make it'. Doesn't it begin by playing an adult as a child? It's the same throughout whole life: Whenever they think you are good at something they will give you chances to actually do it and practice it. Regardless of we are speaking about sports at school (where they have to think you are good enough to give you the ball from time to time so you can even learn the game) or getting laid, or whatever job you are going to have: you have to fake some competence at first to get a chance to even try it. The key to success is to have a good feeling of how much fake is appropriate in which situation.
A lot of ppl in their early twenties and below think ppl are getting something they call mature or professional (when speaking about work) at one point in life. When they grow older and don't feel mature or prefessional at all but has to act as if they where, they feel like an imposter. But lemme tell you, now that I have to do with literal professors and other successful ppl: behind the scenes it's all the same fights and fears, the same anger and the craving for approval and friends hip, the same teaming IP and intrigues between them like between you and your mates back then on the playground.
At the latest when it comes to parenthood, you realize it. you got thrown into this huge quest with a shitload of responsibility and unnumbered side quests without any chance to be prepared and the same happened to your parents and theirs and to all the other parents you now are used to meet, back at the playground. All they can do is trying there best and keep a professional face. although some will tell you they are better at parenting bc they have have always the right size of diapers with them they are amateurs (or imposters if you want it) like you. Like your parents when you looked up to them pretending to know what they do. In fact, nobody knows. Maturity is a lie. Professionalism a fake. We stay always the same children playing in the sand we used to be. We only got better in playing adults.
So what now is imposter syndrome? Just another way modern society invented to hate yourself for being human.
That's it. Thats all I can tell about life after i survived the first half. I gave it all to you devrant, thank you for your attention, now get of my lawn.5 -
ColdFusion and ZKOSS framework documentation has been my reading for this first week at the new job.
The nervousness and anxiety is starting to settle down but won't be gone for a while I think. I'm excited and eager to start actually working on our product to both prove my worth (after being selected over 40 or so other applicants) and calm the hell down about my competence.1 -
Top 12 C# Programming Tips & Tricks
Programming can be described as the process which leads a computing problem from its original formulation, to an executable computer program. This process involves activities such as developing understanding, analysis, generating algorithms, verification of essentials of algorithms - including their accuracy and resources utilization - and coding of algorithms in the proposed programming language. The source code can be written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to find a series of instructions that can automate solving of specific problems, or performing a particular task. Programming needs competence in various subjects including formal logic, understanding the application, and specialized algorithms.
1. Write Unit Test for Non-Public Methods
Many developers do not write unit test methods for non-public assemblies. This is because they are invisible to the test project. C# enables one to enhance visibility between the assembly internals and other assemblies. The trick is to include //Make the internals visible to the test assembly [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MyTestAssembly")] in the AssemblyInfo.cs file.
2. Tuples
Many developers build a POCO class in order to return multiple values from a method. Tuples are initiated in .NET Framework 4.0.
3. Do not bother with Temporary Collections, Use Yield instead
A temporary list that holds salvaged and returned items may be created when developers want to pick items from a collection.
In order to prevent the temporary collection from being used, developers can use yield. Yield gives out results according to the result set enumeration.
Developers also have the option of using LINQ.
4. Making a retirement announcement
Developers who own re-distributable components and probably want to detract a method in the near future, can embellish it with the outdated feature to connect it with the clients
[Obsolete("This method will be deprecated soon. You could use XYZ alternatively.")]
Upon compilation, a client gets a warning upon with the message. To fail a client build that is using the detracted method, pass the additional Boolean parameter as True.
[Obsolete("This method is deprecated. You could use XYZ alternatively.", true)]
5. Deferred Execution While Writing LINQ Queries
When a LINQ query is written in .NET, it can only perform the query when the LINQ result is approached. The occurrence of LINQ is known as deferred execution. Developers should understand that in every result set approach, the query gets executed over and over. In order to prevent a repetition of the execution, change the LINQ result to List after execution. Below is an example
public void MyComponentLegacyMethod(List<int> masterCollection)
6. Explicit keyword conversions for business entities
Utilize the explicit keyword to describe the alteration of one business entity to another. The alteration method is conjured once the alteration is applied in code
7. Absorbing the Exact Stack Trace
In the catch block of a C# program, if an exception is thrown as shown below and probably a fault has occurred in the method ConnectDatabase, the thrown exception stack trace only indicates the fault has happened in the method RunDataOperation
8. Enum Flags Attribute
Using flags attribute to decorate the enum in C# enables it as bit fields. This enables developers to collect the enum values. One can use the following C# code.
he output for this code will be “BlackMamba, CottonMouth, Wiper”. When the flags attribute is removed, the output will remain 14.
9. Implementing the Base Type for a Generic Type
When developers want to enforce the generic type provided in a generic class such that it will be able to inherit from a particular interface
10. Using Property as IEnumerable doesn’t make it Read-only
When an IEnumerable property gets exposed in a created class
This code modifies the list and gives it a new name. In order to avoid this, add AsReadOnly as opposed to AsEnumerable.
11. Data Type Conversion
More often than not, developers have to alter data types for different reasons. For example, converting a set value decimal variable to an int or Integer
Source: https://freelancer.com/community/...2 -
"[Designers’] primary competence lies not in the technicalities of a craft but in the mastery of a process." - Ralph Caplan1
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!rant
Just finishes my ITIL course (basically IT support management). It was pretty interesting, if somewhat irrelevant to me, but I got paid to do it (and get a qualification) so that's fine.
My issue was with one specific thing the instructor said - 'IT support always complain people who can't fix basic issues shouldn't be allowed to use computers. Wrong. Customers don't need to know anything about IT, that's your job'.
His analogy was that we can drive, or cook with a microwave, but we don't know how cars or microwaves actually work in at a technical level. In the same way, customers can use Word, but need us to recover their deleted files and install Office.
This seems sensible, but if you follow the analogy, there's a disparity.
I might not be able to *fix* a microwave, or know how the components inside it work. I can, however, cook with it. I know it won't work if the door isn't closed, or if it isn't plugged in.
Similarly, you need a license to drive.
Customers don't need to be able to *fix* the tools, but they should be able to *use* them properly. Turn them on, log in, open & use some programs, browse the web, etc. If they aren't confident in this - well, why are we giving an expensive bit of kit to them? I wouldn't hand a chainsaw to someone who doesn't know how to use it. Or a fine piece of china to someone clumsy.
I think people should need to prove they can use the tools before they are allowed them. They'd be happier in the long run.2