<rant>
*Rules For Work*

1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.

2. If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.

3. Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.

4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.

5. If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.

6. Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.

7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.

8. If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.

9. If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.

10. Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.

11. Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.

12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.

13. Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.

</rant>

This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.

After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.

The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.

This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.

Yesterday I used a company service account to email over 1,000 internal employees (mostly application managers and the like) about an old OS version their servers are using which must be upgraded in a few months. It's an automated email that will repeat each month until the servers are upgraded.

That is not the part that might get me fired.

The part that might get me fired is an easter egg I left in the html content of the email itself.

In the embedded html of the message, I buried a comment block that contains a full-screen ascii-art drawing of a spooky tree and grim reaper standing beside a tombstone. The tombstone has the OS info and dates on it. Beneath the ascii-art is a bastardized quote in homage to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", referring to the OS end-of-life.

The ascii-art is visible in both the html and the internal git repo that contains the email template.

This is a bit of a shoe-horn for this weekly group rant, as I doubt there is any chance I would really be fired over this, as I (sadly) expect that absolutely NO ONE who receives the messages will ever actually see the comments. But it's out there in the corporate network now... and will be sent over and over for the next few months...

There is a better chance someone may catch the easter egg in the git repo, but I kind-of doubt that, too - so I wanted to at least share with my devRant friends that it's out there, so at least someone else knows than just me. 😝

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Don’t fall for the hype. Software is not only FAANG, ridiculous perks and fancy corporate offices. It’s a job to give you the things you need to pursuit other things.

Just don’t be a salaryman/salarywomen. There is more to life than that.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

Soooooo got fired on my day off!! 😁😁😁 Y am I sooo happy??? Bc the company's president sucks, and glad to be gone!!

So, I come in on my day off trying to help him with a promo for an app I was working on, and ass face come in with a chip already on his shoulders.

Him: So what are u going to show me?

Me: A walk through of the app.

Him: No, what specifically are u going to show me?(already getting upset)

Me: The whole app. Like from the login screen and everything else.

Him: No! I need to knw specifically what your going to show me! Like this button, that menu, this function!!!(boiling point)

Me: That's what I said, "the whole app"

Him: Do u want to be suspended a whole week??!!!

Me: (smiling) Yes!!

Him: You knw what, ur gonna tell me what the fuck ur gonna show me or--

Me: Gets up, grab my phone and head towards the door.

Him: If u leave, ur done!!

Me: Dnt care. (Continue out the door)

Him: (yelling) That's it, ur done!

Me: Happy 😁😁😁

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.

Are you reading your own email?! Do you even comprehend what you just wrote?!

At least it's Friday. Happy Friday everyone!

Before I left corporate America, I worked with a guy who was basically the definition of 'idiot savant' sans the actual diagnosis. He was ridiculously smart, but couldn't stay on task to save his life.

Like one time we landed a project with a major client. My team was running backend, his was running mobile integration. After a month of little to no visible activity, we approached him and he just said 'oh yea, i got sidetracked'... but he wasn't working on anything else. Just found some random shinny pebble that caught his attention and he bailed on everything else.

To make matters worse, his personal hygiene was nonexistent (I don't think he's showered since either), and he LOVED writing things in super-obscure languages that even the best we had hadn't ever heard of, with nonsensical (and often totally misleading) variable names and no inline comments. Trying to put someone new on something he'd touched was like asking an English professor to translate a 10K year old tablet dug up in the middle of the desert. Just didn't work.

But... the CEO flat out refused to get rid of him for years, until virtually every other employee simultaneously turned in our two weeks.

Me during my last performance review: So I did this, and that, which has this impact, and that impact
Some dude from the higher echelon: what you achieved is nice, but you need to contribute outside of your team too. No promotion for you!

Me during this performance review: ok, so here's what I did and its impact, and also here's my contribution to the company outside of my team
Some dude from the higher echelon: wow why are you doing all that? You need to delegate more. No promotion for you!

I love corporate life!

My first actual rant on devRant:

Fuck corporate companies. Fuck agile development.

In the last 8 months I’ve been with this company, I’ve 1) made the app layout (which was super fucked) compatible with iPad. 2) reduced the apps size by 1/3 of the original size. 3) improved memory usage by double the efficiency, nearly eliminated all memory leaks. 4) gotten employee of the quarter for some of the above mentioned.

After all of this I got a talking to from product manager that “he knows I am a good developer but needs more consistency” after I spent a sprint on one story trying to consolidate front end validation logic and make a “validatableTextField” actually do some validation. So much for the MVVM you promised me.

Also, was promised I’d get some experience with Android, and with a team of 8 devs 6 of which have droid backgrounds and other two are juniors, guess whose only even built the droid project once in 8 months? You guessed it. This company has drained me of all of my knowledge, went against most of its promises to me, and values pushing features to the point of adding tech debt faster than I can solve it.

Unfortunately my personal life relies on this job or I’d quit right away. But you bet your ass I’m passively looking for something and I can’t wait till I get a job offer and quit on these ungrateful hypocrites.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

Corporate Life 😎😎

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

I am quitting my job in the next couple of weeks. I don't even have a job lined up. I can't deal with doing Design work as a developer when you have a whole ass design team. Like what the fuck. Then I nearly do development. Oh and your gonna bitch at me when I mess up in design, then threaten to fire me? Well you can shove that shit all up your entire ass. Fuck this Job. I am doing my own thing. I don't care if I become homeless cause Fuck I'll be more happier I did that then be at this concentration camp. I am gonna live my life and own. Cause fuck everything corporate Jobs is fucking life sucking. Please Fire me. I GIVE NO FUCKS ANYMORE. Sick of being depressed and stressed. I want to be a real developer!!!! argghhhhhhhhhhhh

Who said corporate life had to be dull.
Sometimes you just need to step outside and enjoy the view.

The management brought some devs from another outsourcing company into our project to overcome the fact that we, the existing developers, are retarded. We are retarded because they change the scope continously (aka daily) and we can’t keep track with their requests. They want something and after we implement it, they want it changed. Completely.

Instead of getting the project and deep dive into it using the materials (setup, architecture etc.) I prepared along the way, their PM said that we have to make some low level knowledge transfer. This knowledge transfer session happened on Friday.

The presenters were me and one of my colleagues. After 2 hours of training, we found out that the supposed senior devs don’t know how to use GIT, they don’t have a clue about Spring nor Angular (nor any SPA framework), their only questions were ‘why didn’t you use X?’ (where X = bootstrap, jQuery etc.) etc.

What is even funnier: during the presentation we were asked to keep a screen sharing opened during working hours for a couple of days just so the new devs could see how we are working.

Guess what happened with the scope on Friday evening: it changed again because ‘you got new devs so there will be multiple resources to handle tasks’.

2 more weeks and i’m out of there...

2nd day in new job. Random HR training blabbing about something (thanks God all remote so I just did things around house). Blabbing about diversity and other corporate brainwashing. Then she proceeds to say that if someone is introvert and doesn't like to interact with people then such person should look for work in some other company (wtf x1). Next in line her real life story how she yelled at her subordinates (wtf x2 who admits to mobbing xd ) but that's ok because she is choleric and people have to understand that different character types make their team better xD
I have a bad feelings about where this is going...

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

Mail: Meeting about new benefits from working at <COMPANY>. Estimate duration: 1 hour.

Me: Alright, I'll bite. Might even be something I can use.

HR person in said meeting: At <COMPANY> we'll reward you for being healthy by giving you a better life insurance.

Me: Sounds good and reasonable but you also said this didn't require a physical so how...?

HR: Install <APP> on your phone to keep track of all your healthy habits

Me: Wait wha-

HR: Generate our own brand of crypto currency by linking in all your other health apps like google health, and (lists 4 others), goes towards your life insurance and you can even donate water, food or books to the less fortunate! You DO want to help starving children, right?

At that point I just disconnected. I'm not paid to take part in a corporate crypto scheme.

- "Hi A, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID which we were not informed of."
- "Oh but my API just proxies the content from team B."
_____
- "Hi B, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "Ah, I have nothing to do with category IDs, you should talk to my colleague C."
_____
- "Hi C, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- "I wish I knew anything about that, you should contact person D!"
_____
- "Hi D, we had a bug in production due to a changed category ID."
- *changes status to "Absent" on IM*

ERROR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.

It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.

I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.

4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.

Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊

All corporate apps have that story for me at one moment or another.

We are developing a single page APPLICATION which will be embeded into another single page APPLICATION using iframes (!?!?!?!). The embedded SINGLE PAGE application has POPUPS (browser instances, not UI popups) opened. Every app contains at least 75% of the other apps and they do not share common code. Everything in IE11 and ng4.

There comes that dreaded time in the life of a developer working in a conservative, borderline medieval corporate, where darkness sweeps over the land and the evil lords rummage through every peasant's hovel searching for the forbidden - AKA software audit.
So I made a list of all the unauthorized open source code we desperately rely on, and we decided as a team to go down in flames and gloriously fail the audit, a legend of sacrifice that shall be passed on in hushed voices.

Imagine: It's the year 4249.

Corporate has finally managed to convince workers that they don't need a salary.
Workers are now paid with food, shelter and clothes. And it's only in effect if you achieve your deadlines.

Keystroke monitoring softwares are now replaced with Webcam eye tracking software.

GitHub Co-Pilot now takes over your code editor and tries to dictate you how to write better code.
Refusing to do results in a signal sent to the management about your behaviour and you lose food access for the day.

HR Recruiters now require you to give them a blood sample and part of your house as a security deposit.
They also require you to have a micro-chip placed in your brain so they can monitor their worker's thought process.

Switching a job is no longer an option. You pledge allegiance to one company your entire career.

You can never see the real world now because the government has mandated you to never take off your VR glasses.
You see the world the way the government wants you to see it.

PHP is still trash.

Life is Good.

Work out the major requirements,

Identify platform(s) and environment best suited to project,

Design and develop around core features,

Allow 6-12 weeks for scope creep and the additional BS features,

Build, test and deploy in a week or two to meet unattainable deadlines.

Spend new couple of months refactoring and fixing everything.

So, giving a talk soon and marketing wanted to see the slides.

Comments come back. On every slide that is purely visual they've suggested I add a title and a para or two of text.

Fuck you and your fucking slideuments. If you want them to read the material send them a memo and save me the fucking trip.

Or even better, turn up yourselves and read lists of bulletpoints off the screen for 30 mins while I sit in hotel hot-tub with a cocktail.

I hate the inanity of corporate life.

Next time I'm going to send you a blank slide and live draw my diagrams. See how you like that, arseholes.

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

New office saga continues

We had 2 days on induction and these guys hired a 19 year old intern for the HR department.

Yes, the worst possible combination.

In last two days she made our life hell. Insufferable human being.

How can a person be so annoying?!

It was so tempting to roast her, but then I had to control my instincts so as to not get a warning during my first two days.

Not saying that everyone is bad and there surely exist great people, but wide majority of Gen Z makes me go nuts and that is all what is wrong with corporate world, old wine and fresh blood overlapping.

We are headed towards self destruction, buckle up your seat belts.

Me a month ago: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."

*Recruiter finds me and offers me a full-time opportunity*

Me now: "Well, I guess I can look into it..."

Me 9 months from now: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."

Repeat until dead.

"I really like how corporate America ruins you as a person within two years. If you had any aspirations to do anything useful for humanity, they gone."

-Text from my best friend from graduate school

I don't know how you freelancers and contractors do it.

!rant

I’ve worked at six companies over my 10 years of professional programming. All companies say they track internet usage of the employees. This is the first company I have worked for that sends you a weekly summary of sites that you visit.

Corporation.
Meeting with middle level managers.
Me - data scientist, saying data science stuff, like what accuracy we have and what problems with performance we managed to solved.
Manager 1: Ok, but is this scrum?
Manager 2: No they're using kanban.
Manager 3: That's no good. We should be using DevOps, can we make it DevOps?

So yea, another great meeting I guess..

A guy who had the same nationality as the enterprise we were working for was promoted from JUNIOR js developer to UX/UI coordinator for the entire department just because he was 2 year older than me (26 vs 28). Literally he was a junior dev and went to that.

One day he was accusing me of writing a piece of code which led prod to downtime. I was in the office, he was in another country with our manager and technical director next to him and we were talking over internal conference system. I shown git history + his name + his code and he was saying ‘that’s not true!!!’.

I couldn’t resist and I began to yell something like ‘You fucking fuck piece of shit cocksucker...’ for 5 minutes. Since that day i was the god on my project for UI/UX side.

Even now he is in the same place on the same position...

PS: more stories to come with this guy

Startup-ing 101, from Fitbit:
- spy on users
- sell data
- cut production costs
- mutilate people's bodies, leaving burn scars that will never heal
- announce the recall, get PR, and make the refund process impossibly convoluted
- never give actual refunds
- claim that yes, fitbit catches fire, but only the old discontinued device, just to mess with search results and make the actual info (that all devices catch fire) hard to find
- try hard to obtain the devices in question, so people who suffered have no evidence
- give bogus word salad replies to the press

This is what one of the people burned has to say:
"I do not have feeling in parts of my wrist due to nerve damage and I will have a large scar that will be with me the rest of my life. This was a traumatic experience and I hope no one else has to go through it. So, if you own a Fitbit, please reconsider using it."

Ladies and gentlemen, cringefest starts. One of fitbit replies:
"Fitbit products are designed and produced in accordance with strict standards and undergo extensive internal and external testing to ensure the safety of our users. Based on our internal and independent third party testing and analysis, we do not believe this type of injury could occur from normal use. We are committed to conducting a full investigation. With Google's resources and global platform, Fitbit will be able to accelerate innovation in the wearables category, scale faster, and make health even more accessible to everyone. I could not be more excited for what lies ahead".

In the future, corporate speech will be autogenerated.

(if you wear fitbit, just be aware of this.)

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

A few years back, I was a newly hired developer visiting the corporate HQ in NYC. We went to lunch, where the execs ordered a round of drinks.

I commented that drinking during the work day was an odd practice in my experience. The CEO jokingly explained how it made going home to his wife at the end of the day easier (or something to that effect). “You know what I mean?”

To which I reply (with no hint of irony): “No… My life loves me.”

😎

So I am a part of this volunteering initiative where one of our tasks is to assist people in distress (virtually).

Now this activity is led by two chipmunks. One claims to be a therapist who themselves is seeking professional therapy from someone else and the other is a corporate HR.

Well that information should be enough for you to understand how chaotic the situation would be.

But allow me to continue...

So they decide to go about an activity in the group where everyone has to share a meme. Some of the cringest memes I have seen in my life. One of them went to an extent of sharing a husband wife joke as a dark joke.

Next day, someone spammed in the group and one user sent a sticker of some character hanging from a rope. It was evidently a fun and sarcastic sticker which they all use.

But all of a sudden the chipmunks got offended and went on a delete spree warning and banning users.

Most of the time, the group is dead and another group where they plan shit is more active. Full of mindless opinions and worthless conversations.

All they are doing is spamming everyone and forcing people to participate in the name of volunteering.

What's more exciting is, they control it so rigidly that no one, except the two chipmunks, is allowed to even have an opinion or disagree with them. If you do, they'll belittle you in front of everyone.

Yes, you guessed it right, the entire initiative is a massive failure and being dragged in the name of hElPiNg pEoPlE iN dIsTrEsS

So I got a 1.7 grand laptop for free a week ago.

Fuck me, the company I'm working at is the best.

Hp elitebook 840 g5, 16 gigs and auto -crypting ssd.
Corpo life is the best. Shame it's got windows on it and I can't get linux on it.

As I sit and stare at code, and then stare at the Bills I need to pay as the month starts. I began to think, what if I too was part something new in Tech. Everytime, I see people creating new Tech, getting noticed, I wish I was there on forefront.

Then it gradually dawns on me, "you are just here to make ends meet, survive in the corporate world. Why care about the world. Let it go as it is."

"A shitty life".

"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is probably the truest statement, but there's a lot of people who get the definition muddled.

They think "Oh well that means there wont ever be hard days and there'll never be times where I'll struggle or get frustrated, and it means I'll go home at the end of the day feeling refreshed and ready to do it forever ad infinitum"

There absolutely will be days where you're fuckin done with semicolons or that you've had it with other devs, but the saying doesnt mean any of that. What it means is that while you may dislike the corporate environment or the fact that you dont really care for it after work hours, while you're doing your tasks in their purest form, you're not really feeling all too bad.

I know a lot of people have gripes with this statement. Pull your finger out of your ass and admit that either you don't love it anymore or that you didn't really understand exactly what it was you were loving all that much in the first place.

I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.

Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.

So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.

Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.

Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.

Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.

CEO: Lets shift our REST app to graphql.
Me: what? why?
CEO: I saw this amazing video on youtube about it.
Me: But the app is working fine.
CEO: So?
Me: ...so we should stay on the current arch.

Few hours later...
Me: Implementing graphql

Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.

Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!

Because Yes we can!

Beep boop.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

I hate my current work with this piece of bad written legacy $hit. As 2 year old 'junior' without any code review and mentor I feel depressed. I should improve my skills at home and run away from it.

F#$ck you, corpo.

Your profile is in consideration.

Week-1

HR: We'll let you know.

Week-2

HR: You're one of the top 3 under consideration.

Week-3

**HR won't answer/reply to text/emails

Week-4

I accepted the truth.

Corporate world: Welcome to the employee life!

This was my first ever interview, referred by a guy I met on LinkedIn.

Joined a big corporate for the first time in my life a few months ago, after years and years in small companies and startups.

Went from designing new creative solutions and finding challenging problems to working on small stupid tasks and obeying a fucking idiotic company culture, that is nothing but words that are not applied in reality. Creativity and enthusiasm are discouraged for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

Probably the worst decision in my life. I don't think I can do this for long.

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.

In your earlier years. Try to work in a startup. Don't go for corporate life yet. You will learn hell of a lot in a small startup.

And also if you are doing job hunting just spam the recruiters and top officials of the company in LinkedIn until you get an interview setup. Because fuck it you need a job !

Accepting a 3 year old scratched and beaten PowerBook as my "new" dev machine. Especially when my personal, 4 year old one is as powerful but with double the disk space (SSD) and RAM... Then of course the new guys just joining actually do get new out of the box devices just as we're accepting that it's just not how the company works... I guess that's the bane of doing dev in a company that does resourcing as it's main focus thereby never understanding what's needed by us developers and why it is, or rather should be, different from the rest of the company.

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Corporate life blunts your edge, wants you to follow procedure and process. Then out of nowhere they complain that you're like robots, Think outside the box! Innovate!

Pathetic leeches😢

We heard you like security so we put antivirals in your docker containers despite the fact that we made you have antivirals on your machines running the docker containers.
And we won't allow to use root just in case you want to disable the av. And we don't care you need it for the docker 😂

This is how I was played when wanted to use docker containers to avoid dealing with OPS.

Some time passes, my team is going to have independent cloud infrastructure.
Doing corporate politics is challenging...

Today is the first time in my life that I've received an all-caps corporate email from some team running ops.
Funny how someone thought this might make it clearer when all acronyms in our company are all-caps, making it a very intensive read which does everything except bring the important point forward..

!rant

Guys I need your help, I'm considering the corporate life, and I have two major options

Option A:
A software factory where I would be working on maintaining existent systems and adding features, but I would learn a lot with their shadow program.

Option B:
An IT department where I would use a lot of different technologies, .Net, Java, ADF, etc, maybe even hardware but I would be paid the fifth than with A.

So what do you think?

If the corporate work life needs to be taught in school, what do you think the subject would look like?

For example, I think time management and people management should have been there.

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

Just realised that I haven’t properly laughed in a long long while.

Don’t even remember the last time I laughed.

Don’t remember the number of times I have laughed since starting my corporate life.

Ugh, meetings - the productivity vacuum of corporate life. Like who's got time for those never-ending discussions and PowerPoint slogs. 🙄💼

So today was a normal day at the office. My brain stopped functioning after helplessly trying to debug ES6 code for IE 11. So I put my headphones on and went to the loo. (Mind you my headphones have a heavy bass, so they are quite larger than other traditional headphones.)

As I was coming back to my desk, my project manager laughed, pointing to my headphones, and said, "What are these?"

"Headphones!", I said, silently judging him.

He said, "Can't you even put those down for two minutes? You wear them even in the loo!"

Baffled by his utmost stupid sentence, I did the most obvious thing, ignore him.

After about 10 minutes, the manager came to my desk and said, "See, when you walk around with these headphones, people get 'distracted' and are unable to work. So I'd suggest you wear them while still on your seat and remove them when you have to leave the seat. Even the clients might think of you as a weird guy. Okay?"

And I couldn't do anything. I just sat there, nodded and went back to work.

Starting to wonder if I don't enjoy coding or if the corporate environment is just draining the life out of me with it's constant monotony and monotone culture. I can't bring myself to be excited about this stuff, it's so boring. It pays the bills but it doesn't keep my eyes open.

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

Once got into a corporate company, worst 3 weeks of my life. It was so depressing and the code was ugly and the people were like robots all doing overtime and coming on weekends. To top all that they were offering me 900 USD a month which is 1,100 USD less than what the same position i was in paid for in the competitor company.

So, I'm about to be up shit's Creek. I need a new source of income, ideally either a new job or becoming a freelancer. I have been making intranet sites with ASP.NET for a while now, and I can tell two things:
1. It's too corporate minded, so I'll need a fucking degree
2. It's too corporate minded, so I'll be stuck with people like my boss, who still use tables to align content despite the project having bootstrap.

I need to do something more fulfilling, but I probably will have to leave my job by December anyway due to some major fuck ups in my life, do I need to get something lined up. I have been brushing up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but when it comes down to it, I suck at design so my "portfolio" is blatant clones to learn CSS and shitty Spartan things.

Basically, I'm anxious, terrified, and unable to figure out what comes next. Do I keep sending job applications and praying to whatever deity will listen, it do I start figuring out this freelance thing? If freelance, then how do I get into it? I'm terrified and desperate.

So from now on 5% of my software dev performance will be related to DEI and I'll have to attend "trainings". Aside from the fact that it is complete BS, how does this have anything to do with software engineering and why is it so arbitrary, vague and hypocritical in general?

I'll summarize your goddamn 5%: don't be an asshole. Can I start working for real now?

Sounds pretty great for an american company that hires people offshore on the cheap and that treats them lowkey like second-hand slaves? But that's ok because life in their country would be worse without a job so we are "helping" them. How generous.

How low can corporate culture (if you can even call it that) go?

Nothing makes me want to work on my own projects more than spending 40 hours a week trying to solve problems in the boring behemoth of legacy code that is my company's app. Doing everything myself seems downright peaceful in comparison.

So you're behind a corporate proxy. What can go wrong will go wrong. Believe me.

Year 1.5 into my first job and three bosses and several teammates have already left the company. Not sure why. Is this how shit works in general?

A question on corporate reality, let me know which person is doing it right :

Person A is a young enthusiastic nd curious fresher who has joined an amazing company where there is a team of seniors above him.
They ask him to work on a project, give him some guidelines which he is able to quickly grasp and come back with an output (because he loves learning and working on it and challenges himself to do it quicker than before)

This goes on and on, the new guy is giving his 100%, but company realizes it and starts expecting more of him, his 100% is not satisfactory enough, he is expected to give his 110% . He is now feeling the pressure but still liking it (because he likes learning) even though it has started to effect his personal lifestyle. He no longer has time for friends and even codes during his nap times, but still believes that he's in his prime and its okay for him to grind wheels for a better future

-------------

Person B is a lazy ass half hearted fresher who's good with public relations. He knows he can do a work in 1 hour, but still does it in 2 hours and do it bad.
He is giving his 50% and seniors know it but still are expecting to get just 70-80% out of him because of his charming and cool personna.
He's cool, now dating office girls, actively partying and is now people's favorite and living a lavish life with equal salary as that of the person A.

Who is living their youth correctly?

Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment

Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me

Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end

So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.

Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours

To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri

What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies

Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.

All of this sucks tbvh

It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.

And there I was thinking Maven is going to make life simpler, with this granular dependency management and IDE independence (no extraneous classpath and module management required). But wait, it turns out that to run simple Ant task I need all my dependencies to have *.pom. Every. Fricking. Dependency.
I mean, sure, only if I knew which sub-dependencies they all had, but that seems like heck a lot of work to make external JAR libraries to work with Maven process.
WHY TODAY? Yesterday I had no issue: uploaded few libraries in corporate repository, refreshed index, dependencies downloaded, even had time appending javadoc to one of them and it worked. But today is the day, right? I just run simple task with maven-antrun-plugin (mvn antrun:run@<executionID>), and it starts scanning each dependency for *.pom file. I DON'T WANT THIS. Google, help me. Oh, no direct answers and clues?

Just... fuck you, Maven. With all 2 days effort I could just litter in IDE's classpath, write build.xml in no time, make normal webservice, but that would require me to also litter sources with required libraries. FML!

got into this stream for developing great fun things, then corporate life happened and sucked out all the creativity

I'm just wondering ,after observing all your guys' rants.Is the corporate world that bad? I'll probably be working in the next 2-3 years and I'm hoping I won't have a bad experience

I got a guy in my team but different location who is completely useless. He doesn't do anything useful, yet always have something to say.

Manager(M) asking him for progress on some task via email:
M: Any progress on this?
Useless guy: oh yes we have to tasks to solve *long description of the tasks*
M: Yup I was asking if there was any progress since we agreed this yesterday

And now there is radio silence since Friday :)

It all started on a nice summer afternoon. I was minding my own business just using my wonderful laptop with Windows 10 software installed. Then I woke up and realized the truth. I am sick of the scams, the lies, and the games. Today you will all see the same colors as me.

Most of you are probably on a Microsoft device and have had problems with it. A great example of Microsoft's failure is the line of phones they attempted to market. I was forced to own one for a period of time and it is absolute agony. Never force this way of life on another human being. While we are here, why the fuck is Optifine only available for Java Minecraft. Why even have two versions of the game when they cost the same?

These petty offenses are nothing compared to what I am about to tell you. As we all know, Bill Gates is friends with Mark Zuccerberg. Mark is known for his cult of reptile info scammers. Just this association alone is a red flag. This means that Bill Gates is a reptile as well. Reptiles only trust other reptiles.

These "people" are lying to us! Bill Gates just wants you to think he stepped down so he doesn't get the hate and shunning that comes with liking Microsoft. It was just an excuse to get his cult followers to do his job for him so he could run the new world order and the pedophile ring that he co-owns with Jeffrey Epstein. You think Satya Nadella is the "New CEO"?! Bullshit. He is just another Microsoft fleshlight.

Not only is Bill a disgusting liar, but he predicts the future and uses it to his advantage. This is how he has built his cult following and his multi-company empire.

You people need to wake the fuck up and boycott Microsoft. You are all being subliminally brainwashed into thinking it's okay and that "It's just the software" NO. Stop supporting pedophiles. Stop supporting reptiles. Stop supporting shitty products, and STOP LICKING THE CORPORATE BOOT. In conclusion, fuck Microsoft.

I just found out i've wasted month of my life by troubleshooting wrong component.
I was unable to access my application in cluster and suspected networking and port configuration. (custom corporate setup with chaotic documentation did not help to situation)
In the end, it was caused by Jenkins, which failed on building a new container but still showed "build: success" while it deployed May version of container without any changes applied.

!dev

So, few people who know what shitstorm I've been through, considering that I've cut off all social media except Reddit and devRant.

I am one of those hotheads who will rebel against anything which is even slightly wrong or unacceptable so after my twitter incident, I've been thinking to change my behavior and attitude, which has caused me and my best friend problems and I let him down and embarrassed and I think he also gave up on me but more to that later (or maybe I've covered it up in my last rant). The point is I want to improve myself, grow myself and for the sake of that I've quit free-lancing, and took a mildly great opportunity in a meteor js based company, I like their office, I join within 2 months (2 months till my support period ends), also I've become quite a twitter addict so I had to shut down my old account.

But I have an idea to learn about the corporate environment and raise voice against them, which in my eyes is an action that should be needed.

Somewhere down the line, I wanted to achieve my dream i.e. to get my doctorate degree, I was so obsessed about it. But frankly speaking, I've given up on that too.

So. yeah, cheers to a new life

var life = new Life();

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

hey folks, what are your thoughts on different kinds of insurances?

I recently went through a major accident that would have impacted our finances significantly , if i didn't had a corporate insurance. And this led to me researching a lot into different kinds of insurances : health, motor, home, travel, life, term life,... there are so many of these.

And they have a significant cost! they do cover benefits (claims) of even bigger amount but some1 with my salary and 12 different insurance will be shelving out approx 4 months of salary as premium every year. at the same time, our dear ol govt is taking 30% (4 months worth) as taxes.

and then we have a simpler generation that was my parents, who lived their 50+ years without any of these insurances and taxes. their income sources were very less to be taxed (or make considerable savings) , they will rush to govt hospitals for free treatment and prey to never get a major disease, and not leave the world without making their dependents independent.

so this is a weird philosophical question. should i live knowing am secured from stranger companies which may help at times ,while i try to manage my live with 40% of my salary?
or should i live like my parents(& billion others), trusting the govt and system to help me in times of need while i feed them my 30% salary an try to stay alive with the remaining 70%?

Nothing interesting to work on. Weird problems from others trying to force a bad solution to a problem. I just want to go home and finish Westworld!