Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

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

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

Pointy Haired Boss: "There's an issue with this simple bit of that service, could you take a look?"
Me: "Sure, give me a minute to investigate"
*A minute later*
Me: "No wonder there's a problem, this code is horrendous! What idiot wrote this unmaintainable crap?"
PHB: "Doesn't matter, just fix it, test it and release it."
Me: "I just want to check who did it, so they never touch our code again."
*Checks SVN log*
Me: "Well, I guess I can never touch our code again."

My words to live by...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

Tutanota (encrypted email service) has a newly designed interface.

I usually don't give a crap about design.

It's so beautiful 😍

I think I'm in love 😱

So...
I'm penetrationtesting a network and the servers on said network
The network administrator and IT security officer knows this, because they hired me..

TL;DR a scan caused the network to crash.

Today I received a very angry email going "Stop scanning NOW!" from one of the IT departments.

Apparently I crashed their login server and thus their entire network...
It happened d the first time I scanned the network from the outside and they had spend an entire day figuring out how and repairing the service they thought was the problem, but then it crashed again, when I scanned from within the network.

Now they want to send me a list of IP's that I'm not allowed to scan and want to know exactly what and when I'm scanning...

How crap can they be at their job, if they weren't able to spot a scan... The only reason they found out it was me was because the NA had whitelistet my IP, so that I could scan in peace...

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"

ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"

slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"

prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"

Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."

Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.

Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."

asdfjkagel.

This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.

At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

My carrier sent a message in between two blank messages. Why tho?

Teaching my homeschooled son about prime numbers, which of course means we need to also teach prime number determination in Python (his coding language of choice), when leads to a discussion of processing power, and a newly rented cloud server over at digital ocean, and a search of prime number search optimizations, questioning if python is the right language, more performance optimizations, crap, the metrics I added are slowing this down, so feature flags to toggle off the metrics, crap, I actually have a real job I need to get back to. Oooh, I'm up to prime numbers in two millions, and , oh, I really should run that ssh session in screen so it keeps running if I close my laptop. I could make this a service and let it run in the background. I bet there's a library for this. He's only 9. We've already talked about encryption and the need to find large prime numbers.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Please, oh please, tell me there's an exception for murdering people using their phone in speaker mode right in the middle of an open space.

Please ... I feel like it should count as public service and be rewarded ..

I'm trying to work here, it don't give the slightest flying fuck about the latest crap you dare to call code and how it fucked up your whole application.

-GDPR
-News letter
-Ads blocker blocker
-Ads popup insite
-Ads popin in video
-Ads popin podcast
-Ads in mail
-Ads in software
-Ads in any android application
-Ads in windows
-Ads in ads
-Auto scrolling
-Slideshow
-Scroll position reset on back button
-Aria-label aria-labelledby aria-role aria-aria of game of thrones
-Order in dom for a11y different of the display order -Button :hover, :focus-visible, :focus-within :fuck-this
- SVG abandoned ware
- I make you a illustrators X version that not work with yours, i use figma. I use affinity, i use akira. I use photoshop, i use word. I use powerpoint, i use publisher, i use paint, i use all Asss (application as a service) on the web and to see what i make you need to pay you an account
-We all make frontend backend... No linter or something... Why we have always 848274 change in git ....
We not host anymore we use 62616 different cloud services to try all the fucking company everywhere
-Make a Drupal CMS to a client that's are to idiots to use it and call you each time they have something to modify

And goes on

Web tooday is fucking crap shit
People realize that you cannot make money anymore with informative website. Then everybody try to squish people at the last drop... Because of selfishness.

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

The switch from “Wild West” to ITIL uncovered so much bull crap. 20% of the people where doing 80% of the work. And then people were keeping some things alive by shear will, once Changes and Service Requests were required, it was shown how awful the environment truly was and how few people in the company knew how anything worked.

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

Why do companies feel its ok to put dumb crap like this when their services go down? Shit like "oopsies" or "Oh no" doesn't make your users feel better about your shitty service.

Btw this is from Mixpanel, who I wish we hadn't chosen as our analytics platform.

I came up with what I considered to be a brilliant approach to a festering internal knowledge management problem using a third-party SaaS. I rolled it out and it was very popular. Weeks later, after my profile had become the "linchpin" by which hundreds of other employees had joined the service, I was told that a female employee (yes, gender is important to this story) had produced a proposal for a more in-house solution that used a different company's software and that I would be on the team to roll it out. I thought it was a great idea and I deferred to her on pretty much everything.

Months after that I was accused, by several other female managers, of trying to take over the whole leadership of the project just because of one minor suggestion I had proposed. One day, after a lengthy interrogation about their take on my emails on the matter (lacking only the bright, hot spotlight in my eyes) I was booted off the project and the woman who had proposed the project was promoted. She then proceeded to lord it over on me and treat me like crap.

This type of thing was a general pattern within the company that amounted to a form of a reverse discrimination "policy" (unwritten). The effect was that the ratio of men to women in upper management was not equal but completely flipped. Way more women than men had upper management positions and higher pay.

In their eyes, the ends (women broke through the glass ceiling) justified the means (discrimination and bullying) which I guess is good and "equal", again in their eyes, in terms of the overall perception modern feminism has about men needing a comeuppance.

But in the context of HR's stated policy on equality, meaning 1:1 men and women in position of power and pay and a non-threatening work environment for all, which we all (men and women) were forced to sign every year, it was an utter fail as far as the math and intimidation went.

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

Short angry rant
What the fuck is wrong with the SalesForce Authenticator logic?! How in the hell do you fuck up a simple 2FA system this hard?!!

Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing... -> Reload Page -> Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing -> Click "Use Code instead"... nothing happens... -> Reload Page -> "Login -> don't even wait for notification and just pres "Use Code instead"... nothing -> Reload Page -> Notice there's a "Use Code" button on this page as well -> Finally be able to log into the fucking Aloha piece of shit...

How TF is it, that Duo is able to send me a push notification within 1 second and it ALWAYS works... and THIS FUCKING SHIT NEVER FUCKING WORKS THE FIRST TIME AND AT WORST JUST DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!!!!

Fucking hell.... Don't offer me a push notification service if you don't know how to make one... jesus fucking christ... All of Salesforce security is fucking stupid, but at least the others mostly work, but this retarded piece of crap is making me actively surprised when it works on first try... Maybe it's because I'm on a slow connection, but again Duo Mobile doesn't have this problem and works *instantly*... so what sort of retarded monkey coded the SF one I don't know, but I hope they are making better products now, because this is a disgrace to programming and security

So after multiple hours of wrestling with Jira I finally managed to autofill fields in the service desk. How? By installing a plugin to show message boxes and injecting JavaScript through it, what else?

Fucking wonderful piece of crap :)

Next up: automatically capture errors triggered by employees with Sentry and raise Jira requests. "A button didn't work" isn't enough god damn it.

So we're doing this contract work for this other company and the project is just an overcomplicated piece of garbage where they shoved every buzzword technology into it just because. I managed to get the code just about organized and functional on our side of the contract and it was looking up when suddenly the management decides "we had a rough start, lets start over, learning from our mistakes"
So I was thinking "cool, there were a lot of problems with this overcomplicated pre-optimized stack, surely we can only do better".. oh boy how naive I was. See Im not the guy in charge of the infrastructure (unfortunately) and really the project structure across this huge multi service project is a free-for-all kind of management.. so we had a call on friday where they explained how the new structure should be built... 3 new technologies, more micro services and even worse dependency tree later I was contemplating suicide on the spot.

I tried to make this shit usable and efficient and all my fucking work went down the drain in a single day of these fuckers throwing more buzzwords at the problem... I can't even get a new empty project started without browsing our huge 100+ repo project git for which dependency Im still missing to even run it...

I fucking hate this retarded piece of crap project and I hope every "manager" and "developer" with an exception of very few chokes on a cock...

Again got an email(pseudospam) from a service I subscribed to (yes I did). It says the email is from CEO and it's supposed to be X-mas wish + invitation to their youtube channel. It was, kind of...

But the words they (or he, but I hope not) used in the email! It was so obviously blank, such uninteresting-president-speech. It was even targeted as a spam by gmail. In a foreign lang.

I mean... if you want to reach to your customers, sit on your ass and imagine _yourself_ reading an email that's long, its point was lost somewhere in the fourth sentence and magically appeared at the end + even default mail filter targets it as a spam.

That's what you get from a service. Motivational crap and blank words. Many thanks, I haven't heard a lot of those lately, eh?!

I started working for a startup as Server Administrator/ System Integrator beside university to get some dollars with easy work and nice people.
((I Know two of the C*Os so I got a had feeling with this. Besides the upcoming story I'm still really happy with my position and career chances here. God bless my Department which has the most funny/rude guys, love you.))

tl;dr:
Guy fakes his Skillset and fuckup whole department, can´t do most of his basic tasks. I had my first and hopefully last interaction with this bastard.

Heres how everything started:
I was more and more involved in the leading processes and decisions.

Heard about a story where and why the whole dev-department was kicked out of his position because they were crappy developers. And cant just believe the stories they told me about the former Dev-Lead

Now I met the former "Development Lead"
I was brought in because we in the IT wondered why he would like to share his local machine password with colleges. After some questions he came out with the Reason.
He is doing home-office for some days a week now and wants his colleges to be able to start his "software". (already confused by that)

The "better IT-guy" in me offered help for automatic deployment CI/CD stuff so that they can use it as an inhouse service.

BIG OOF incoming:
"The code is not in git because I wanted to clean it up before"
"My IDE is the only place where my PHP crap work is running"
"The 'PHP-software' is to complex for this"

My Lead and I were completely speechless,
I understand the decision to kick this "dev-Lead" from the lead position down to a code monkey/ script kid.

Now I´m thinking about getting my Hands on the Lead position after my exams because if such bastards with no clue about basic stuff, no clue about leading, no clue about ci/cd, no clue about generic software stuff get the job I would easily be the "good IT-guy" with more responsibility/ skill.

Now I sit here, hate people that fake their skills and set back work of colleges for multiple months and never asked for help or advice.
And the little "Bastard Operator from Hell" in my just wants to delete all his files, emails account during a migration to completely demotivate the person who failed to be responsible for a team nor their projects.

Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.

you guys ever seen a webservice returning view elements for the front end to interpret and generate views using a switch

switch(data.type)
{
case password:
// generate password field with returned value
...
}

is this really some new practice in back end / front end design ? it just frustrates me so much. web service should be returning data only. i can't maintain this code it's too much crap.

A home hosted build server for continuous integration is always crap and a blocker for everyone. If you don’t have 5(yes, five) full time admins/devops to support that, forget about building the infrastucture yourself. There are companies whose business is to provide CI as a service, why do you think you can beat them with your crappy Jenkins installation?

I’ve seen a 200 company failing with 2 people. I’ve seen another one completely failing, because the admins didn’t know what CI meant, and a small one failing with 0.5. The only place where it kind of worked used Gitlab.

Since the last update of the company antivirus some things became terribly slow, like IE dev tools, they are standard slow, but now they ere horribly slow, copying a 500MB file over the network to my pc now takes 10 minutes and the worst part is git. Git is unusably slow so i can't use git-tfs anymore and have to use standard TFS again.
And whenever all of this is happening there is always the same thing on the top spot of CPU usage 'trend micro unauthorized change prevention service'.
Oh how I hate that antivirus crap

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

"Service is Service" don't take crap personally when there is a deadline looming people will react in different ways, people will blame you for things that are not your fault, people will swear at you, they will try to devalue you to make you feel bad about yourself and then regret it later if you take it personally it will play on your mind and make you ill don't make yourself ill if you mess up fix it messing up is what staging is for.

Did a backup.

Did a bulk import to a service (netbox, great tool for network documentation by the way).

Fucked it up.

Back to backup.

Fixed bug.

Fucking gerbils on ecstasy (devs) annoying the fuck out of me.

Lobotomizing meetings.

Yuck coffee. Cold, stale and over extracted.

Gerbils planning a mutiny. Killed them with a big cheese wheel (lots of stupid boring tasks as they seem to be completely missing stuff to do).

Deleted backup.

Redid import.

Small typo.

Find the mistake...

I just love it when a small task becomes a huge fuckup due to too many disturbances.

Luckily SQL UPDATE went well....

Nothing's more fun than to patch a live database.

Yeah. I didn't wanna do a new backup. :)

The "I don't give a crap mood" is sometimes a great way to accelerate tasks...