My company just blocked devRant ip...

Well, now I need to use my own mobile data to procrastinate

Tech Industry: “We need more developers!”

NewDev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced developers please! We don’t have time to train juniors ”

Older Dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “no, you want too much money and too much time off“

Mid dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “only experienced devs who are a culture fit!”

Robot dev: “Hire me”

Tech Industry: “You are Hired”

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

!rant

Today i got a job offer for 20k more than i'm making right now and a better company and culture.

I can't wait to see my managers face when i tell him. He has being an asshole since i started.

Just a regular software engineer...

Rough analysis of LinkedIn inmail’s I get:

Hi <5% of time, not my name>,

I was looking at your profile <97% a lie>. I was very impressed with your <10% something I’ve never done> experience working for <5% a company I’ve never heard of>. Would you be interested in hearing more about <60% a job I’m not suited for>, they offer amazing benefits and have a great culture!

... no

Starting to feel that devRant is a really nice place to hang out.

Even though we have differences in languages (C#, PHP, JavaScript, JAVA), culture (semi brackets, tabs and spaces) and tools (Sublime, vim, nano, Atom) but we strive to be a better coder by encouraging one another or ranting to blow some steam.

Like seriously guys, you guys are awesome! It feels that I am becoming more human by visiting devRant (or maybe I'm turning into AI).

Manager: Why is no one innovating?

Me: You hired all of us based on culture fit so you have optimized only in that direction. Everyone is same ... like you

Manager: You are right.

I've got new job offer with different company. New technologies and better culture, 30% pay raise. And my current manager counter offer is "You will hate it there and you will leave in 3 months".

employee: I want growth in my role

company: *installs ping pong table*

employee: autonomy?

company: *creates fully-stocked snack room*

employee: fulfilment.

company: *employs a live DJ in the office*

employee: *quits*

company: some people just aren't a good culture fit.

This is why I love working where I work. I worked extra hours until 9pm to get an ITest environment ready for one of my customer teams. I came in this morning to a little prezzie and a thank you card signed by the entire customer team. This is what awesome culture looks like.

It was great to see Gitlab not only being transparent, but also being so empathetic towards the employee and not bashing them at all. Instead they said the more things you do the more mistakes you make. And the system/process should have contingency so that human mistakes have some tolerance margins.

That is a great workplace!

Dev: Sam’s a little nervous about taking his paid leave. I guess it’s not common in Nigeria. He needs to hear from the company that taking time off like that is acceptable.

HR: THAT’S SO INAPPROPRIATE! YOU CAN’T ASSUME HE’S FRON NIGERIA JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK. BLACK PEOPLE HAVE A VERY RICH AND DIVERSE CULTURE, THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM NIGERIA!!!

Dev: Sam is from Nigeria. He told me so. He tells me a lot of stories from there.

HR: …

Dev: Can you tell me something about Sam besides his skin colour?

HR: …

Dev: …

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

Job offer:

"There is no hierarchy within this company."

Bullshit.

Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.

Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.

You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.

Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.

Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.

How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?

That's what I would find much more interesting.

People who browse the devRant feed with 'Recent' filter
"Ahh! I see you are a man of culture as well"

Advising a person about a code that he has created and you don't know shit about. In dev culture it is considered a dick move.😑

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

🤔 accurate?

So in my culture when u have hiccups it is believed that someone is mentioning/talking about you, that means that hiccups are one of the first versions of push notifications 😅

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

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

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

Not a rant, just awesomeness:
At my company our CTO organizes a meeting every month that gives us devs a chance to present new technologies to each other, offer advice about workflows and give feedback about current situations. This allows us to constantly improve.
Thanks boss!

Old rant : I was fired for complaning about the non-paid extra hours everyone was doing. The excuse : I was against "the culture" of the company.

I hate game companies...

DevRant feels a lot like home. Not because I'm a pro developer - I'll probably never be one. But because I get to spend time with "my people". It's like when I went to Dreamhack for work and after 30+ years of being weird there were suddenly over four thousand people just like me.

There is no shortage of online IT culture but devRant is unique. It could have become the usual cesspool of hate, misogony, trolling but hasn't. Somehow it gives me hope to se a place meant for blowing of steam turning out to be one of the more respectful communities. So - thanks people! Your rants actually make my days a little better.

The startup i work in has such a dynamic environment that their monthly milestones get changed every hour!

#firstRant

Back after a long time!

So yesterday one of the "senior" python developers woke me up at 1 am (we work in different time zones, and he knows how many hours I'm ahead) asking why isn't his code working. The error message was:

[ERROR] Runtime.ImportModuleError: Unable to import module 'app': xxx is not installed, run `pip install xxx` Traceback (most recent call last)

I am at lose of words and patience. Not only idiots who can't google simple stuff are seniors, additionaly we went from "DevOps is a culture" straight to "hey I'm developer in my silo, if it doesn't work on my machine it's DevOps problem, plz fix".

"Do you easily get offended?"

"We have a bro culture here. [Some other stuff and examples] So do you think you can fit in here?"

"Tell us about a time you had to communicate with people who are not as technically capable as you."

I can remember more but cba tbh.

HR: At company A where we are all about hiring top talent!

Dev: What does this position pay?

HR: Well we’ve done a market assessment of local wages and an happy to announce the VERY competitive offer of (insert 30% less than the median wage here).

Dev: …

HR: I assure you this is a very competitive. What we don’t offer in pay we more than make up for in culture. We are a family here!!

Dev: …

Reasons I hate the US

1. It's fucking 2 in the morning there and folks are checking their Slack when they wake up for pee breaks or done after their sex sessions.

Nearly 90% of the team is on and off checking Slack.

2. Culture fucks have only 10 holidays and hence they align rest of the world to their calendar and only give 10 holidays. India, Europe, and entire world can easily get 15 holidays per year outside their leave quota.

What a cluster fuck of a country it is.

HR: Here at company A we have a great culture. It truly is the best place ever to work!

Dev: How many companies have you worked for?

HR: Besides babysitting as a teenager this is the only company I’ve ever worked for.

Dev: I thought so.

Fuck those who cover their incompetence with complexity. Fuck those who fall for their shitty tricks. Fuck you for depriving me of any sense of accomplishment with overcomplicating everything to show how smart you are when you are not. Fuck you for creating a culture of overthinking egoism instead of shipping and finding out who was right. FUCK YOU IN THE ASS YOU BIKESHEDDING, MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!

I did it! I FUCKING DID IT! I got the new job, where I am paid better and won't get abused! The culture is better, pay is better!

My struggle now! Do I do finger guns to my current boss after telling him? I hate that asshole.

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.

After working for about 3 years of my life I've established the following;

Work is mostly stupid people praising other stupid people about their stupid work, while clever people remain in the shadows. Will this be true for the rest of my career or am I just working at a company with a bad culture?

Best part about IT culture is how you send someone an e-mail & then you have to go and tell them that you've sent an email.

It happens to me often!!! 🤣🤣

Non IT people controling the IT departments and ruining the development culture.

No one (where i am from) anymore considers the software life cycles, initial r&d work, normalized relational db or using proper algorithms. All this stuff is critical for critical systems but people just want the softwares to work on the front end and make money, no matter if its all duct taped underneath. And I strongly believe this is happening because of non IT people and marketers sitting on top of IT departments.

Computer science people have kind of lost all respect. They are constantly yelled at by non IT people and asked to do year's job in months.

This makes me sad

I studied ancient languages, because of corruption in my home country, I couldn't find any place in academy although my scores were above 90%. Moved to another country and taught myself web development. Naturally in time I lost almost all my knowledge of Latin, Ancient Greek, the whole ancient literature, history, philosophy and culture (everything from historical evolution of tremmas in letter i in ancient Greek to honey fish recipe in ancient Rome cousine). I'm super happy with Webdev tho but I think that also counts as data loss.

First they came for the atheists, and I didn't speak out - because I'm not an atheist

Then they came for the university teachers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't like universities

Then they came for the gamers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't play videogames

Then they came for Open Source and I didn't speak out - because "anyone can fork it"

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me

I know I butchered the poem and I'm not comparing our social situation to the Holocaust (obviously), but I think it kind of illustrates that silence and gradually giving up ideals like justice and meritocracy can end up badly.

I also encourage you to read the actual poem it's pretty nice and food for thought.

Always remeber:
The interview goes both ways. Ask the interviewer how he likes to solve problems, and how he works with ppl. This will give you the information to decide if you want to work with him or the company.
This is especially effective on HR: ask about thier corporate culture and how they deal with promotions/good people and how they deal with bad people.
And make sure you visit glassdoor.com before the interviews begin.

Engineers in their natural habitat

Just a friendly reminder that when you hear one or more of the following:
- underrepresented
- identity politics
- *phobia
- toxic *ity
- cis* (though "cisco" is fine)
- diversity
- culture appropriation
- passive-aggressive
- patriarchy
...and other bullshit, feel free to not talk to that person ever again. You'll miss nothing. Always remember that their goal is not equality but power to oppress whoever have a different worldview.

If you fear twitter backlash, fear not. Political shit comes and goes, but the inherent value of what you do is here to stay and means something at all times.

To anyone who wants to judge me because of this — remember, what you have read above comes from a bipolar transgender bisexual rape victim.

PM talked me into comming into the office because of some subjective "culture" reason. He worked from home that day (didn't state a particular reason)

Would you be mad?

Just started my new job.

Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅

Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following

A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.

Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?

Isn’t it amazing how every company is ranked one of the best places to work? Amazing.

The worst work culture I've experienced was at a local security company.
There was a reason why over 15 people come and go within 6 months (just 30 people work there):
The boss is a fucking psychopath and should be (mis)treated in a high-security mental health institution.
There has not been one sane day during the 90 days I had to work there.
A friend of mine still has to work there because he can't find anything else in his current situation...

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

Men of culture

Worst work culture: You had to formally request post-its

Recruiter: "Take this culture survey. It's not a test. There are no right or wrong answers."

Me, internal voice: Then why give me a list of words to choose from that I think describe me best and another list of words to choose from that describe how I ought to behave at work? Clearly, there's a matchup you're trying to do here. So clearly there's going to be a wrong answer if I don't choose enough of the former to match the latter.

Wanted to live outside the US. Was dating a Korean girl who moved back to Korea and was like why the hell not, let's go.

Worked at an American company that had a Korean office, so i thought it'd be easy mode. Took a working vacation to that office and interviewed. Brain froze on basic algorithms stuff - binary search. Failed to understand a logic question. But oddly enough, did well communicating with Korean developers with limited English knowledge.
Director talks to me at the end of the day, tells me they're looking for someone more senior. I bombed it, not mad.

...

Then he tells me he has a friend at one of the largest companies in Korea and that he'll be there to talk to me in two hours.
Dafuq

Chat with the dude. Supposedly, the larger company culture blows, but he has a little haven of badass developers and is known throughout the company for being an effective team builder. We talk for 90 minutes, and he days he'll hire me. Take a short online test to make sure I'm not a derp. Four months later, living in Korea and working, alas, sans girlfriend.

Been a year now. Ends up the company culture eventually crushed my boss. He was moved off the project, and then the project was scrapped. Yet they're starting a new project with the same group plus more because logic.

Today accepted an offer at a smaller company for a salary equal to my current salary plus bonus. Also, vidya gaems yayy.

I have got to have the silliest luck

So this just happened... not to me, but at my friend's company.

The devs are being congratulated and spurred on for working late! I don't know about you, but this is not the kind of culture that should be encouraged.

it's kinda cool when u recognize devRant users by their avatar after using devRant a while.. it's like "Oh, him/her again..." 🙃

Hopefully seeing the app that I've been working on for months officially released and on both the App store and google play store.

I say this because I've been waiting months and months for my boss and some other people at this company to be done with the privacy policy + terms of use for the app (which is needed due to how the app works) and I want to resign soon due to minimum wage + 2 hour commute twice daily + want a proper development culture (get treated as the IT guy at work)

Is this really what tech-startup culture is?

A year ago I wanted to make a change and joined my friend who is a VP at a startup. She and my team are great even up to the C-suite level. But after a recent encounter with the core developer team here… I’m at my
breaking point.

This dev team is extremely tribal. It’s as if they view other tech teams as “others” and it’s “us vs. them”. My team works on a different vertical so I’ve never interacted with them before and a timeline of events is below. Is this kind of behavior a normal thing at a tech startups?

/story
Here’s some highlights from the last month…

- Customer demands a deliverable because it’s in a contract signed a year ago.
- No one in dev can be troubled to lift a finger (holiday season). I get called in to support.
- This isn’t my code - I’ve never seen or used it before.
- None of dev’s documentation is up to date.
- Find out dev hasn’t touched client’s project in a year.
- Spend weeks working with it. Find fundamental flaws which could have put us in legal jeopardy.
- I realize dev never finished this project because it doesn’t even have basic functionality to do what customer needs.
- Spent entire Christmas/New Year working.
- Create dozens of bug tickets and merge requests.
- Barely squeeze by and save multi-million $ contract renewal.

So what happens next?
- Reprimanded by the dev lead. He tells me I’m “hurting people’s feelings” by pointing out so many problems.
- A PM in a public Slack channel told me I was “passive aggressive” for a Jira issue where I wrote (verbatim) “Can we enable code highlighting in this text box? It’s difficult to show steps to reproduce the bug.”
- get told by VP to stop talking to them
- a bunch of merge requests rejected without explanation
- weeks later I see someone in dev run into a bug I found. I sent him the fix. They accepted his MR in the same day and it actually added another new bug.
- I lookup the recent commits of the lead-dev who chewed me out, he’s been working on adding colors to his console log output for print debugging. This is a time-critical application and he adds 30% overhead with logging debug information in production.
- Meanwhile dozens of major bugs exist and are ignored.
- The CTO at this company loves these people - though he hasn’t brought in any new business (literally) ever.
- My team is about to close a new contract and we’ve spent 15 days to work on it.
- The CTO said my team is slow and doesn’t fit with the business model of the company.

My team has never dealt with these devs before, so I checked Glassdoor for other experiences, the dev team apparently…
- uses “vulgar slurs for women”
- talking about technical issues “resulted in a lot of resentment”
- has an apparent “desire for revenge”

/ end story

This last month really shocked me because for my career so far I’ve never dealt with this kind of behavior. I could see a startup accepting this kind of culture if was bringing in a lot of revenue but they aren’t. They dropped the ball so hard we all lost our bonuses this year. It’s made even worse with the fact that they are constantly producing complete dog poop code (I’ve kept that opinion to myself though).

I’m really left wondering if this is just how it is in the high-stakes startup world.

Sorry - this started out as a question but ended up another dev rant.

The startup life culture is probably killing a lot of talent and taking away peace of mind.

Everything is needed
- too fast
- to work well

Forcing people to compromise on personal life and health.

It also takes away the interest to work on something as an interesting problem and makes it feel like "just another job to get finished".

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

So TRUE 😒

I switched my job about 2 months ago. This was my first switch after college (in 7 years). I was at a senior position and was not learning anything new for few months and got really bored.
I had asked for a 100% hike in new company, they gave me over 150%. Apart from this, they offer free food and snacks (or reimburse if you order your food from outside). Unlimited leaves and work from home option. No fixed working hours (I see people working for only 5-6 hours some days). No sign of politics yet. People are very humble and help you out even on silly queries. Company is growing at a very fast pace, it was named in fastest x growing companies about a month ago in some report with growth rate of about 1000%.
I see people around me with so less experience than me but so much knowledge. Feels like I am fresher again and learning so much from them. FYI, I had worked in same field (tech) for initial 3 years of my career. Looking at seniors I am finally able to set goals. 
This one time I saw CTO awake at 3 am collaborating actively in resolution of a production issue.
Having seen so much positive, I went over 100 reviews on Glassdoor to find out the only 2 negatives points ever written, one of them was slow Lift in building. The other a

Most toxic work culture ?? oh boy where do I start.

Getting verbally abused and physical threats over bugs found in production.

All kinds of office politics going around where everyone openly admitted not liking others in other departments.

Your day's salary gets taken away if u are late by even 1 min. And no overtime pay and no you cannot say no to that either or end up getting laid off.

Company brags about giving their employees their salary on time.

Only the devs who have lasted more than 10 years in the company will be heard.

After so many job switches I managed to find one where I get to WFH and pretty much face no toxicity from others.

So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.

I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :

1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.

I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.

Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.

Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS

Got reminded of this job search bullshit they say after interviews, when they say you're not "fit for the culture" but they want you to be "challenging the status-quo".
Like, take a fucking pick. Either you want someone who follows and fits in, or you want someone who innovates and stands out. 😒

If you would start your own company what would be the core values of its culture?

Startup culture.
Most suicidal cults are healthier than any given startup.
The ones that aren't have already killed all of its members.

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

My week at glance:
Monday: Sunday night hangover
Tuesday:Prepare report for progress meeting.
Wednesday: Progress meeting
Thursday:work little bit for next week progress meeting.
Friday: weekend fever and hence not in mood to work.
#big #company #work #culture

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

Lets do this guys, for the culture..

Which would you recommend?

1. Suicide
2. Programming

It's not always true that degree holders hate self-taught developers. Sometimes, it's the other way around. When somebody mentions he gained a cs degree, he sometimes gets hate, too, hearing "degrees are useless! yadayada..." like it's a sin to have one. We should never stop learning whether we have a degree or not, and we should stop this hate and divided culture.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Relationship of company employee

"I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS." - Larry DeLuca

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

Ok, so I'm one of the new folks here, and spent some time looking around.

And I've read so many of you write about levels of insanity at work that just baffles me.

Why do people do that to themselves? And no, I don't mean you sales-manager, or your boss who hired the wrong kind of dev, I mean YOU.

You are a developer, currently the market for devs is so large you can literally pick your jobs. And if you don't know how to find a new job, just Google (easy mode, search on LinkedIn) a company which specializes in recruiting, there are tons of them, and they will gladly search an employer for you.

Don't get stuck in a job that sucks - you will kill your motivation, and you deserve better.

Funny how on Facebook (which I left years ago) I used to never get any likes for anything I wrote, even if it was meaningful.
Then I would look at the feeds of my friends and they would get ++'s for mainly useless and uninspired pop-culture reposts or posts of high narcissim.
It's ironic how they praised garbage rather than value.

I'm glad that on Devrant I at least get ++'s, indicating that people can relate to me. On Facebook, people faux-relate based on narcissim and faux-culture.

Shrug.

Slack culture.

Yes, the chat application.

Fuck it, fuck mattermost, HipChat, Skype, and whatever other digital text medium for team communication.

These are great applications, but used for great evil. They feed cliques and passive aggressive "side" conversations. Every team I've been on has something like this, and it allows people to cultivate hate for one another even though they're sitting in the same room.

Texting allows you to complain about a coworker to your clique. Each clique can have it's own thread. This empowers people to silently rip into other team members. It prevents rational adult conversations and builds stupid little secret societies.

I have been in Netherlands for just two days and I am already in love with this country...
Too bad I'll leave in two weeks 😱😢

One of the most infuriating ideas in software development culture is that you can build maintainable applications without a strictly enforced type system and structured data.

Sure, it's more fun to wack around a dynamically typed system until it works or to write a major application with mutable datastructures... It's a least fun until a few years in and you have to debug an unexpected overwrite or a inconsistent use of an object property or whatever.

Anyone who writes maintainable code eventually figures out that you need rules and procedures, the issue with JavaScript, python, ruby, lisp, etc developers is that they think it's us developers that needs to enforce these rules instead of the compiler (which is infinitely better at it).

At my last startup, the company decided to formally adopt core values after being in business for ten years already. They even emblazoned them on a mouse pad and sent it out to every employee as company swag. I quickly learned that those values were more for show. It was a sign of the culture going downhill. Values included teamwork and collaboration. But since I was only an IC and wasn’t a manager or director or VP, I was expected to be a mindless worker bee. Even when I just asked logical followup questions, I was treated like I was being insubordinate and “questioning their requests.”

Corporate Culture™: when those seniors who spend half of their time gossiping with each other pretend to be too busy to answer a junior's question.

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

i worked at this startup that had these very low wages, hustle culture, bad work environment (bad or no computers for staff, no ergonomics, cramped), and they delayed payments a lot. my boss was mad at me cause i said i didn't see myself there in the future lol. i didn't last 4 months, and i saw colleagues leave within a month. i was so burned out i thought i didn't want to be a dev anymore

No crazy prep, ever.

I always go in with a 'this is me, these are my skills, that's all you're going to get' mindset.

I of course do some research (about the company, their culture, technologies and stuff like that) but I find it kinda weird to spend a big amount of time on interview prep when there is a chance of rejection. (personal opinion)

What do you think about ageism in the tech industry? I see articles where Facebook/Google pride themselves that their employee median age is not over 30. Why is that of any importance? Is it hard for seasoned developers to find a job or adapt to the "youth culture" in tech companies? Any of you felt bullied by your younger colleagues? Finally, will this change in the next 10 years since developers in their 20s will be approaching their 40s, or once they reach that age they will go to the special developer graveyard and commit harikiri?

A coworker asked me to give him a hand on a project last thursday at around 8:00pm, by Friday noon I had most of it complete. Then turn the code back to him. Then somehow , it got placed on me during the weekend....20 mins before leaving to San antonio to be with my sister while my niece was born. Yeah...no..sorry...guess who enjoyed SA this weekend? This guy. Past experiences have shown me that one should not sacrifice personal time for company bs. Specially here in south texas where the majority of employers are from Mexico. In Mexico, there is no worker appreciation culture, going above and beyond the line of duty to accomplish tasks is not met with any sort of consideration. So nope nope nope nope.

Interviewer: “I agree, companies should stop calling people devops engineers, devops is a culture”

Me: “I’m glad you see it that way too”

*weeks later*

Interviewer, now new boss: “and this is our DevOps Engineer, Jeff”

Me: 🤨

just saw a tweet praising a company because of their choice to use swiss servers and they had a pompous sentance in parenthesis like (upside to banking secret culture)

like, dude, at the end of the day, guaranteed their 'server' is just a linux box somewhere, just like anywhere else in the world just STFU

god i HATE ignorance, hype, and stupid tropes that managers just automatically subscribe to with their 2 brain cell NPC brain

This business philosophy is relevant no matter which industry, culture or century you're in. In software development a user- or customer-centered design approach is particularly important👌

Via Instagram @alphaimplement 🚀

Damn! I never thought resigning from first company is not easy.
The team was amazing, overall culture was great. But after working for 2 years and making product stable enough, the learning curve started to flatten.
Decided to move on, last day was most painful. Sitting on the chair, wondering whether I did the right thing. All the memories flash black on that day. Nervous but little bit excited. Kinda mixed feelings

But turned out that job switch was even better. Good pay + one hell of learning to build product from scratch.

I decided to go freelance/contracting. Headhunters keep pitching me permament roles (and I love watching them run out of pitch lines :D )

Headhunter: This job can't do your asking salary, but can offer career development.

Me: Already did that. was Engineer, then Architect, then CTO. I'm actually stepping back to be an Engineer.

Headhunter: Ok well, in this job you can do things start to finish, see them through to the end.

Me: I actually get bored after a while. Prefer change.

Headhunter: Well this place has a great culture and fun atmosphere!

Me: It's an insurance company mate...

My company sends out this Culture Assessment survey so employees "voices can be heard".
"Completely confidential."
I keep reading the email:
"Please *do not* forward this email to other individuals. The survey link is unique to your Business Group, project, and certain demographics, and therefore should be completed with only your responses."

....*face palm*

Our CEO had a virtual town hall using Zoom and now have a sign language interpreter box as a regular feature... To go along with all the Inclusion stuff...

The most immediate problem though is they didn't turn on auto-captions...

I don't know sign but am deaf so needed the captions which it turns out you can get using the Google Recorder app on Pixels. (This is literally like a fuck you to non-Pixel users and Zoom which disables Live Captions in conferences and recording full transcripts).

Anyway I left it own and near the end, a speaker was like "we're getting a lot of likes and positive feedback about the interpreter box! See how small changes make such a big difference?!"

And well of course in my mind I'm going "uh.... No."

I'll just go back to not caring about anything that isn't related to how much I make.

Sticker game:

A friend finds me coding and busy on my code then asks.

Her:Can I have a minute.
Me:Sure,how can I be of help

Her:What's up with all this devrant cartoons on your machine.
Me:Sounding excited,you like my sticker game can ship some for you?

Her:Nah sticker game since when is there such one looks childish and why ship stickers.
Me:It's our techy culture respect it let me finalize on my work.

She messed up my evening human bug.

I am planning to build a list of Gem companies.

Would crowdsource the details.

Definition: Gem companies are NOT FAANG but companies with better ethics, culture, WLB, and good salary.

Will structure it as follows:

1. Name
2. Location(s)
3. Domain
4. Website
5. Jobs page

Make this public for anyone who wants to refer. This list can be used by any job hunter to search, apply, and land a decent job.

I really hate the childish corporate culture at some tech companies. Today I received my Christmas "gift" from my employer. It was a branded chocolate bar and a sticker pack. The stickers were designed by our UX designers, and the stickers look like they are made for little toddlers at kindergarten. The stickers said things like "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!". Jesus Christ, are we little kids? The average age of an employee at my company is around 30 years old, and those are the stickers you give us? Stickers are childish anyways, but it seems like 50% of my autistic colleagues seem to like putting those ugly things on their laptops to lick the boots of upper management.

The office itself literally looks like a kindergarten. There's LEGO artwork on the walls and the "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!" nonsense and similar motivational bullshit is plastered on all the walls. Seriously, who ever thought it's a good idea to tell 30 year old adults to "make friends!". I already have my friends, I don't need to be friends with anyone at work, and I definitely don't need to be told to do so!

Even funnier than that is the fact that the whole "To The Moon!" bullshit is a phrase introduced by upper management to symbolize their effort and wish to make our company bigger and stronger by having a bigger market share. Basically it's the rich peeps from upper management telling us to work harder and make them more successful. Today I had a meeting in which they told me they wouldn't increase my salary because they have a tight budget this year because of the economic problems we're currently facing. But that doesn't stop them from childishly motivating us with bullshit like "To The Moon!" so they can become richer themselves, while the little people at the bottom of the pyramid need to work harder without extra pay.

The most annoying part of this is that many employees lick the boots of upper management and go along with all this bullshit. God I hate cringy childish corporate culture so much.

Found out two of our best engineers put in their notice. They both have shaped the culture here and I don’t know what it’s going to be like without them.

DevRant MeetUp in Nijmegen 4th Jan'20:

I'm goin' scouting this Sunday.

Got six locations to check for compability.
Lots of coffee, tea, beer, wine and such to evaluate. Btw : what's our price level? Medium?
Anyone in for culture, arts or even partying?! =)

Cheers!

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

So I just recently found out there's a local idol group named MNL48 in here.

Basically bringing the seiyuu/J-Pop culture in the Philippines.

...

Maybe I should've became an idol instead of a senior high school programmer :/

The best part of being dev is the community, its also the most unique one IMHO. I mean what other profession in the Whole Wide World has such great and ingrained culture of helping eachother and sharing knowledge ?

I hate that "integer overflows" have become somewhat pop culture because anytime I see someone try to use it in a joke, they use it wrong.

I've even seen people confuse them with stack overflows and be like "my intelligence is so low it stack underflowed and became the max of an integer value!"

Or "It overflowed and became zero again" ah, I guess it happened to be unsigned and overflowed by precisely 1 then eh?

So cringe

Company Motto: “Business is simple, hire amazing people and let then do their thing”

Company Culture: You can’t do that!! It’s really hard and expensive to hire people with those skills! How would we replace you or save money by continuing to not give you a raise if you did that!?

So I just got an offer. It's nice, but it's not full-remote, so I'll probably keep looking.

Also a company there tested my IQ. I had 140. Smart enough to know IQ is basically pseudoscience. I turned them down because the whole process was very bureaucratic, so I don't think we'll be a culture fit.

Cross fingered for the rest

How many languages do you speak?

It really sucks when you join a company, you are really excited and then you see that the management and the work culture in the company sucks and you cant wait to leave...such a waste of time and energy :'(

I think I'm getting fired. My manager is pushing to have a meeting. Although we also have 1:1s but he is asking for it this time. Never did this before.
My company have a firing culture. I'm not very positive about everything. My performance was satisfactory last year, but I couldn't do much this year.

Manager asked suggestions to make any changes to work culture, because of the overall productivity issue of the team. The culture was so much toxic that no one was ready to speak.

Subscribed to CBS all access just for Picard and Lower Decks. Made the mistake of clicking on the Comedy Central icon by accident.

Two minutes later: email ad in my inbox advertising the Daily Show and Comedy Central.

Fuck you CBS. Double fuck you Viacom.

Project manager ending argument with "it's because we have a shit culture"

Just nailed the technical and company culture interview, probably

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A great corporate culture, pleasant coworkers, a caring manager, meaningful work, and a good salary. Hmmm. Thank you for reminding me that I have a pretty close to ideal Dev job. I can live with what's missing. 🤠

Started my new job in November. At least it only took me four months to discover the toxic culture before I'm on the market again. Uuuuugggggh Fuuuuck.

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

Who else hates hackerrank coding challenges?

Let's schedule our weekly sprint planning meeting for 10AM on Fridays. And let's chastise those who happen to be 5 minutes late (literally). It's the perfect plan, since everyone is normally expected to come to work between 10AM and 11AM. Makes. Total. Fucking. Sense.

I need help understanding GitHub culture. How many stars do you say is equal to 1000 Instagram likes?

Sadly no VSCode icon theme for Chuck Norris fans yet

I'm so confused with this app right now. I've seen very few rants and mostly just photos making fun of various issues that occur in software development work culture.

Recently shifted from startup culture to an established organization as a Javascript developer. It has been 3 weeks haven't written a single line of code here or any other related work. Employees pick a suitable source of entertainment (mobiles,netflix) and stick with it whole day and go home. Coming from a fast paced startup environment, I get creeps due to such an eased out approach towards work, can't believe I am getting paid for this 😂, as I was working my ass off during my last employments.

When applying for your first ever job, which of the following is/are/can be acceptable?
- Bad company culture
- Slavery pay
- Bad location
- No benefits (health care, etc.)
- No coffee/free snacks
- Long working hours/Lot of overtime work
- (Other)

🙄😐

Company with CULTURE
Company who doesnt allow tech team to WFH but editorial team is fine (or sales)

Sonos playing ALL DAY, and sales team talking all day, next to tech team desk

Dont u love open space offices?

Fuck this
FML

I have been growing this creepy stache for a month now. I am hoping the "not fitting company culture"-ness of it will steadily attain me work-from-home privileges.

If it does fit the company culture, I am fucked in more ways than one.

Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:

Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.

They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.

Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?

He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.

She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."

This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.

He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."

He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."

"Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture. " - Anthony Burgess

In the Netherlands they have a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" culture around wages, how is this in other countries?

You ask for what you think you're worth (and are happy to work for) and if the company agrees they pay you.

There's no guarantee you'll be paid the same as your colleagues working the same job because they might just have the confidence to ask for more money.

I have no idea how my wages compare with my colleagues but as I am happy with what I earn it doesn't matter. Seems to solve a lot of the dick waving issues that stem from everyone comparing salaries.

Didn't get to the next interview stage because of "culture fit" 😔
What does that even mean?

Why some folks get offended by anything? The PC culture is getting out of control!

They say it in a proud manner, too! Wow!

Startup: Please go to Glassdoor and fill out the company review to make us look good!!

Dev: ...

Just finished Microsoft's newest CEO, Satya Nadella's book "Hit Refresh." It was actually really great. He talks about changing Microsofts culture and global impact, inspiring makers, as well as what the needs are going forward in technology.
Highly recommend.

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

Do you have this culture at the office where your employer (management) try to shame you if you leave at the normal hour? How do you deal with it?

If you work in France I would like to know what's your work schedule, because I'm in a startup and everyone stay there until 18pm.

My kick-ass merch from JapanCon Brussels (Nov 2018): a Yoda doormat, TallGeese Gundam Wing model, Pulp fiction displate, AND in front of it A 3D-PRINTED PICKLE RICK OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!!! xD

Just turned down an offer to become eCommerce Lead @IKEA Austria.

They got those messed up systems controlled by the headquarters in sweden and no clue of or sense for online or digitalisation...how I'm supposed to fix their organization culture... I'd only had freaked everybody out trying to disrupt their 'used' way of doing business :(

Wondering if that's gonna haunt me...

Remote work as a sure thing. WFH 4EVER.

Currently I'm still not confident that most companies will keep or adhere to a remote-first culture because those are full of managers who can't see past their own insecurities.
We will probably see a wave of company failures and bankruptcies (sorry, I should have said "industry consolidation") in a few years while those few that managed to automate away their future-averse middle bosses take over the world.
The day you can't tell if your boss, that you only see in a Zoom window, is organic or a fully virtual #SFW #Professional interactive LinkedIn ad? That is the day I longe for.

Can anyone tell me what’s that “cultural appropriation” bullshit is all about? What does it mean to appropriate some foreign culture?

When you're told you are a great culture fit, and have great experience - but not ENOUGH experience.

Feels bad man.

What is it with this bullshit culture about installing something syncs it with all machines
First chrome/chromium, You can't install a plugin or extension on 1 machine unless you're logged out. what is this bullshit

Next windows 10, I fucking installed a Japanese language pack on 1 machine, by the end of the day all my fucking machines and even my windows tablet got it installed and applied in a fucking bugged way that made it that my UI is English and my fucking metro apps are Japanese.

This is starting to get annoying as fuck

My decision whether to move to the US vs. the UK/EU will be primarily be driven by ability to attend rock/metal concerts and access to art/travel/culture/diversity.

If I am happy and living a stress free life (stress free == balancing stress with doing something that I love), then I'd be able to perform better with a clear mind and grow well.

Money has always been an output of my working with good ethics and high values.

How is it security, a function of IT, does not understand developers? I mean, they work in IT, should not at least pick-up on the culture?

Pranks aren't part of the culture here, and I'm happy about that.

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.

Has anyone else worked in business environments and found... em.. "wannabe-tech decisions?"

For example, naming stuff with shortened words and underscores instead of spaces.... for no real reason? Or maybe using the word "database" a little too often, just to use the word? (similar to the way you might call someone by name, only to confirm to them that you have learned their name?)

It doesn't actually bother me, rather, I think it's a bit cute that these people are interested in our culture and want to be a part of it, even if it's in sort of silly ways like this.

I see stackoverflow are trying to deal with the shitty culture issue

Started a new job as a dev. First days revealed no local admin rights, no right to use Linux locally and a very limited set of Software. Negotiated compromise to get a remote VM with Linux and a user who is part of sudo. VM turned out to be isolated by proxy, so I can not install anything new. At least Docker is pre-installed and I hoped it could work out. But guess what no access to dockerhub and I can not pull any images. Admin told me to copy manually the images with scp.

I'd never thought that there could be any companies out there who treats devs like that. What puzzles me most, there're lot of devs staying with that company for years, even decades already and they're good guys, please don't get me wrong.

Did you encounter anything like that? Could you make any difference there, where you met anything like it.

I reached the point after 3 weeks where I do not think I can make any difference and when it'll take ages to move people and company policy.
I do not want to give up, but I fear it is pointless to fight for change there. I am out of options and about to leave asap. Can you recommend me anything else?

Thanks in advance and for your time :)
Felt good to write it down.

Workplace infantilzation..

"The era of self-regulation for online companies is over." UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright.

Look for governments, especially those without strong free speech protections, to move to control the means of communication for the masses, and control what people see and hear.

It's called culture

Them: Maintaing code quality is a vital part of our team culture!
Me: Really, how important? Can a feature slip to facilitate necessary refactoring?
Them: Well no. We've made a commitment to the client.
Me: So, code quality is not very important then is it...

Culture.

Everybody seems to fuck it up. (Most ignore it entirely)

Everybody seems to undervalue it’s importance. (Its value cannot be overstated)

Everybody seems to think it is a luxury for successful companies. (Instead of being a major part of what got them their success)

Everybody seems to think having beer in the fridge is culture, or some other perk. (I like beer and shit, but that’s not culture unless your company makes fucking beer!)

Everybody seems to think that a value statement is culture. (Your employees don’t give a fuck if you want to “provide value to X industry)

And guess, fucking, what...

Everyone is wrong. That’s why 9/10 startups fail, because the founders and CEO are dumbasses.

Here’s some pretty simple advice for life...

“Don’t be a fucking dumbass”

- Me

recently i prided myself in my high ability to google stuff but i just blank at this problem:

i have 4 HDDs with my photos on it. They are more or less backups of each other, but not quite. The folder structure is convoluted and i am dreading this task since years. I now want to move to a better backup culture and save the data i really care about.

Problem: i may or may not inserted new photos in some versions of the hdds and not in others. So they are like [Photo1], [Photo2], [Photo3] and [Photo4] but [Photo1] contains a,b and d content, [Photo2] contains a and b but not d, [Photo3] contains c.

Now i would like a program that just takes hashes of all files present and compares them and finds differences among those 4 folders so i can combine them in each other. Additional problem points for a being in a different subfolder on [Photo1] as in [Photo2]

Its probably some backup software that can that, but i dont know which one.

Whelp?

I had my second interview today with the director .. He seems to be nice at first.. when he asked me do you read books I honestly said I don’t...he then asked me if I had like programming books with me.. I said no since all the lectures are all in ppt ... and I believe that is enough during colllege.. and they didn’t require us to have books.. I just felt that .. he did not like me just because of that..I like the company but I guess being honest also kills the opportunity..the second interview mainly focuses on fitting with the company culture...I just thought the interview went really fast.. It just seemed that they had this “ahh next!!” Kind of attitude when I left the room

Recruiter called me to present me a job in fintech.

Arguing about how work standards are important and that task oriented work culture is great.

....

Recruiter (can’t find any argument): All people work in office. It’s financial institution they need to protect privacy.

Me: AWS on last summit presented show case of whole bank from EU in their cloud infrastructure.

....

And we argued for at least 10 minutes where me was talking about losing time and task oriented workplace with specified goals and listening about how brilliant people are there and how much they believe in opensource.

I started believing they want me to go to work to indoctrinate me and make me corporate pig.

Hell no I am to old for that.

Coworker (junior engineer): "He's a principal engineer, and damn good at his job because he works all night long. You're still lead engineer because you don't work late at night."

Flak I get for *not* being able to stay up after 10:30pm. 😥

In recent years there has been a massive shift in dev positions and their responsibilities. At least in all the companies, I've worked with.

Interns are now treated like Juniors.
Juniors are now treated like Mids.
Mids are now treated like Seniors.
Seniors are now treated like Architects.

I think some devs(now seniors) forgot how much easier it was to get into this field years ago and how little they had to know to start.

Sad reality.

Best thing about DevRant is: I have 2nd job that's not a developer company and all my colleges doesn't understand a jack shit about code and the culture. But worst of all is that everyone there is "shoulder spy's.... So i can feel safe when i surf DevRant during the breaks and enjoy my breaks with DevRant

what the hell this friendo just sent me a 100 line Julia function with variables names like `sauce` and `thingy` and expected me to debug it. And I guess his tab key was broken cause there was no indentation at all. Did I mention I’ve never used Julia in my life? Is this just Julia culture?

A good way to avoid working for a bad company is that you can spot major problems in the interview and pre-employment phase. There are a number of things that indicate a bad culture that you can ask about right off the bat. Dress code, blocked websites, and work from home policy(or a lack thereof) can all indicate what kind of work environment to expect.

But the biggest one of all is a request for your salary history. If a recruiter or hiring manager wants to know how much you are or were making at a previous job, and will not allow the process to continue without the information, run.

Every job opening has a budget associated with it. The employer already knows what they want to spend on the position. They want to know what your current or previous compensation is or was, so they can perhaps save some money of that budget by offering you a very small amount more than the amount you tell them.

If they ask the question, I get suspicious, but then say, "I'd prefer not to disclose that. What is the budget for the requirement?"

If the person who asks you relents and tells you the budget, then all is well, in my opinion. But if they stick to the subject and insist on getting your salary history, then it indicates a culture of arbitrary subordination, which is not a healthy work environment. If it ever goes this way, I politely tell them that I'm not comfortable disclosing that information, and that I would like to withdraw my interest in the position.

I`m new to coding. So i`m also new at ranting.

I know i have something to rant about. But my nerd culture is just not yet at the level.

I have been taught by a mate to used linux and started vanilla javascript. We use intellj as IDE.

So i have to speak to this client whose previous IT provider was gonna code his thing with ASP and visual studio!!!
Right?! WTF?!!! But that`s all i got!!!!

Im pretty sure its a wtf?! But i don`t have the rock solid reasons why.

Please ranters help me become better at rantong and tell me i`m not wrong and why ;)

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

So the whole rubber duck culture in devRant comes from "rubber duck debugging" in _The Pragmatic Programmer_, right? Just read about it today

I'm making the communication in my company. So I have to make facebook posts to link our product.
That could be fun if only I could use memes, jokes and pop culture references. Unfortunately, our targets are seniors. So, always same format, always same sentences, always same images. I'm bored.

Had to turn down a job offer today because of a BUNCH of red flags in their hiring process that hinted that their corporate culture was absolute trash. HR people are trash when they do whatever they want to with your time just because you’re in need. If they had been more ethical and professional, I’d have a job and they’d have a position filled. But, no, they had to play stupid games and win stupid prizes.

Why do all these fucking stores not sell anything that isn't crap ? Our waste centric culture pisses me off when I can't just always buy something new immediately on something else wearing out

Goddamn getting back on my feet a million times crap !

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.

Who else works at a company that enforces test driven development? And after doing TDD do you think you could ever go back to NOT doing TDD?

!rant
I started this job in December.
I am very happy at the moment.
Company culture is great, organization is excellent and workmates are very smart and friendly.

Ernest Hemingway and @bittersweet once competed in whose shortest story is the saddest. Ernest wasn't original, boasting his old "baby shoes" charade. But @bittersweet, proving the culture is changed, and new talent beats the old, won, with this story of his:

"CTO is wanted by YC unicorn. Requirements: PHP 5.4".

Is the office dead in the dev world? Does everyone prefer to work remote from home, coffee shops or Coworking spaces? Or is there still value in working as a team irl, but modern office culture is killing it?

I like going to work on casual wear, I don't like going to work on formal wear but my boss sayings that it's part of the corporate culture and we have to follow it.

Do you guys go to work on formal or casual wear?

The world has move to a dev culture of making good reliable RESPONSIVE and immersive programs.

But bank apps and system still suck

To all the Indian Devs here. Which company do you think he is talking about?

God I'm getting tired of the whole TDD culture. I get it, testing is good, but we're getting to the point where several major OSS projects fail on common real-world use cases because instead of worrying about the main purpose of a software, devs only worry about satisfying their artificial tests. And when someone opens an issue, it just stays there for months or even years simply because setup & teardown logic for the required tests would be several times more complex than the actual fix.

Seeking a new school to continue studying..
Finally found a good one, with a programming planning, a rare things in programming school...

Ok let's go, here is a challenge to be accepted.
Friends : i bet you to fails the challenge and get accepted.
-me : .... well ok I'll only do the programming part and don't answer the rest of the test.

30% of the test was logic and programming, the rest were stupid culture questions.

- the school actually hired me.. thanks 😂😂😂

My company's corporate culture is so gossipy, cliquey, and backstabby. And I'm so *bad* at corporate intrigue. I feel like Rand when he gets to Cairhien in the Wheel of Time books, and all the scheming house nobles are interpreting all his words on a second, third, fourth layer of subtext and he's just all "I don't care about your stupid game I'm just telling the truth" but nobody believes him.

I guess what I'm saying is you really shouldn't have to play word games to have a chance to write and deploy decent software and maybe get a raise every once in a while.