1. Buy boxes of orange juice, almost past their expiry date.
2. Put boxes on the hot office windowsill for a few weeks.
3. Cool down juice in fridge.
4. "Hey dear coworker, would you like a refreshing juice box on this hot spring day?"
5. Watch coworker retch and vomit, spitting blue-grayish juice over his desk, crying: "Why would you give me old moldy juice without checking the date?"
6. "Do you remember when you told me you didn't have time for unit tests? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, DAVE, THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU DEPLOY UNTESTED CODE.... NOW FINISH YOUR JUICE!"

This shit is real.

Guy comes to my desk.
Guy: Do you know Python?
Me: Yes
Guy: I want a program that reads a CSV containing IP addresses and tells which of them are valid.
Me: Sure thing. Show me the CSV file.
Guy: (Shows the file)
Me: (Writes a small function for checking whether the IP is valid)
Me: Done Here you go.
Guy: You should be using regex.
Me: Why? This is perfect. No need for regex.
Guy: My manager wants a solution using regex only.
Me: Why so?
Guy: I don't know. Can you do it using regex?
Me: Only if you say so. (Stackoverflow. Writes a humongous regex). Done!
Me: Just for curiosity, what is your application?
Guy: I will port it in Java. You see, regex is easy to debug.
Me: Ohhh Yes. I forgot that. Good luck with your regex.

I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

A rare bug appeared. It was my duty to finish it.

SH = Manager

SH: So when do you think you can finish the task?
Me: I still have to analyze the problem. Give me a moment and I'll get back to you.
SH: Alright.

*An hour later*

SH: *Approaches my desk* Have you found the source of the problem?
Me: Not yet. Please give me some more time.
SH: Ok.

*An hour later*

SH: *the approach* You found it yet?
Me: Yes, I've found the the source of the problem, But... *explains the problem and thus concluding that it's a complicated bug*
SH: Can you finish it by tomorrow?
Me: I'll do the best I can but I am not entirely sure if I can finish it by tomorrow.
SH: OK great!

*The next day*

SH: *Le approach* Hey I have a colleague here that may be able to solve the problem, he has skills with XYZ. Ok, I will leave you two at it then. *the leave*
Helper: So can you tell me about the issue here?
Me: *explains the bug and the source of the problem*
Helper: Have you tried solution A?
Me: Yes sir, but it yields a different output... *explains what happened with solution A*
Helper: Well, that won't work. What about solution B?
Me: I've tried that, too. *Another lengthy explanation*
Helper: Welp, ok. I'll get back to you on that.

(...But he never came.)

*A few hours later*

SH: *A.P.P.R.O.A.C.H.* Hey I have this team lead from another department. I think he can help you out on this one. *L.E.A.V.E.*
Helper 2: What seems to be the problem?
Me: *Explains again with all the solutions I tried but failed*
Helper 2: Wow. That really seems to be a complicated problem.
~~
Me (In my head): -_-
~~
Helper 2: Listen, I need to get back to my team. I'll keep you posted if I happen to find a solution for your problem alright?
Me: Alright thanks.

*Towards the end of the day*

SH: *APPROACHHHH* Have you resolved the bug yet?
~~
Me (In my head): You made me spend half the FUCKING day explaining to these people who didn't even give a piece of FUCKING SHIT to contribute to the problem and you are asking me if I am done with this FUCKING BUG? FUCK YOU, YOU SON OF A -
~~
Me: No, it is not finished yet..
SH: You have to finish this because we don't have tomorrow.
~~
Me (In my head): SHDIFHWISGSIFGSISBAUDBEIQBDIWGFIEBWIDHWIQBDOSBCISBDOSHDIAGSUSVDIFBDKDJWIQKDBDIDGSUWVDIABDIXBSIDBDIDBWUWGUSVDUWVDJQBDUDVWISHDUWVFG
~~

I went home for the day.

Heard a conversation between my colleague and the boss

Boss: (saw my colleague's messy desk) hey, could you organize your desk? It's not nice to see when clients come in. You know what they say, messy desk represents a messy brain..

Colleague: (glanced over to the boss' empty desk) and what does an empty desk say for the brain?

Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!

We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).

*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*

"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"

*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*

*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*

"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"

*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*

We laughed so hard xD

Walking with gf.

diadev: hey that desk would be perfect for someone with one monitor!
GF: What kind of fuckin normie has one monitor?

I'm keeping this one 😂

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

An incident which made a Security Researcher cry
--------------------------------------------------------
I was working on my laptop finishing up my code while waiting for the flight which was late . Meanwhile two guys (I'm gonna call them Fellas) in black suit and shades came to me

Fella : Sir you have to come with us .
Me : *goes along with them*
Fella : Sir please proceed *points towards the door . The room has a round table with some guys discussing something *
Fella 1 : Your passport please
Me : *Hands over the passport*
Fella 1 : Where are you traveling to sir?
Me : India
Fella 1 : Put your laptop in the desk sir.
Me : Sure thing
Fella 2 : What were you doing there? *Taps the power button*
Me : Just finishing up my work .
Fella 1 : Or hacking our systems?
Me : Seriously?
Fella 2 : The password please .
Me : Here you go
*5 minutes have passed and​ he still can't figure out how to use the machine*
Fella 2 : Which Windows is this?
Me : It's Linux
Fella 1 : So you are a hacker .
Me : Nope
Fella 1 : You are using Linux
Me : Does it matters?
Fella 1 : Where do you work?
Me : *I won't mention here but I told him*
Fella 2 : So what do you do there?
Me : I'm a Security Researcher
Fella 1 : What's your work?
Me : I find security holes in their systems .
Fella 1 : That means you are a hacker .
Me : Not at all .
Fella 2 : But they do the same and they use Linux .
Me : You can call me one .
*After 15 minutes of doo-laa-baa-dee-doo-ra-ba-doo amongst them I dunno what they were talking , they shutdown the computer and handed over it to me*
Fella 2 - So you are somewhat like a hacker .
Me - *A bit frustrated* Yes.

##And now the glorious question appeared like an angel from river ##

Can you hack Facebook?
Me - 😭😭😭

Just a joke I found online:

One day I was facing some issue with Outlook and I raised a ticket to get it resolved. I got a call from the Service Desk lady after some time and it went this way:

Lady: Hi I'm calling from service desk, what is the problem?

Me: (I explained the problem).

Lady: Can you please share your screen and give me the control so that I can solve the issue?

Me: (I shared the screen and gave the control. She solved it!!)

Lady: You may close the ticket from your end, the issue is solved.

Me: Thank you very much, I will close the ticket.

I opened her profile in lync and had a look at her profile. The display pic looked small in size. I instantly messaged her Employee ID to my colleague and asked him to have a look at her. He replied "She looks good in some angles".

I tried searching her FB profile with the help of her name, but there were too many results.

I started searching on Linked In instead, I found her profile this time. I was trying to enlarge the profile pic and suddenly a message popped up - it says

"I'll share my better picture with you on your outlook ID but you may please stop sharing your screen??"
😂

Meeting with smooth suit guy:

"So, our company has pivoted"

I hate everything about this guy, not having slept well at all, I fucking snapped:

"Pivoted? Oh wow, what a wonderfully refined word to describe that your asinine business model smacked flat into the mud, that your obtuse bubble of vague ideas popped and your childish dreams of piles of undeserved gold got caught up by the hard reality that your product does not add any tangible value -- yet you tricked your sheepish retarded investors once again to fall for a new hype-filled pitch deck? Congratulations. At least you probably snort enough coke to keep believing in yourself..."

The guy nervously wiped his nose, stuttered, and walked off looking angry and a little confused.

So it turns out, my boss is apparently the major "sheepish retarded investor" in this company.

Today I got a mail from him. I expected fire and fury, nuclear ICBMs crashing into my desk.

"Thanks for your feedback, this is why I invite you to meetings. Could you take a look at their new pitch slides and preliminary API docs for me?"

So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.

Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.

Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.

Manager: No you have enough on your plate

3 hours later

Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long

Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.

I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.

I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)

After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.

Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.

So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.

But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

!rant

I had this idea about national flags on the avatar. (Something like an item on the desk) then @letmecode suggested notebook stickers.

What you devRanters think?

Someones keyboard just stopped working in my job.
They called the helpdesk and i told them to unplug the keyboard from the back of the PC and try a different usb port before i send them down a new keyboard.
Their reply?

‘How am i meant to do that? I mean... *laughs* I didn’t go to college for this kind of stuff. I know you did but you need to explain it in English for me instead of using technical terms.’

....

So i had to describe what a USB looks like, and tell her how to follow the (only) skinny black cable she has on her desk, down the back of the desk and into the PC. She got overwhelmed by this cable being the same colour as the thicker VGA cable, so ended up unplugging everything!
Its fine though, as when she plugged them all back in, everything was back working.
She finished the call by saying:

“Like, i know how to use a computer but I just don’t understand all this technical mumbo jumbo, like USB’s and stuff? How should i know about that?”

...

I sincerely think interviews need to have just 5 minutes dedicated to the person showing that they know what a bloody USB is!!, can turn on/off a PC, open outlook, and follow basic instructions.

Ugh I work with idiots 😢

Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"

Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"

Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"

Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"

Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."

Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."

Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"

Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"

Clerk: "€3500"

Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"

Friend: what do you do for living?

Me: I am a developer, software engineer.

Friend: Lucky you! you have a comfortable work, always in your desk.

Me inside: *he doesn't have a clue about developer​s struggling* *dying inside*

The colleague:

- I can't work, my chair is uncomfortable
- I can't work, my chair is not ergonomic
- I can't work, my desk is too small
- I can't work, my legs are uncomfortable
- I can't work, my keyboard is not ergonomic
- I can't work on this task, John knows how to do it better
- I will only work on <this> type of tasks. I will not work on others
*gets assigned <other> task; browses the internet all day; at the EOD task isn't even touched*
- I can't work with Jack, he's too noisy
- I can't come to the office on time, there's traffic in the city
- I couldn't come yesterday, I was out of town. No, I will not log a vacation day - I was NOT on vacation. It's personal
- I can't<...>

Manager, 2 days to the end of said colleague's probation period:
- I am very sorry to tell you this, but our attitudes are not in line and we cannot continue working together. Since this is your 5th warning, we have to let you go.

The colleague:
- What?? How come?? I did NOT see this coming... You can't do this! I work here! This is where I work and you can't fire me!

*got his things from his desk and left. Never came back*

Everyone at the office:
- YAYYYY!!!! Let's have a shorter day today and let's celebrate this riddance in a pub! (manager agreed)

So I'm working on a computer vision project that grabs video from my webcam and detects faces in each frame. Earlier yesterday morning I was capping out at 30 frames per second, which is what I believe to be the max for my webcam. As the day became night and I was wrapping up my work on a portion of the project, I noticed that my newly compiled version was only getting around 8 frames per second. Confused, I looked into my frame grabbing + face detection code.

"Maybe I can only detect faces in a certain region of the image, based on where the face was in the previous image?" No, still 8fps. Hmm.

"How about I lower the resolution of the image, that would definitely help!" I tried that, but no speed boost came either. What??

I start to dig deeper. Maybe I'm not linking my libraries correctly, and it's using an older library I compiled. So I recompile that. Nothing.

"Am I low on resources?" I close out of all my other apps. Nothing.
Okay, wtf. Now I just comment out the face detection code entirely, and only grab webcam frames.

8fps. ?????

Suddenly, I get an idea. I get out of my desk, walk over to the doorway of my room, and flip the light on. I sit back down, and run my code.

30fps.

The stupid webcam switches to "night mode" when it detects low light, which restricts its ability to output frames at high speed and caps at 8fps. Damn, I felt like a fool 😂

This happened a month or so ago. I wanted a tablet for more easy/portable server management (JuiceSSH) so I went to a second hand tech store (a good/reliable one) and this guy asked me right away what I was looking for.

"a tablet!"

I pointed at a specific one and he grabbed it and walked me to the cash desk to take a look at it.

"what do you want to use it for?"
"server management mostly"

Then this other guy behind the desk looked at me with this view in his eyes like:

"fucking try-hard"

The employee helping me also looked strangeish at me

😅

I went out of office for a while, and when I was going to sit on my desk, a co-worker said me “Elizadeath, the boss wanna talk with you”. I was concerned, I though “maybe something broke in production code, or they need an urgent code, I don’t know”.

Well, that wasn’t what I expected.
“Elizadeath” she said “I’m seriously worry about you. I saw the plastic bottles our team has collected for the recyling project, and I realized that most of the Coca-Cola bottles came from you!”

Yes, it was a Coca-cola addiction intervention 😂 I’m drinking more water and less coke from now, for my health 😊

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

Collegue *yells through the office*:
Hey IT-guy the file is not there, where is it ?

Me: what file is not where ?

Collegue: you know that file i've been searching for 30 mins now on the Google drive.

Me: Have you tried hitting the name into the search bar ?

Collegue: Sure dude, I'm not stupid.

Me -> *one the way to her desk*
Collegue: OH! never mind I found it with the search bar. I swear it hasn't been there before!

*turning around, going back to my desk*
-fml

The network starts slowing down, transactions start to fail across the 450+ stores, the website starts to spit 500 errors what is going on?

Queue a frantic running around the office working out what was going wrong... Calls from all 3 data centres, nothing is going in or out of the network.

Notice the network admin come back to his desk, his eyebrows raise and he looks left and right before unplugging his laptop ethernet from one of the server access points

The network rushes back to life, everything is fine.

That particular network mapping tool is now banned for use on production.

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

My lead developer left on vacation for a week. Without notice to my boss and/or myself.

Well to be fair we did have the minimum which is a 2 day notice....

So what did we do? Well the boss and I acted like absolute adults and did what any other adult would do.

Me sticky noted the fuck out of his desk and screens.

4 screens full of sticky notes.

Phone is full of sticky notes too. And geez man....everything is sticky notes....so...many....sitcky...notes

In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Got inspired by a rant and got something to make my desk at work more green.
What should I name him/her?

I worked on a company with an open floor plan where you would get a desk assigned depending on the type of project you worked on. All the desks were modular an you would get a desk with a cube with a set of drawers, or with a locker-like cube with a single space and door. When this guy started, he was assigned a drawer set. Around the third day he went around the office asking anyone with a locker to trade cubes. He finally got one. He filled it up with liquor bottles, cans of juice and several types of glasses. He would prepare himself cocktails during the work day. Once he was enjoying a Coca-Cola and whisky mix when the HR boss came around to ask what he was up. He offered the guy a drink.

I'm starting a new job next week so I don't currently have a desk, but my boyfriend loves the cross stitched Yoshis I made for him!

Also, fuck cross stitching. It's the worst. I'm never doing it again. What was supposed to be a Christmas gift turned into a belated Valentine's gift.

1st post. Not sure if rant.

> Join 1st job after college.
> Desk assigned is close to a senior dev
> Random day, QA asks senior dev questions on something and coincidentally I happened to be working on the same thing.
> Senior dev borrows my system and explains qa something.
> By the end of explanation senior dev had bunch of shell commands written on notepasd on my machine.
> I don't understand jack shit of whats happening.
> QA looks at me and says, "Ping me once."
> I think, "no idea what just happened but must be something related to network ."
> I open terminal and type "ping" and quitely wait for further instructions (address to ping that is).
> Everyone starts laughing their asses off.
> QA guy opens slack, and sends himself the commands on text document.
> I realize what just happened
> Laugh awkwardly with everyone to ease the pressure
> FML

Root rents an office.

Among very few other things, the company I'm renting an office from (Regus) provides wifi, but it isn't even bloody secured. There's a captive portal with a lovely (not.) privacy policy saying they're free to monitor your traffic, but they didn't even bother using WEP, which ofc means everyone else out to the fucking parking lot four floors down can monitor my traffic, too.

Good thing I don't work for a company that handles sensitive data! /s But at least I don't have access to it, or any creds that matter.

So, I've been running my phone's connection through a tor vpn and sharing that with my lappy. It works, provides a little bit of security, but it's slow as crap. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, REGUS.

AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, CLEAN THE SHIT OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM FFS.

Ugh. $12/day to work in a freaking wind tunnel (thanks, a/c; you're loud as fuck and barely work), hear other people's phone conversations through two freaking walls, pee in a bathroom that perpetually smells like diarrhea, and allow anyone and everyone within a 50+ meter radius to listen to everything my computer says.

Oh, they also 'forgot' to furnish my office, like they promised. Three freaking times. At least I have a table and chair. 🙄

Desk? What desk?
Fucking hell.

Guess what my supervisor had lying around the house and gave me? (from an old company project) My desk is gonna shine bright like a diamond. Yes, it's RGB.

Hey devRant. What the fuck is up?

I'm new and just wanted to say hi or whatever. I don't even work in any computer science related job. I'm a fucking welder.

I have aspirations one day to be just like you nerds. I fall asleep at my desk almost every night taking random online programming classes which I lose interest halfway through to some OTHER class and redo the same shit.

Is this what it's like to be smart?

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

So this shit happened today...

We were asked to implement a functionality on the device that allows it to go to standby mode to save battery power. Once the device enters that state, it can only be woken up by actual bus-network activity, and usually that means connecting a shit-ton of wiring harness and network emulation devices... Before implementing and releasing the device software that does this, we told that fucktard customer how difficult it would be for him to connect to the device without such a setup. He seemed to be fine with it and said rather arrogantly that we should implement the requirement as asked...

Well okay you cock-sucking motherfucker, you'll get exactly what you asked for... We implement the functionality and deliver the software...

Now this pile of shit comes back running his mouth on how the device tears down all its interfaces (to reduce power consumption) and he can't connect to the device anymore.... Well what else were you expecting you dickhead.
To make things worse for me apparently he runs to the manager describing his apparent problem. Both of them come to my desk.. With that fucking Bastard hiding his smugly mug behind the manager's back... He thought he was going to have the upper hand... Well guess what fucked piece of shit, I came prepared... I showed the manager how this was a part of the requirements by throwing that JIRA ID in their faces... The manager seems to understand but this relentless fuck wanted me to implement a "workaround" that would allow him to connect to the device easily... The manager almost had me implement that workaround, when I expose a huge security flaw in doing so. Guess what, now the entire team comes to my desk and start supporting my statement... To make it better they also tell how doing so will violate other requirements...

I've never felt so happy in my entire fucking career, when the entire team stood by me and watched that asshole drag his sorry ass back to his place

THERE HAS BEEN A SLIGHTLY BIG SPIDER IN MY ROOM SINCE YESTERDAY AND YESTERDAY IT DISAPPEARED THE LITERAL SECOND I FUCKING SAW IT IT DISAPPEARED. I SHIT YOU NOT IT JUST VANISHED. AND THIS SPIDER IS A BLACK FUCKER AND MY DESK, MONITORS, TV, HEADPHONES ARE ALL BLACK SO IVE BEEN REALLY PARANOID. AND JUST A FEW DUCKING MINUTES AGOI WAS WATCHING A VIDEO AND I FELT SOMETHING IN MY RIGHT HEADPHONE AND SLAM JAMMED MY EAR AND THREW THAT BITCH AS HARD AND AS FAST AS POSSIBLE TO THE POINT I HAD TO SIT THERE AND COLLECT MY THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED AND I DONT EVEN KNOW IF IT WAS EVEN THERE OR IF IT LEFT THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE IS SCREWING WITH ME I AM ONE STEP AWAY FROM JUST BUYING A GUN TO SHOOT THAT LITTLE FUCK

Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.

I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.

This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)

Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”

He runs out.

I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).

Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”

Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.

A while back a co-worker of mine fucked up by leaving some debug code and pushing to production.
He quickly repaired it, redeployed and everything was good again before the customer experienced any issues.

Later that day, management showed up by his desk to ask what happened, how it happened and stating that he was not "angry enough" about his fuck up, long after it has been repaired.

Up to this day i regret not asking in what unit of measurement we could determine if we were angry enough; decibels? gray hairs? grams of shit in my underwear?

Open source for the win!

Working on a new awesome project and found an open source android app which does most of what I need. realized that one of its features is very annoying for me so was sitting behind my desk like fuck me.

........ Suddenly remembered that the app was open source.

Cloned the repo, imported into Android studio, rewrote the part (very tiny part, I'm not a Java dev) that needed rewriting and built the app.

Installed it onto my device through adb and bam, works! (Although not ideally yet but I overlooked other features needing adjustment).

😎

Our working hours are from 9 to 6 which is the standard in Malaysia (I'm not malaysian )

Yesterday I came in around 10AM and my boss took me to his room as soon as I arrived.

Boss: If you were in school and you come late what do you expect to happen ?

Me: get punished, I'll compensate by working an extra hour today.

Boss: well our clients aren't available at your extra hour and I'm struggelling with a big client you're supposed to ship the rest of his site and golive today and he's freaking out

Me: yh well his site is done it just needs final QA before going live.

Boss: oh its done already?, cool cool. Anyway you shouldn't be late you're not Malaysian and being late doesn't run in your genes like them.

*ops manager (Malaysian) walks in*

*boss confused*

*ops manager looks him in the eye*

*boss looks at the ground*

* me giggling while walking to my desk*

The Micromanagement God. The guy would come to the office 64 times a day, go behind my desk, stare at the monitors for a while and ask what am I working on.

He would sometimes ask for explanation of how something works because he never saw it before and then give me advice on how to use that thing he never saw before.

This is what I see as an intern when I go to my manager’s desk to ask for his help

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

I once reviewed a Pull Request made by a fairly junior developer. They had joined recently, and this was one of the first times they had to touch a bigger part of the code.

Due to a mix of inexperience, new (to them) coding standards and lack of git knowledge, they ended up with a mess of a PR, with a few thousand lines changed, and no way to split it off.
I ended up spending the best part of a day reviewing the whole thing and requesting changes.

Even with the long list of improvements, however, I wasn't sure they would get the magnitude of their fuckup.
So I decided to use a real-world, palpable way to show them what they had done: I went and printed the github diff for that PR. It rendered the glorious amount of 73 pages.

I'll never forget their face, and those of their teammates, when I barged into the room with a thick wad of paper and deposited them on their desk.

At least it worked. I never saw another big, ill-thought pull request from them again.

It's strange what you can learn when you have too much deadtime.

Last week I learned balloon twisting through youtube videos. A co-worker and I decorated the desk of a co-worker for her birthday.

I made her this balloon throne (from Game of Thrones). Notice that I was soooooo bored.

She loved it ^_^

I'm fairly certain my boss'.....boss (didn't want to count them.. it's high up the chain, and slightly lateral) thinks I'm incredibly weird. I have too many sports injuries to be fully functional and they all flare up while I'm sitting at my desk. To offset this, I stand up or walk around while on the phone, and occasionally stretch.

These stretches are for hip and it band, usually, which are a bit more involved, so of course he ONLY fucking walks into the damn office while I'm stretching. (Image search for hip stretch).

To top it off, I have an unfortunate colored ointment for the pain in my elbow that i was applying today while stretching, and im scared to know what he was thinking before he realized what was actually going on. Imagine hip stretching (this one with leg on desk) while rubbing milky sort of clear ointment into skin...

Sir, if you're reading this, I promise I'm not actually that weird at work, you just have shitty timing.

Dead 💀 developer.

My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.

In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.

About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”

Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).

So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.

What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).

Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.

Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.

Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!

So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..

Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?

Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.

Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕

Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?

Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".

Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question

Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.

After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically

I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂

About a year ago, while giving interview for a pharmaceutical company. (role of software developer)
Interviewer : So why do you want to join X?
Me (in mind) : (Ok, be calm, I have practiced this and i know what to answer, just follo tbe script)

Me : (Following the script) I would like to join X because I think X could give me exposure to meet people with various skills. (Cant remember what was next) And i also think working in X would make my father proud as he always wanted me to become a Doctor.
After that I just sat there for a few seconds staring at desk contemplating my life failures and I suddenly remember Im in a INTERVIEW.
Me : And thats it. (smiling as if nothing happened)
Worst Interview ever.

Someone called me saying that the system wasnt letting them login.

I walked over to their desk to see that they had the application open with the credentials filled in. I clicked "OK" and what do you know, it logged them in!

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

A Monday morning poem

I enter the bureau, feeling all relaxed and well,
my colleague looks up:
"Abandon all hope, welcome to hell."

This indeed, he doesn't say,
his face only twists a little in dismay:
"I need that schematic, did you finish it yet?
And there also some tests I'd like to get -
how was your week-end by the way?"
I start my computer, don't remember what I say ...

I grab some coffee, half a day is gone,
the PM pressures: "I want that asap done!"
I am cluttered in tasks and bullshit, too:
"Go fuck you right now - yes, I meant you!"

I don't say what I like to, I mentally punch a wall,
I crank some more code out and git-commit it all.
Some devRant on the lunch-break, some shallow talk,
I leave the building and take a short walk.

My mind rotates, I cannot enjoy the scenery now,
I return to my desk, and figure out what to handle and how.
But my plans are crashed by a colleague dashing in:
"I need you to do a test setup! I need to begin -"

I do the setup, I do some other stuff,
At the end of the day I feel totally rough,
Work is piling up even more -
"Tomorrow", I think and close the door.

At home, I just flop on on my bed -
I should be learning instead ... -
with some pizza and chill.
I think about sleeping, I hope that I will.

...

It is now Friday,
my brain is fried, too.
I am finished with this poem - how about you? :)

I think having the wrong job can really bring down the quality of life.

My friend has to drive two hours each way to get to and from work. That's four hours wasted commuting.. and his job is service desk agent.
What are the consequences, you ask? He never has a spare second to talk to me, he's quickly developing gray hairs and he has no time awareness.

Having the wrong job is unhealthy and results in a cascade of bad side effects.. When most of your day involves work-related things, that's just wrong. There is no Yin-Yang there. I know because my work life is somewhat balanced.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

Guy I just met: so what do you do?

Me: I'm a developer

Guy: no way! I work for a software company so... (goes on to talk for 10 minutes trying to show off his knowledge of software)

Me: so what do you do there?

Guy: sales

Me: oh...

Just because you work for a software company does not mean you know shit about software. Don't try to build some erroneous common ground with me because you walked by a developer's desk one time, looked at his or her screen, and magically thought you could understand code.

That moment when you walk into the office on your first day, while setting up your desk they ask you which mouse you would like to use, and you respond "oh no thank you I prefer my trackpad" and the whole office stops what their doing and gives you that look...

I die, go to hell and my punishment is to write software for hell network that is having power problems due to light source disruptions and is running on Windows 95 on FAT32 without any service pack.

Network speed is trough 300bps dial up modem. Protocol is over IPX/SPX.

My task is to write interactive websites that are replacement of modern websites but in VBScript, ActiveX, IE 4.0.

I have 10 managers that tell me what to do and scream when I miss deadline that is set everyday without my knowledge at random times.

They send me an email and 5 minutes later they arrive at my desk to ask me about it.

I must work 16 hours a day before I can leave the place and if I won’t show up police beats me and escorts me to the office.
If I’m late a second I don’t get payment.
I can’t afford to rent a place so I sleep in the sleeping bag.

It doesn’t matter much cause as soon as I fall asleep phone rings until I wake up and my manager screams about the problems he have for about an hour.

I once worked Tech Support for a point of sale software package. There was really no internal help desk, so we got all of those questions as well.

One day our front receptionist that her computer is being really weird and she can't type - it keeps inserting 3s in the middle of what she is typing.

I take the short walk down the hall to her desk and see that, indeed, a never ending string of 3s is being input to her screen.

"I can't figure out what's wrong." she says.

Then I reach over and remove the edge of an open binder whose edge was resting on the 3 key and enter key on the num pad.

"That should fix it."

Walked back to my desk.

Pm: "so how long should this take?"

Me: "well, I see at LEAST 8 hours of work here for me, some of which can't be done without graphics, but let's assume graphics are done by designers by the time I get to hour 6 and I just have to plug the images in without much editing or tweaking."

Pm: "So you'll have this by tomorrow?"

Me: "Do you think I just sit on my hands all day waiting for one of you trolls to give me something to do? I said AT LEAST 8 FULL HOURS OF MY TIME, that would be assuming I could get 8 consecutive hours to work on this, and let's face it that's not gonna happen."

Pm: "So Friday...?"

Me: "Tell the client that so long as there aren't any unforseen issues it could be done as early as Thursday. I'll put it on my schedule, but it is not a priority until at least Monday. There's only one of me and 5 other active projects on my desk."

Pm: "I'm gonna tell them Wednesday morning we'll show it to them for approval."

What in the hell is wrong with people?

So this happen on my previous workplace. I worked there for 4 years and quitting was the best decision I made while was there.

One manager/owner there was the most toxic, piece of shit, disrespectful cunt I have ever worked with. The type of guy that comes in and every person's productivity goes down in a heartbeat.

As he was a owner he usually came in later. This one morning it was 11-ish and a meeting with a client was happening and it was an open space.

He comes in.
He puts his laptop down.
He sits.
He screams of the top of his lungs:
- WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
- ANTS ALL OVER MY DESK!!!
- I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS.

He leaves for about 30 min.
He came back with a can of spray, and literally intoxicated the office and everybody had to stop working.

And there you go one of my last place's beautiful stories.

So I get to work this morning and see this interesting little contraption on my work colleague's desk.

Safety first: make sure there's a warning sign... Lol.

No idea what he's doing with it though, guess I'll find out later.

I learned a valuable lesson today about the life of a manager. I’m not a manager, but I am a senior level dev.

Today I was told there wasn’t room on the new team for 1 person, and I had pick that last team member. I had to choose between a friend who really isn’t cut out to be a dev and a non friend who is a better dev.

I talked through my reasoning and ultimately chose to put the friends job in jeopardy. They told me that I had solid leadership traits for being able to separate my emotions from my decision making. But I felt like a piece of shit.

I cried back at my desk. The friend doesn’t know yet and I can’t tell them. Is this what execs feel when they have to let people go?

Every year, my company organizes an internal seminar week for its engineers and developers. I helped plan it this year and, since I also ran a few sessions, was absolutely exhausted by the end of the week.

On Friday of that conference week (after I'd spent four hours in our engineering building), I come back to my desk to discover that a coworker managed to, single handedly, get our boss to agree to shortening our release cycle to one that, without dramatic infrastructure changes, would require about 8x the developer overhead than today's. ...The test cycle I am supposed to pick up in a month.

When asked about it, he said he was so full of energy, why wait for automaton? What better way to inspire us to improve than to switch right now? The worst that can happen is just a few bugs.

I love my job, but I can't stand this guy. 😒

Beware, this is gonna be a long one.

Today, in university, our professor wanted us to do an algorithm where a number was given in input, and we had to see if that number was, as she put it, "triangular".
For example:
3 is triangular because it's 1+2.
6 is triangular because it's 1+2+3.
10 is triangular because it's 1+2+3+4.
And so on.

While she was explaining this, I was programming it on my phone (because I didn't bring a PC there).
In about 10 minutes I completed it.

This student who was beside me, which I didn't know until today (I'm still in my first year here), saw me programming it, and when I finished it, he looked at it and said: "It takes too much time, like this."
So he spent another like 5-10 minutes """fixing""" it, and then showed it to me: "Here, now it's better."
Do you want to know what he did?
The only thing he did was putting a for cycle instead of my while cycle.
And he didn't even do it properly!
He put an else statement inside the brackets of an if, and some variables weren't correct.
You call that making a program more efficient? Deficient is more like it.

Also, like 5-10 minutes after I did it on my phone, on my own, I looked at the prof's desk: a guy (who apparently is "the best") wrote his algorithm on the blackboard, and the whole fucking class applauded.

Later, I saw on our Whatsapp group that someone sent a photo of him writing on the blackboard, with the caption "The student surpasses the teacher." Others agreed.
I replied with: "For the record, I did this algorithm in 10 minutes."
An asshole replied: "You'll never be superior to the master"

Fuck off. -.-"
...I'll show them.

I love my girlfriend, but sometimes she doesn't get dev-work.
Last night, we had a fight over me sticking post-its to the wall in our home office. I find them helpful for keeping an overview of what I'm working on. She finds them ugly and decided to tear them all down without conferring with me. I got pissed. I almost always give in to her quirks and wants in every other aspect of how we live, so I feel like my desk space should at least be under my control. In my anger, I ordered her out of the room. She then proceeded to be sulking/angry with me up till and including this morning "because I overreacted".

Was I wrong? What should I have done differently?

Admin comes to my desk and says:
"Hey the CEO wants to know why is the third party application having issues with our system? He wants you to keep me posted on the matter and let us know when will you fix it."
Me:
"Well I'm working on it, we're having a discussion on Slack about it and I'm quite busy right now"
Admin: "Yeah OK but when will you fix it? The CEO wants to know why didn't you reply yesterday"
Me: "Because I was on leave? You would have known if you saw my calendar"
Admin: "oh well, can you keep me updated with how things go?"
Me: "You can join the Slack channel if you want..."

What the f*CK is wrong with people? Do they even know what vacation time means? Why would the CEO ask the admin to talk to me when I'm sitting two rows from him?

Fidget spinners are stupid.

But what do you have on your desk instead?

The challenge of a Rubik's Cube? A classic Newtons Cradle? A stack of empty pizza boxes? Magnets, because how do they work? The one and only devRant stress ball?

I'm looking for something to mess with when I'm staring in disbelief at horrible PRs.

Preferably something semi-creative, tactile and stress-relieving. The three-dimensional material equivalent of the doodle.

Something which is less annoying for coworkers than the clicky switches in my keyboard. And a bit more appropriate than my genitals.

Today, at a dinner party, someone acted surprised when they discovered that I was an Integrations Engineer because (quote) "You look too normal for a Dev".

What the hell? Why do people always assume that who works at IT must live their whole life at a desk, wear glasses and have 0 social skills?

My work laptop (windows) updated yesterday. Today my monitors keep flickering, hanging, and going black for a few seconds then come back with an error that my display drivers crashed. Since I have basically zero access to anything admin on this machine, I put in a help desk ticket with all the details, the error message, even screen shots which took forever to get because of all the crashes.

They finally respond after about an hour, and tell me that my computer does not support 3 screens so I will have to use 2, and that is what is causing the crash. Well I have been using 3 screens with this computer since I started there in 2014, and it has worked perfectly until the update, so I asked if they could revert the update.

He told me that they could not revert it, and not only that, but I couldn't have been using 3 monitors before because the computer doesn't support it and never has. REALLY??? I just freaking told you I have been doing that for over 3 years so obviously it does support it you deaf, stupid retard. Try using your brain for 2 seconds and work on a solution instead of calling me a liar and dismissing my issue without thought.

After going back and forth for about 5 minutes I gave up and hung up. Finally I fixed it by switching out my docking station with another one I found laying around. Not sure why that worked, but I'm back to working on all 3 monitors. I called the guy back to tell him it's working and sent a picture of my setup, his response: "Well I don't know why that works because your laptop is too old to support that."

Useless...

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.

Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.

I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.

I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.

I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.

I don't know what to do...

Shit morning, I work in tech, so I guess it is related haha.

First, I wake up and it is cold. Like -12 degrees Fahrenheit. With wind-chill, feels like -29 according to Google. Then, while getting ready for work, my only belt breaks. Not a little, but literally splits in half! Fucking sucks, as my pants keep partially falling down and my shirt keeps untucking.

I go out in this cold that could kill a polar bear, go to start my car. Can you fucking guess? Dead fucking battery. Fuck! Now I am super late to work.

Make it to work, and guess what? My manager just promised 100% completion by Friday, and we are weeks behind! Fucking sucks... I think my coworker snapped, as he keeps hyperventilating at his desk for no reason. Oh and our best coder just quit...

Waiting to either wreck my car or find out my dog is dead when I get home...

It's long, but trust me you won't get bored. So today, I went to work, even on a Sunday. My supervisor had given the task to finish off my custom module by this week.
There were only the 2 of us in the office. Everyone else enjoyed the holiday.
I got stuck somewhere in the code and approached his desk. We could never see what he was doing on his computer.
Suddenly, I could find him uneasy as I approached and he started jolting St those "ctrl+w" and "alt+f4s" and clutched his mouse to minimize. I said, "Uh sorry, sir but this taxonomy doesn't work in this code, help me out?"
He said, "Oh sure, sit. And he opened chrome trying to act cool. Guess what? Chrome played it like a boss, "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly. Restore the following pages.
[] Shocking! 99 year old couple have s3x
[] xxx tiny teen shows her.... (i don't remember exactly.)"
The quickest possible glance I ever had. And the most sweaty face I ever saw of his.
He granted me a leave today and extended my deadline for the next week as well. I thought I was screwed :P

Sister: *walks up to me at my desk* Hey, I was wondering if you can undo what you did to the internet and put it back and make it work better in my room and also make it faster
Me: Sure

Yeah, I’ll get right on it and go hit the fucking magic button in the router settings called “enable extended range and make it go faster”.

#rant

Instead of receiving a motivation in 2018, my boss decided to go anti mainstream and started with demotivation speech.

He started with how good we were last year even when he wasn't around. Well done team! But after that, it went downhill.

We were asked to work even harder, we got new policy (no unpaid leave, no paid overtime, minimum 40 hours working, etc) which some of them make sense and some don't, a specifically set break time (apparently to shut down smokers for smoking at random times), and warning for not being punctual.

And pay rise only after end of financial year.

To make it worse, we are not allowed to take naps or watch youtube on our desk on our breaks.

I seriously wonder what happened during his Christmas NY break. I'm not an entrepreneur so I have no idea if that is a right way to run a company or if Australia government just created new law. But surely I know this is when I say "New year, new company"

Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.

I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"

Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.

No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.

The boss is asking you what is the progress of task1.
You provide the status.
You have 4 hours meeting where he also attends.
The meeting ends.
Boss comes to your desk and asks what is the progress on task1 -_-*¥¥¥¥¥
Fml. I was also on the same meeting OK?!

Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.

What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.

5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.

And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒

Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.

Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?

Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑

For some reason the office I work for is paying for a designer to become a front end developer and she gets to take the classes one work time. Any time I want to further my career or pay I have to pay out of pocket and it can't interfere with work. Additionally I have to deal with her asking me every other day why I use Sublime over something else.

Basically I use Sublime because I spent too much time researching new things to try and learn yet another editor. If you wanna use brackets, cool, if you wanna use atom, cool, if you wanna use notepad, cool. I don't give a flying fuck what editor you use, you're writing CSS, I'm writing PHP, if you can count to 4 spaces, and not look at my code, I'm not going to scream at you.

She comes in each day and sits at her desk watching video after video on beginner HTML and CSS asking me mundane questions breaking my concentration at least once an hour.

I know we all started somewhere but Google was my best friend and should be yours as well.

Just got chewed out because someone couldn't see the latest interface changes on the site...

*Walked over to their desk*

Me: "Did you clear your browser's cache?"

Them: "Oh, what does my online banking have to do with the updates?"

Me: *sigh* 😬😬

*while drinking tea at cafe area*
me*thinking* : may be this is going to solve that error
yes
yess
yesssss

I got solution

but wait let's first drink this tea then I will try this solution

*came back on desk*

me*thinking* : -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

what was solution ? wtf?

Frack..people suck.

In sprint planning meeting, prioritizing the tasks...

ScrumMaster: "Next item, create a spreadsheet that identifies the systems used by order processing so the PO can identify errors by system."
Me: "That's already done."
ScrumMaster: "Did you work ahead of the sprint again?"
- Really trying not to throw something heavy at his head.
Me: "No, you did back in January."
- SM stutters..um..uhhs...
ScrumMaster: "No, I never did that...see."
- SM navigates to the sharepoint directory
Me: "Yep, there it is."
ScrumMaster: "I didn't create it, you must have."
Me: "Created by...you."
ScrumMaster: "Uh...um....I might have added it to sharepoint, but doesn't mean I created it. Anyway, lets take a look..."
- opens the spreadsheet
ScrumMaster: "What is this? Did you simply export the sharepoint list to excel?"
- Getting harder and harder to resist the urge to throw something heavy at his head.
Me: "I don't know what that is, you created it. You commented on the Trello card that this task item was done."
ScrumMaster: "No, I've never seen this or made any comment on the Trello board...lets look ..."
- FRACK!!! TRELLO IS DOWN!!!
ScrumMaster: "When Trello comes back up I'll assign the card to you. Lets stay on task with the cards from now on. Next item ... "

Trello up, 3 hours later, back at my desk, there is his fracking comment from January about uploading the spreadsheet to sharepoint. Frack frack frack people suck

Two days ago...

I was happy, building out the network in a new lokation.

Suddenly my phone just doesn't want to stop ringing, from all the other lokation calling in that they can't connect to HQ.
Then HQ calls, we don't have internet, nothing works. The one guy on location who has access to the server room enters and finds all the servers offline and a couple of breakers blown.
Turn on breakers, servers won't boot properly.
Me in a taxi and hurry to HQ, to help boot the servers.

Afterwards I find out that one of the bosses spilled a cup of coffee on his desk, shorting the circuit.
Apparently he is on the same breaker group as the servers!?! What the actual fuck!

At least now the other bosses are like; yeah, we need to do something about that

Yesterday, my new (Irish) co-worker comes to my desk and asks me a question about an issue in his code.
His commenting all done in Irish.
Him: "If you want me I can translate the comments for you?"
Me: "Ní gá, is féidir liom é a léamh go foirfe." ("No need to, I can read it perfectly fine")
co-worker looking at me like: "wtf just happened?"

After a while, I spotted the issue (I noticed the expected output from one of the functions not being of the correct format - an integer instead of an array).
So I fixed it.

Next day (this morning) I came back at work, looked into my food drawer to see what I would eat for breakfast (yes, I have a drawer specifically for food, and yes, I eat breakfast at work), found a small box containing an Ulster Fry :D

Best breakfast at work in a long time :D

Rant #1:
Why everyone and their toy cars gotta be jumping on the bed when I’m trying to sleep?

Rant #2:
For months now, I get bleary eyed and tired every time I look at work. Focusing and being productive is almost impossible. I’m cheery and alert, then sit down, open my editor, and find I can’t focus. Moments later I feel like I need a nap.

Rant #3:
I get interrupted an average of every 3-5 minutes, basically every day, all day long. The more this happens, the more tired and angry I become. I often have to resort to yelling, throwing toys that appear on my desk/keyboard, and blasting loud music I don’t want to hear through noise canceling headphones.

—————

Is it any wonder I can’t focus or think or do anything but feel like I’m falling asleep? Is it any wonder I’m perpetually angry and frustrated?

I can sort of fix the interruptions by locking myself away in my monster’s room. But I’m still so tired and bleary and can’t focus. I don’t know what to do, or even what I can do. Vacation didn’t help. Another would doubtlessly be just as effective, and certainly wouldn’t improve my boss’s view of my performance.

Ugh.

Best swag ever: 3d printed dev rant avatar? I would love to have my mini-self on my desk! Or for playing board games! For rubberducking! In the fishtank! Oh man, inifinite posibilities ... *_* what would you guys do with one????

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

Story when I worked as a 1st line technician:

Customer: "Yes hello, I'm trying to install Windows as instructed, but the installer is not starting"

Me: "Ok, have you tried pressing [button] at the bootscreen?"

C: "Yes, over and over, still nothing happens"

This was actually one of my first calls, so my co-worker stepped in to help while I listened.

Co-worker: "okay, so when you rebooted the computer, press [button] and tell me what happens"

C: "....okay, I think it's starting"

Co-w: "Great! I'll just wait until it's running"

A minute goes by, installer seems to be running, but then we hear a loud BEEP. It's so loud another coworker hears it from his desk, through our headsets. A moment goes by, and it BEEPS again. Then the sound begins again, but doesn't stop. It's like an air horn at full blow. We ask the customer what he's doing, but he cannot hear us over the constant beep. We're brainstorming what it could be, when he finally says something:

"CAN.. LET.. OF.."

Co-w: "WHAT???"

"CAN I LET GO OF THE BUTTON??"

-----
I think we laughed the whole day

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.

The thing with meetings is that most don't know what a (formal) meeting is.

A meeting has a specific time frame, a defined agenda with specific topics and a moderator or an agreement on a common netiquette.

That's a meeting.

A meeting is not a place to put your willy on the desk and proof to everyone that your cock is thx to operation a long schlong who won't get hard, nor that you don't know how to shave, even less to measure the size of your genitals.

It's neither the time to eat and slurp like a fucking hobgoblin, nor to drink like an alcoholic who hasn't had a drop of alcohol in the last hour.

Parents, I don't care what your satanic offspring achieved today, nor how cute they are, even less what booboo they have.

Crybabies, keep your whining for after meeting time, maybe even stop crying and just have a nice talk outside of allocated time frames to discuss whom hurt whom the most and who has the most sand in his clit.

Get to the fucking point.

If I wanted to read a trilogy to understand what you contribute, I'd have written it on the agenda.

If it's not on the agenda, cram it in your butt cheeks for the next time you need to shit.

If you can't converse with people at all, the meeting is allocated at least 24 hours before it happens.

Prepare yourself for goddamn sake.

You could even read out a predefined text if you want, noone cares.

The company that I currently work for has a strict clean-desk policy. So strict, there's even have a little booklet that they have about 1000 copies of lying around the office everywhere. In the booklet is a playful description (with cartoons!) of what can go wrong when sensitive information is lying around, or shared with outsiders through careless talk, etcetera. Employees are encouraged to take a copy of the booklet home.

Also in the booklet is a description of the importance of having a good password. It mentions the required minimum (x) and maximum (x+1) length of passwords, mandatory character classes, and how often the passwords have to be changed.

when I ended up catching 400 pokemons from 10 countries while sitting at my desk, makes you wonder what algorithm allowed that

Sprint planning meeting, two hours trying to plan what to do with a new feature we wanted to add to one of our systems.

The boss gets out of the meeting room to get a phone number to make a call (we needed to ask something to one of our clients).

5 minutes later, the boss comes back and saw that the lead dev was going to his own desk.

Boss: Where do you think you’re going?
Lead dev: I’m bored :v

😂😂😂😂😂

I may cool off a little bit after this rant:

One of my junior coworkers weirdly peeks into my screen while I code or do any stuffs - this is what I hate the most.

Also whenever we discuss something by my desk, he looks for the opportunity to touch my Mac every goddamn time. Even after I told that shitwit several times about it.

Once, I went to have a conversation with a senior engineer just a few desks away only to come by and see that fuckface peeking into my project.

I had to tell him off with my absolute verbal retaliation.

After investigation, I'm just refreshing my os and hoping I can reconfigure work applications. Feel bad, but help desk friends are getting me the software to install and are helping me out on a day off.

Wasn't the application like I thought. It was the useless update that won't install and therefore can't be rolled back but is still getting in the way of my work, therefore they can all daisy chain their dicks together in the sane manner little kids make daisy crowns, and then have a steamroller head towards them with faulty brakes (steamroller operator is innocent in this scenario, he jumps out safely).

I'm planning on calling Microsoft in the morning to tell them what I think of them at the moment. But I'm too angry to form words that don't sound petty and childish. I'm open to suggestions.

Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

I honestly don’t know how my coworker has been a software engineer for 10+ years, doesn’t know and or understand a single Linux command, only works from windows... also doesn’t understand the concept of proper version control ... thinks zip folders is completely sufficient... AND doesn’t understand why someone would need to refactor something... says it works... I’m like you have a 2000 line function... yes it works, but it’s not testable nor reusable... he says he’s tested it (at his desk) ... and so what if it’s not reuseable... he’ll copy and paste and rewrite something for another project. “That’s what we are paid todo” .... HORSESHIT!!!

I don’t understand how the system hasn’t weeded people out like this.... and he blindly doesn’t want to take criticism, or learn.. saying his Years of experience proves he knows what he’s doing... bullshit

I’m just happy management is on my side.

Two weeks into our fresh new Android app my colleague decided to define 1dp dimension unit in dimens.xml:
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">1dp</dimen>

During my code review I asked him if there was no better name for it as it's simply overstating the obvious and does not scale well for other resolutions. He didn't understand what I meant so I said would you then define this for xxdpi
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">4dp</dimen> just because you need more padding on higher density screens?

Then he goes on for 10 minutes how he thought about other names (doesn't say which ones) and still decided to stick with this one.

I politely heard him out and made it abundantly clear that I disagree with that naming (not the value). And I also backed up my point by saying that what he did is exactly the same as defining a color in colors.xml like this:
<color name="color_FFFFFF">#FFFFFF</color>

Then he frowned and said (paraphrasing): Noooooooo, that is so wrong. I would never do that. It's not the same as what I have done.
Then he again started defending his point which probably would have gone for good 10 minutes except I literally bit my tongue and walked away from my desk hoping he wouldn't follow as I was dangerously close to punching him!

Fucking enganeers!!!

what do you think of my setup?

/* picture of desk with 200 monitors, 7 keyboards, a flying mouse, a rasbperry pi with a human head, and a desk lamp */

Years ago, I joined a company making games for handheld consoles.

Because a game's audio needs to be tested, too, I connected earphones to the console so that:
0. I wouldn't bother others w/ the sounds coming out of the console.
/* !Everyone wants to hear that crap. */
1. I could hear the sounds better.

PM: * Enters the room. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * Walks up to me from the side, starts talking. *
Me: * Focused on testing the game. *
PM: * After approx. 30 seconds of complete lack of response from me, kind of irritated, knocks on my desk to get my attention. *
Me: * Take out the earphones. *
Oh, hi, how can I help you?
PM: Haven't you heard a word I said?
Me: Well, no. I am testing the game, including the audio.
PM: You need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Me: Testing audio is one of my responsibilities. I am using earphones because of the reasons [0-1].
PM: Even still, you just need to pay attention to what's going on around you.
PM: * Finally explains the reason for him bothering me, then goes back to his lair. *

Moral of the story: Fuck being good at what you do && knowing your responsibilities.
When PM wants something from you, you better give him the attention he wants.

/* The expectation being I grow an extra pair of eyes && ears, so that I see the guy coming && am prepared to listen to him whenever he wants something _while_ doing the best job I possibly can. */

What I don't understand is why it is so hard for some seniors to just let me jot my notes down, I get it you're busy but if you just let me write down certain key words, I will never ask you this question again, I am nervous cause I had to bug you for help so my mind is not taking anything in, its freaking out cause you're making it so clear I am a bother! So I'm gonna go back to my desk without notes and no idea of what you just tried to tell me.... It was never a problem for my first senior, and he even became my mentor! In a question of 6 months he could go on holiday cause I could handle all his responsibilities until he came back with my trusty note book in hand... So why are you telling me to stop making notes!! It works for me so leave me be!! - sits at desk, pondering why I exist - 😖

There is a mark on the whiteboard hanging behind my desk that says:

"Days without people walking on <me> doing something weird"

Thus far. The head of the department has walked on me making fun of Indians(I make fun of everyone, my indian brothas from another mothas don't be upset, I particularly make fun of Mexicans), going on a monologue about how the white ranger rules supreme. Why Mario could totally destroy Mickey Mouse in a fight, why my manager is secretly in love with me(with her listening intently into my reasons) and singing the bad touch going "mimi"...dude just make mimi sound like words and you'll get what I mean.

Sometimes the dude just pauses by my desk to check if I am saying anything stoopid.

Work can be really funny sometimes.

End User: The program isn't working
Me: What were you trying to do?
End User: blah blah blah
Me: Are you using IE?
End User: Yes, I always use IE everything should work with it.
Me: Didn't you see the email to the listserv explicitly saying not to use IE?
End User: I did, but I only like to use IE.
Me: (bangs head against desk & loses all hope)

food is the favorite thing on my desk. doesn't matter what food, just food. :D

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

All I want is a another DVI cable so I can connect my secondary monitor digitally instead of by VGA. From their reaction, you could think I had instead asked for a gold-plated desk. Was it really nescessary to have three guys check (non-technical people, too) if *they* could see a difference between my monitors? My primary one is DVI, and *I* can see that the monitor connected by VGA is blurrier. Who connects a flat panel monitor by VGA anyway? Just the idea of an unnescessary pair of analogue-to-digital/digital-to-analogue conveters in the middle of what should be a straight digital connection should be an affront to any sensible technical person. So of course, no extra DVI cable for me.

Call me stupid, but I think it has probably cost the company more money from lost productivity having three people look at my monitors instead of just buying me another DVI cable like I asked for nicely.

You know what devRant is missing... Flags! Something like a national flag on the background, sticker on the notebook or some item on the desk. Just a thought

It's a little dark but I got my MacBook from a failed startup and they paid me with the MacBook. Got the screen pretty cheap on letgo, it's nothing fancy or amazing but it does what I need it to do. I got the blue yeti used off eBay for a great deal and this whole setup is on my loft bed's desk since my room is small.

What does your desk look like? Here is mine....

*2 days ago in a meeting*
Boss: "We need you to develop this, this .... *adds 10 tasks in Trello*

*1 day ago. less than 24 hours*
Boss: "So , what's new regarding the tasks?"
ME (angry): "You just gave me all those tasks less than 24 hours ago. What kind of news do you expect?"

*Boss leaving to his desk, laughing from embarrassment.*

Conversation with coworker at a staff function...

girl: ...we can't wait to see what you can do!
Me: Great! I can't wait to get stuck in, but you know, those exports you wanted from it, that doesn't have to wait. If you need that straight away, come to my desk and I'll make some queries for you and pull out the data you want...

Girl: o_0
Girl: ... Omg, you can do that?! You're awesome!!

Me later: o_0 - the Dev before me could never at least do that?!

Time to make a deal with the devil

@theabbie since you love downloading the entire devRant db and writing little gimmicks, I have an idea for you.

Avatars are envcoded as URLs. Each part of an avatar is separated by an underscore. Shirt, pants, desk, whatever.

Make a bot or script or website or what-fucking-ever to query users with the same avatar as you. This would be:

- Same EXACT avatar (desk, pets, etc)
- Same body parts as you (face, skin color, hair, etc)
- Same body parts and clothing (everything that shows in the mini avatar next to comments, plus pants and shoes, I guess)

The doppelganger finder. Honestly I think it would be neat.

Would be even cooler if you could filter by active users (last post/comment within past 3 months)

What my work desk looks like!

Me: Im testing a new feature that is not on production yet for 30m and can not make it work. (I asked the developer for any idea why is not working)
Dev: i just tested, works fine.
Me: i just tested again with no luck. I’m i missing anything?
Dev: (Developer comes to my desk). Lets see what you doing wrong here. (After 5seconds). You're not on UAT. You have been redirected to the production and you've been testing there all this time.
Me: 😩

Reasons why I hate the hospital I work for...

1. NO fucking budget, for fuck sakes our telecom system is still running Merlin Magix. (I’ve been working on getting the trunk and everything to at least push FreePBX out... Configuration configuration.) but, that requires a decent server to host said system... But guess what? We’ve still got a few servers online that are running server 2012 r2. NO FUCKING BUDGET.

2. Training. They don’t have the budget to send me to training, but the doctors here are rolling in Mercedes... Must be fucking nice.

3. I have 5 f-I-v-e job descriptions. I’m a bio medical technician, network admin, system admin, programmer, and help desk... I fucked up allowing them to know I program.

4. On call 365 days a year. That’s nice and all, but when I’ve got shit to do and the nearest Walmart is an hour away I don’t want a call from Louis “oh the printer has a jam” FUCK OFF LOUIS! Get the paper out, we’ve been over this, I believe in you!

5. Some of the FUCKING (l)users.... You wouldn’t imagine some of the calls I receive, some of my favorite being late late “Hey *anonyops* I know it’s late but we’re needing a chair moved from one room to the other.” FUCK YOU YOU CHEEKY FUCKING CUNT.

The only reason I’m still here is my direct supervisor and a hand full of people that I’ve grown to love. Also, because any computer related job here is either outsourced or filled by a YouTubing god. - reason 1 why I started my own business. Supply and demand.

Rural Kansas Hospitals = shit, inb4 thanks —insert president to blame—

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

Now I can afford myself a duck on my desk :-). I love devRant it's so addictive. I have the app as well. This thing is like WhatsApp for developers on steroids. Forgive my ignorance what are those pluses called anyway?

So this just happened. Some background before I begin: We're understaffed, my desk is in the back of the building, and there's no one really at the front to greet people. No security either...

Guy walks in wearing a flannel jacket (no shirt under it), pajama pants, and sandals. He looks like hell. Explains he was just released from a hospital and his apartment is locked. I let him use my phone to call his sister.

When I talk to his sister, she barely wants to speak with him. Tells me his apartment is locked for a reason and he's not allowed back. I'm just like: "So... what would you have us do for him?" At this point if his sister won't help, I was going to ask him to leave. Oh, and that hospital was a drug rehab.

So it ends with him waiting for a ride, but he ends up napping on the couch in the front of our office. CEO/Owner and his business partner walk right past and say nothing. They go into a meeting. I'm trying to figure out if I ask him to leave, wait outside for his ride... I'm a developer, this isn't my job.

A good 45-60 minutes later, after the guy walked outside and then came back in and laid back down on the couch, he leaves with his ride. Shortly after the owner walks out of his meeting, so I ask him what to do in this situation - more hoping he'd realize the need for more security.

If this story isn't crazy enough, the business partner pipes up - absolutely serious - and says he didn't say anything because he thought the guy was a developer.

So I've learned that we've got extremely low hygiene standards for developers here, with a relaxed dress code and are allowed nap times on the front couch.

Thankfully our CYBER security is better than our PHYSICAL security. :|

I just got a phone call from "Microsoft" because there are Trojans on my pc. The broken English (and the content of the call) told me that it was scam, but I wanted to have my fun, so I continued the call.

After I told them that I am on my Computer, I was forwarded to an "expert", and now the funny part starts 😁

Scammer: you have your keyboard in front of you??
Me: yes
S: you see the strg, control ctrl button on the bottom left
M: yes *rly?*
S: what button. Is next to it?
M: fn
S: ...
M: ... *XD*
S: and next to it?
M: that's the windows button
S: ok, press that button along with 'r'
M: ok
S: what do you see?
M: *telling him what I see on my GERMAN pc*
S: ok, type 'eventvwr' *spelling it like hell*
I did so. Just while this spelling I could have hit my head on the desk... It was hilarious

He navigates me to the error and warnings and tells me that those are Trojans 😂 and that this is the reason some programs (especially my antivirus software) aren't running properly.

Well I told him that those aren't Trojans and that all my programs are running properly. I don't know if that was the reason, he stopped the call, but I wasn't able to connect to their 'headserver'.

In the end I am sad that I wasn't able to f*ck him up more. Maybe I would have been able to get some more information about their company to kick their *****.

Next time I will be (more) prepared

Sorta dev related.
I work at a service desk for an automotive supplier.
We've once hab out entire mobile phone system crash and for whatever reason, it won't let the phones connect, if there are more than 50 phones trying to connect at the same time. Kind of a problem if there are 400+ phones trying to connect.
My colleagues showed me what to do in order to get one phone to connect to our system.
It was basically: enter some invalid data on out webinterface, save, enter the correct data again and safe again.

It was too stupid for me. So i hacked an AutoIt script together in about 15 minutes, and let it run for the next half an hour. Showed it to my colleagues, they were excited and I went and got a coffee.

Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.

He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.

Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.

Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.

Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.

Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.

Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.

Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"

Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*

Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

Realized there was a bug in my npm package that made it hard to update the state of the input field conditionally (rather than explicitly through user action) and fixed it, wrote tests to ensure it was working the way I thought it was, updated the dist, updated the package version, merged, cut a GitHub release...

Then uninstalled and reinstalled it in the project I’m using it in and it didn’t work. What the eff, I think. Take a couple hours furiously trying to figure out why the hell the behavior doesn’t seem to match the behavior of the new version.

Then it dawns on me. I check the package.json.

“react-autosuggestions”: “^2.1.0”

.... I forgot to do the “npm publish” step.

*head desk*

Really?

Far far away in a small startup, one developer was brave enough to try to fix the beautiful iOS application (hmm, nothing fancy just a broken, patched and served behind a wrapper).
To do so our hero needs, of course, a testing iOS device.
So the guy went searching for the testing device and asked around, then he returned to his desk shocked when I asked him what happened the guy told me literally:
- "Can you believe it? The boss gave the testing device to his fiancée"

and now guys you know why bugs in startup application take a while to fix :/

My client is offering me onsite project with 6 months of employmentship/contract/internship in Germany(munich)🍻
He is going to provide me flat, desk, macbook and transportation but final amount is not decided yet.
What all things I should consider while negotiating.
I'm so excited for this offer but no idea what should be expected salary and compensation over there.🤔
Ps: I have experience of 2 years in JavaScript development and I worked with him from almost beginning of my career.

Also shall I start learning germany or dutch?🤔

I walked into the office.
Following the usual morning words spit out, more undead then awake.
"Good morning, jada, jada."
I'm placing my backpack on my desk.
Now opening the case with the notebook.
I grab the notebook as usual.
*crack*
Shit.
Now I'm holding the battery pack in hands. My notebook still chills in my backpack.

FUCKING FUCK SHIT WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? CURSES ON THE MANUFACTURER OF THAT PIECE O' SHIT!

Years ago we hired a new employee in our department, her first week was kind of slow, she had training materials to get through but otherwise didn't have much newby work for her. I noticed she was missing one day, she wasn't at her desk or in the area training, I found her hiding behind a door playing a video game and texting on her phone. She didn't last long there. She should have asked for something to do, or asked what she could be doing, instead of sneaking off and playing on her phone.

Hello my Friends.

TL;DR i meditate as I draw, here’s the result. What about you?!

Does any of you exercise on any kind of meditation? Not the popular meditation forms, more alternative meditation? I. E. walking meditation, dancing meditation, reading medidation, etc. ? Remember, it’s all about being here and now and letting go of any pre-programmed thoughts, right?

I myself, have a ritual which is performes once-twice a year. I call it drawing meditation. When daylight ends, and the moon rises, I sit at my desk in a dark room with one light, which is hanging aboce the white sheet of paper. I take black pencil, turn on some music mildly and turn off my thought receiving part of the brain. I hear every thought which is passing by, but I have no attachment to it. My hands are drawing, without my interception. It feels amazing, and I believe this method helps me to clean up some space in subconscious file system.

This activity of mine, takes strangly short/long time. Once I’ve sat for about 16hours, once 6hours.

Furthermore, I’m always amazed by the abstract art pieces which are the end result. I’m attaching the image of the last drawing made in this way to the post.

Can I hear what you see in it?

Its mine office setup, just a laptop and two pictures in which one is of UFO.. Well UFO means U Fuck Off..
Interesting part is..
Everyone comes at my desk and says "nice UFO".. They really don't know what does it means.. 😁

Yesterday some students came for work experience and I was nominated to be the tour / questions and answers guy. So I showed him my desk and spoke to my co-worker about what he does. He was a dev as well.

Midway through he asked how we deal with problems in development. I said "Go on Stack Overflow" He laughed it off but I wasn't kidding.

TLDR: Stack overflow is not a joke.

We have this lovely little old lady who works in QA and whenever she finds a bug she goes across the office to the developers desk and taps them on the shoulder and spends like 15 minutes explaining and showing the bug...

This is infuriating as you lose all concentration on what you are working on and wastes so much time... But I can't bring myself to tell her to stop just can't find kind enough words. She's a lovely person and means well but it seems her world runs a lot slower than everyone else's.

So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).

So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.

Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.

They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.

He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.

The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".

The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.

They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.

This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.

After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.

The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.

Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.

When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.

It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.

It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.

Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.

I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.

What the hell! Every time someone comes over to my desk and stands behind me my brain disengages from my fingers an I start misspelling and doing wrong commands etc..

Just one more reason everyone should have private office.

About 3 years at a job I worked at, management moved my work desk right next to the toilet.

I had enough. I got up, packed my things and left the office without saying anything to anyone and got another job a week later.

Have you ever quit on the spot? If so, what was your breaking point?

The team spirit in our team has improved over the past 1 month with this etiquette..
*walk up to team member
*no greetings
Just say " bring yourself back online"
Watch them light up..share those ten Westworld seconds..ask for what you need
..and the hell back to your desk
..cheers

So, I'm a veteran. I served in the Army as an information system operator/analyst. Glorified help desk, set up some equipment in the field, a few other small things. But I can make fun of vets, other branches, and those serving. I've paid my dues, and they're OK with it. Hell, they all do it too. But you have to be a vet or currently serving.

I feel like that with tech too. My buddies and I call each other geeks/nerds all the time. I get annoyed (read as pissed off) when someone from the outside does it.

I got an email from a recruiter that said something along the lines of "..basically a bunch of really smart nerds building software..." What the actual fuck? Go eat an entire bag of dicks, and choke on every single one.

(!= rant && == story)

Sooo it's 1:35AM.
Just had a call with boss to show that everything is done.
Bossy ses gud night.

Skype call ends, who the fuck is Alice starts playing in my headphones, the night is dark and I'm siting near my desk lamp, Geez lonelynes level is over 9000

In my head: wait, what now?🤨

I like to paint miniatures. So I keep a small collection of what I've done sitting on my desk. I also keep drawing stuff beside me too in case I feel like doodling.

Literally painful dev learning experience: Do your damn stretches and invest in a good chair.

Spent a couple of months of WFH working eight hours a day in an awful chair and started getting back pain out of the blue. Part of my first paycheck after that went into a decent office chair, in hindsight I should've spent more on it but goddamn what a relief it was not having to spend an entire day in the tiny, back-breaking piece of shit my landlord calls a desk chair.

Richard Hendricks is becoming less believable all the time. In season 3, they staffed their company with a crew of offshore devs and worked intimately over video chat, and it worked perfectly! They produced a product that wasn't exactly what the world wanted, but it was exactly what Richard wanted.

Now, in season 5, they're completely ignoring their previous success, and hiring/managing the most expensive devs in the world, and enforcing an outdated, "be at your desk" policy.

And they're having huge problems with it. Go figure.

Me: Im testing a new feature that is not on production yet for 30m and can not make it work. (I asked the developer for any idea why is not working)
Dev: i just tested, works fine.
Me: i just tested again with no luck. I’m i missing anything?
Dev: (Developer comes to my desk). Lets see what you doing wrong here. (After 5seconds). You have been redirected to the production site and you've been testing there all this time.
Me: 😩

Just found out my child’s after school care has been cancelled right before the new term, for fucks sake, how about some warning! Fuck knows what to do about work now. Oh and here is a desk

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert