!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

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Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

How to know a mobile game will suck

Opens game says need to download more data... Ok

22 files needed, looks pretty fast... all's good

#22 apparently HUGE file...

**feeling doubtful...**

**It's almost there.... done!**

Downloading file 1/34

**WTF... I see what you're doing now... ok I'll wait....**

Finally done... Ok loading....

loading....

black screen, loading?

still black....

（╯－＿－）╯╧╧

ಠ︵ಠ凸

So I just created this Registration GUI (part of a bigger app) for my uni project and was demonstrating how good the app was to all my friends.

Suddenly someone came and said let me verify this. I said go on with a doubtful mind. Obviously I had some verification for all the fields in the GUI but I was closely watching him.

He signed up with this email: " @ . "

😞

I suddenly realized all the technical debt shit I told my boss would happen years ago given the way things were done/heading then... Just occurred pretty much all at once last week in the form of critical production issues...

The teams like:
-we need real time server process monitoring
-structured logging for apps
-containerization so one app didn't affect others

Me thinking: yes.... I told you so like 3/4 years ago when I first joined the team and kept repeating so much I got tired of saying at every annual review...

This is exactly what happens when you let technical debt grow and have no free time for developers to look into and fix then while they were small and not critical production processes... Or properly document and peer review them... (Got a shit pile of projects that no one knows how to use or even exists because the devs left the team) and they'll have a lot more when I finally leave... Hopefully this year.... If I can find another role and not need another medical procedure... (Doubtful)

The things we take for granted... I was laughing my tits off at my mate taking a screenshot this is how it transcribed :)

My mate:
morning!

Me:
morning mate 🙂

My mate:
how are you getting on?

Me:
not bad thanks, bit knackered but good 🙂

My mate:
the band was good then lol. how do i take a screen shot buddy?

Me:
there's print screen button on the top right of the keyboard
My mate:
what will it be under?

Me:
it's a button
on the keyboard
print screen
prt scr or something

My mate:
no when i want to use it

Me:
??

My mate:
what file/folder

Me:
you have to open something like paint
paste it in
save it 🙂

My mate:
urghh
fuck doing all that
you do it

Me:
hahaha
My mate:
haha

Me:
I'm all good 😀
just open paint
ctrl+v
save
that's it

My mate:
i just got a killer score on wows lol i want to post it to the group
so i go to the game screen take a shot by pressing that button then go to paint and do what?
i dont even have paint lol

Me:
don't know what it's called in Windows 10

My mate:
ahh fuck it

Me:
burger nipples

My mate:
why doesnt it just pop up on your downloads or pictures ffs

Me:
it might do in Windows 10 I don't know 😀
doubtful though

My mate:
it has done for other ones
for other games it has

Me:
sometimes the game has it built in
depends on so many things haha

My mate:
nailed it!!
i just hit the right click then hit paste and it came on to the post haha
no fucking about

Me:
Congrats ;)

- build a self-service shell script to manage your environment in all kinds of ways with a single script and different switches

- ask tech manager for a server to keep that script [and others] at so coleagues should not bother setting dependencies up on their windows workstations

- be asked to list out all use cases

- be promissed your consolidated tool will be torn apart and replaced by 8 other tools depending on use-cases. Meaning 8 different browser windows open at all times to manage your single env

- be assured that this kind of improvement will take months and is doubtful to pay off

Every job interview I go through I feel more certain that I need to get out of my job asap and more doubtful that I wanna work with these companies.

1. Find a decent, entry level job at a company for full time
2. Graduate from my two year tech school with my degree
3. Apply/start at a university for my Bachelor's degree.
4. Start actually building my database application project. Its been on the back burner for over a year.
5. Try not to be so doubtful or unsure of dev skills. Try being less anxious to ask for advice or explanations, and dont let lack of knowledge discourage or embarrass me from growing my skills.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

Do you ever feel so down that you realize you've been writing shit code which does nothing productive and you've been just reinventing the wheel? Like, being in a confused state of being doubtful and afraid of being outdated coz you don't know any future proof tech? I'm in the final year of CS undergrad and this feeling sucks.

Isn't it curious that most development libraries, frameworks, widgets in an ecosystem see a decrease in popularity when they reach a "no longer under active development"/ maintenance stage (especially exacerbated in the front-end)?

As if we just can't settle on a convention. As if, even for limited-scope solutions, a final stage can never be reached, there must be perpetual growth. As if we must constantly trade a solution for a shinier one, that just might provide us with 2% profit based on a doubtful forecast... or not. Sounds a lot like the investment capitalism that resulted in the 2008 subprime crisis. Not sure what to make of this thought but

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

so there was this issue regarding our company's system which tends to be a problem for sometime now, its a recurring issue caused by the data that the users needs to encode to the system

today another issue arised, our senior supervisor, not knowing that this issue was already recurring and there is already a documented step procedure on how to address it, suggested or come up with a another solution which would task one of our co-developer to push a temporary code to production during business hours just to accommodate the issue and rollback the code after

take note that its during business hours and more than a hundreds of branches of the company are using the said system

what was he thinking !!

thankfully one of our colleagues voiced out explaining that this issue was already recurring and already has a procedural solution, but still our brainy-know-it-all-stubborn-close-minded heck of a supervisor insisted that the solution has computational impact and still insisted that they push a temporary code to the production, what an idiot!!

fast forward our colleagues ended up standing their ground, even if our supervisor is highly doubtful at them, and executed the already established solution instead of pushing a temporary code to the production which was such a bullshit idea

damn those close minded people they shouldn't have reach that position in the first place!!

I am stuck in a loop where I lose confidence in a project and leave it 75% finished (without debugging) while also being doubtful of my skills every time I code and being so demotivated. I have been learning but its a slow process and I keep being lazy about it. I honestly wish I had less stress externally and was able to focus on software engineering more.

So I thought I had a basic, high level understanding of C++ STL strings, pointers, copy constructors and stuff. In comes a dirname, a -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 and... Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
So what is happening? I copy a string expecting a deep copy, but then I do the dirname or manipulation on the copy and it messes up *both* strings. gcc/C++ I know you're a beast, but what's going on there? Thing is only possible if I cast away const from c_str - which of course is a doubtful operation - but there also seems to be some strange copy on write logic that the data pointers initially point to same memory location and only with first manipulation on the copy they start to point to different addresses.

I had no clue. And still don't have.

"You don't need to put a type annotation here, the type will be inferred by the compiler"

"We don't need to mark this function as async, since we are already returning a promise but not awaiting it yet within this method"

TypeScript codebase. Am I wrong to prefer that things be explicit rather than implicit? Sounds a bit tryhard to try and make things implicit, but maybe the async really changes behavior in the second case? I don't think so, and I prefer to mark an asynchronous operation as such, but I'm still doubtful; that's why I humbly ask you all what makes more sense here.

Had a hell of a week trying to convince a client that "Case Sensitivity" is a real thing in programming languages.

So there was some typo in some third party code which client had provided which was not giving the accurate results, but the client was not ready to listen. I asked him to get the variable rectified from the 3rd party from

var1 to Var1

But he somehow had a notion in the back of his mind that the 3rd party could never ever be wrong and it was surely I who had screwed up the code and he won't even bother the other team.

He was all like "I don't understand anything remotely connected with coding, but do explain me why is this not working ?" (His exact words)
Me (thinking): umm, WTF !!!

After to and fro for the whole damn week, finally able to convince him ( I guess, still doubtful) after giving the video and link of a jsfiddle showing him all the freaking magic of caseSensitivity!

I am feeling a lot doubtful right now.

I am an average undergrad student who has been dedicating efforts in java/Android for most of my college life.

As of now i have decent command over java , launched 2 simple apps on playstore, worked as an android dev intern in 3 companies and make decent medium complexity apps. I will say i am 40-60% down the path of an expert native Android dev.

However apart from Android, am dumb as a stick. I know shit about ai,ml, web dev, js , react, hybrid stuff, and am not very good with competitive programming and system topics ( os, Algorithms, networking, etc)

So this closes a lot of doors for me. I can't apply to some top tier companies as they would either want expert competitive skills or expert Android dev skills.
I had bad experiences with startups which are usually willing take rejected students like me for the post of a droid dev... there is usually low packages , high pressure, and treatment like a slave

So i am very unsure what to do next. I have tried to learn web dev/ ai-ml-data sciences. They are not very interesting to me, but again, what is interest really :/

What should be my focus now?
A) I could be learning competitive and other interview related topics so that i could crack interviews of top companies , and later try to get a position of android developer there.

B) i could focus on become better in Android and start learning things that i don't know like rx, kotlin, etc. I could then hope to crack interview of medium sized app dev companies which would mainly focus on my android knowledge in their interviews

C) i could increase my skill set and learn web dev or ai/ml topics to increase my recruiter pool. It would be like option B, but i will have more medium sized companies willing to take me.

Currently i am in a shit storm. I am about to go into a mass recruiter company in which i have heard would be doing more or less data entry work