!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Most embarrassing and lucky moment on the first week of job.

Me and my best friend were selected in the same company as developers. I was having some trouble with my system. So I mailed the description to our support department. Pop up was displayed from our chat client and person on the other end happened to be a lady. She wanted me to share a team viewer link with click access. So I did it and within 2 minutes of efforts she solved it. I thanked her, closed the chat conversation and started installing few packages. Meanwhile, I was curious to see her as she was really nice throughout the conversation. So I opened LinkedIn, searched for her name and found her profile. I zoomed in her photo and she was a pretty chick. I didn't stop and found her on FB too, and quickly saw all her DPs. I just copied her profile URL and sent it to my friend ( the one that got selected with me ) and told him about my conversation with her. Then I asked my friend
"She's hot. Should I send her a friend request or have to find some more troubles in my pc and talk to her few more times ? :P "
He replied "Dude what are you wanting for ? "
Out of no where, a pop up showed up. It was the girl we were talking about. The exact message was

"You can now close your team viewer session, and we can talk over FB :)"

Embarrassing AF!

Admin: "Wait, I noticed unusual traffic."

Me: "What is it?"

Admin: "Looks like we have a bot here."

Me: "A bot? Didn't know we are so popular."

Admin: "It makes constantly login requests through our API, it already surpassed 600.000! I will ban it right away."

Me: "wait, that just sounds like my bot.."

Admin: "DUDE, WTF? ARE YOU SERIOUS?"

When there is bug, you don't know of, it can end up quite embarrassing.

This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.

One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.

After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.

I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.

Manager: “We need you to stay in the room and not go outside to make personal calls on your mobile.”

Me: “uhmm okaaaay...”

*I get a call* “Yeah, I called about making a doctor appointment....my symptoms? Ummmm...*lowers voice to say it but everyone still hears...totally embarrassing*

Same manager, later, at performance review: “We found it highly inappropriate for you to be talking about your personal medical issues on the phone in front of everyone in the office.”

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I sang in front of the clients to demo an app for 30 seconds. It's a dating app that allow users to sing and record a song and send it to other person. It's a famous way of courting here in the Philippines.

That was my ridicolous and embarrassing meeting ever. Hahahaha

Most embarrassing dev moments:
Many years ago before I knew anything about javascript minification, I opened a .min.js file and thought "wow the guy who wrote this must be insanely smart"

I was on a 1:1 with my boss talking about my performance, recent tickets, HR stuff, anything I need, plans for the next quarter, etc.

My 4yo ran up, pointed to my boss on the screen, and asked "who is mommy on a call with?" I told him it was my boss, T, and that he needed to be quiet. "I want talk to T!" He demanded. "Hi T!" He wouldn't take no for an answer. We were pressed for time, so. As cute as it was, it wasn't very welcome.

It took like five minutes to finally make him leave. Now whenever I'm on a call, he runs up and yells "Hi T!!!!" at the screen. 😅 even when its standup or the engineering meeting with like 50 people.... thankfully there is a mute button! His face still pops up on camera, but most people understand and just laugh.

He's cute but he can be soo embarrassing!

I remember that one time I accidentally copy-pasted a pornhub link instead of a trello card's to my commit.

GUESS WHAT? HE WANTS ANOTHER FUCKING FEATURE!

AND WHEN I SAID I DIDN’T HAVE TIME BECAUSE CODE-COMPLETE IS TOMORROW, HE SAID HE’LL PUNT IT TO NEXT YEAR INSTEAD OF RELEASING IT THIS WEEK SO I CAN “BUILD IT RIGHT.” MAN, FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENDLESS CHANGES!

THIS WAS GOING TO BE A TWO WEEK TICKET UNTIL HE STARTED ADDING ENDLESS FEATURES AND CHANGES AND SURPRISES. IT’S BEEN FUCKING MONTHS! I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT!

ANSDFKAWHOALIKWEGJFADIO;UGJT;

There goes my Q4 performance review.
> “Accomplishments? Oh, there’s lots of room here. Accomplished: Basically nothing. How embarrassing.”

Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate

Manager: How come I go on vacation for 2 weeks and you are able to start, complete, and ship an entire sprint in that time where as when I'm around, the same amount of work takes months? I even got COMPLIMENTS from *the client* about how smoothly things went while I was gone...THIS IS COMPLETELY EMBARRASSING AND UNACCEPTABLE!

Dev: Well. I cancelled all of the status meetings, created tickets with clear expectations, didn't change those expectations, didn't add every idea that popped into the client's head during those two weeks to the current sprint, didn't pull anyone off their tickets to teach me to code, cut the budget for making degrading comments to zero, and incentivised everyone to work by allowing a half days on fridays to work on personal projects if we stayed on schedule.

Manager: THAT'S NOT YOUR JOB! I'M THE MANAGER AND ALL. OF. THOSE. THINGS. ARE. MY JOB! NOT YOURS!

Dev: ...I know.

Throughout the day I check Google analytics, I do it so much that I have a habit of typing "anal" and hitting enter into chrome and it auto completes,
I accidentally typed it not realising I still had focus on my company Slack chat window. The delete message feature is disabled 😰.

That moment when you've been sat on the toilet reading devRant so long that your legs have gone dead so when you try to stand up you faceplant the opposite wall :-/

devRant is bad for my health !

EDIT: what's more embarrassing is I lay on the floor writing this rant.

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

Had an interview this morning..
Interviewer - have you used github?
Me - yes
Intw - so, you have a profile on github?
Me - yes (** in mind, I don't think github will allow me without that **)

Intw - how many commits have you done?
Me - ** what kinda qust is this ** well,... Yeah... Umm.. A lot! 🙄

Intw - how much is a lot for you?
Me - umm... Well... A lot lot... So many... I mean a lot of... **Long pause** .... You see, I'm a commitment type of guy. ** Wtf did i just say?**

Intw - Whattt!! Then he laughed.

... and I used to think that my days of embarrassing interviews are over. I'm not going to that company doesn't matter what happens. Shitt 😐

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Diary of an intern story #101
Boss went to china for business purposes.
Me(just out of cheekiness) : what are you going to bring for us boss 😜?
Boss : for you, more tasks 😎😂

Why god why ;_;

Disclaimer: kinda non dev related. Just working to pay the bills right now.

The other day I ran for the train to work, don't want to be fucking late, right?

Arrived and this guy asked me this: (I have a sweating/transpiration problem but I'm fully aware of that)

"hey man, ever heard of fucking showers or deodorant?!"

Yes, I was sweating my ass off and you could smell me but I can't FUCKING help that.

It was very embarrassing and humiliating to get that kinda comment in front of like 30 people but I just swallowed it and went to work.

After the first break, a woman from management came to me and pulled me aside. A few people had complained about how that guy from before said some pretty humiliating stuff to me and she said that the guy received a warning and was told to fucking learn to treat people with respect, regardless of their (health) issues/appearance. I also got an apology and a sorry and if I could keep my eyes open for such behaviour in the future.

I'm very glad that she apologized although it wasn't her fault because I know I've got this health issue and I can't do anything about it yet but it can MOTHERFUCKING hurt when someone talks shit about me when I smell and I CAN'T FUCKING HELP IT BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY MY BODY WORKS TOO BADLY.

I felt protected and safe about my issue for the first time in my life.

Thanks management!

I saw this and thought "Wow, only one ++ away from 10,000!"

The time my Java EE technology stack disappointed me most was when I noticed some embarrassing OutOfMemoryError in the log of a server which was already in production. When I analyzed the garbage collector logs I got really scared seeing the heap usage was constantly increasing. After some days of debugging I discovered that the terrible memory leak was caused by a bug inside one of the Java EE core libraries (Jersey Client), while parsing a stupid XML response. The library was shipped with the application server, so it couldn't be replaced (unless installing a different server). I rewrote my code using the Restlet Client API and the memory leak disapperead. What a terrible week!

!rant Decided to use the DevTools audit thing to try to improve my personal website. An embarrassing number of hours later and I finally have to tell the perfectionist in me to chill.

Working with a client...the resident """sysadmin""" hasn't actually been a sysadmin since the early 90s, the last OS he _actually_ managed was SunOS 5 or something. I can't remember what he said. He hasn't kept up AT ALL with modern technologies/terminologies. He's convinced SELinux is a security hardened kernel. We've explained to him several times that it's not but he sees Linux and thinks Linux 1.0 from the 90s. It's downright embarrassing.

Now this would all be well if I didn't have to interface with him often, but the client WILL NOT give me access to their systems. So I have to go through him to get anything done. Which is over webex. So I get to watch this guy type (and mess up) basic commands over and over (he isn't aware of tab completion of any of the bash features that are super useful). So I'm telling him what to type and the delay is always just enough for him to get too far in the command to back out, so its like SSH-over-incompetence with a 500ms ping. It's truly infuriating.

Every once in a while he'll get frustrated enough to hand me control of his webex session, which isn't as painful but once again the delay is bad enough it's still a pain.

Best part is that he looks EXACTLY like Milton from Office Space. So thats one plus to this whole situation!

My code review nightmare part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engineer: hi whats this meeting for

Employer: unfortunately today we're cutting staff and you've been affected-

Engineer: 🤣😂🤣😂🤣-

Employer: why are you laughing?!

Engineer: no no- sorry it's just-

Employer: it's not funny-

Engineer: you're broke 🤣😂🤣

Employer: what?!

Engineer: that's like so embarrassing for you-

Employer: that's offensive. That's rude

Engineer: no i mean- you should have told- i didn't know you guys were this poor

Employer: we're not poor the market shift is-

Engineer: is really cringe. I mean can we just start a gofundme campaign or something-

Employer: that won't be necessary

Engineer: this just isn't a good look for you- it's giving 😂- it's giving poverty vibes honestly🤣🤣

Employer: that is very offensive-

Engineer: I'm really embarrassed for you. I was doing three people's jobs anyway bye

if you were code, you wouldn't compile

I wouldn't catch you if you were the last exception in my code

your brain is so tiny, indexing it would make no significant performance gain

you are so embarrassing, I can only go out with you in SSL

if you were a pointer I'd move to java

If I run into a problem with code or a configuration of some kind, like a good little programmer, I Google it.

One of two things will happen:

1) I quickly find the answer to my problem.

or

2) After hours of searching, I can't find anything about my problem. At all. I change the search phrasing, adjust the advanced search settings, read all the somewhat related but still unrelated articles. Nothing.

If #1 happens, awesome, life is great, thanks Internet!

If #2 happens, it's because of one of two things:

1) I am the first person in the world to stumble upon this issue. Quick! To the Blog Cave!

2) I AM TOO STUPID TO BE DOING WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO BECAUSE MY MISTAKE IS SO UNBELIEVABLY DUMB THAT NO ONE HAS BOTHERED NOR WILL BOTHER TO WRITE ABOUT IT, ANYWHERE, EVER. I LOOK AT MY WORK AGAIN FOR THE 100TH TIME AND FINALLY REALIZE MY EMBARRASSING NOOBERY.

2.1 is a unicorn. 2.1's happen to other people.

I am dealing with a 2.2.

Always the same story:

Marketing: hey I'm gonna do a demo to a customer. They were asking for feature XYZ. That's ready on thr staging server right? Do you think I could use the staging server for the demo?

Devs: well feature XYZ is not 100% done. Basically just feature X is done, and it still has a few bugs. The deadline ain't for another month, since we gotta finish ABC first. I guess you could use the staging, but it has a lot of bugs.

Marketing: perfect!

*after presentation*

Marketing: the staging had so many bugs! Why didn't you tell me?! It was so embarrassing showing it to new customers! Anyway, they loved the new feature. We need it to be ready ASAP.

Devs: What?! That's gonna mess up with our schedule. You know what? Fine, but feature ABC will have to wait another month.

Marketing: Well, it'd be ideal if we could do both...

Devs: Pay for more devs or dor extra hours.

Marketing: Just do XYZ. It's a pity that you'll have to push back ABC but it's fine, XYZ is more important.

(I might ask, if it was so important, why didn't you notice so in the meeting where we had decided that ABC would be prioritized?)

*tons of working hours later*

Devs: There, we finished XYZ.

Marketing: Yay! Wow, this month we'll have two major features done: ABC and XYZ!

Devs: No, ABC is not done yet.

Marketing: What? But the deadline was this week.

Devs: It was, but then you decided to prioritize XYZ and we said we had to push back ABC to get XYZ ready, and you agreed.

Marketing: Did we? Fine. But do it quick.

Marketing and their mood swings.

A few years ago I was in rage because I could not find the second page of my mobile provider invoice. So I called the support hotline to ask for the second page. Then he just asked: "Have you tried to flip the first page?" and I had to reply "oh, well...".

I decided to setup a little server on my local network just to make use of a 2TB harddrive I use to store videos.

Told everyone in the house I planned to grow the library over time and that they could access it all in a browser using my system name. It's become quite a fun venture and my video library is shaping up nicely.

Using nginx on a Dell XPS 17 with Ubuntu 16.04 to host a server that just auto indexes a shared directory on my external 2TB harddrive. Kind of an embarrassing rig, but it's just a hobby activity and I do plan to upgrade shit later.

The real fun has been getting to understand a bit more about video files. They used to be magic to me, as complex as their file extension. Now I run a script on all of my torrents which checks the video and audio codecs, converting them if they aren't supported by Chrome's and Firefox's web players, and outputting mp4s using ffmpeg. I feel like I have this stuff down fairly well now. Becoming more and more automated.

Next step is to port forward so I can access it from anywhere, but we'll see about that later down the line.

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

The awkwardly embarrassing moment when you realise your junior, a fresher out of college, knows more than you... Shittt... Why kids are so fucking smart these days!!! I'm looking for a place where I can go and just hide from the world. If you know one, please help.

Not me, but a colleague questioned himself for a while over this one. He simply forgot a semicolon when doing some server maintenance:

sudo yum remove application1 sudo yum remove application2

This didn't just remove application1 and 2, it removed sudo and yum too. One slightly embarrassing call to the ops team later, we had to replace the box.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should automate your server maintenance!

As an introvert & junior dev, I'm so frustrated with video conferencing meetings:

1. People interrupt each other and change topics all the time.

2. People disregard the host's agenda.

3. Meetings are starting to be recorded or secretly screenshotted in the very moment I am frowning because my internet connection is getting bad.

4. The meeting chat turns into a side discussion if the host is not addressing things in the chat and setting the rules clearly.

5. There are lots of buttons missing in my company's VC tool that would display my current status to the other participators, e.g. a no "I agree", "I disagree", or "I have something to add". All I have available in my VC tool is a "thumbs up" or "applause" reaction that stays next to me in my picture for very long 10s...

6. Webinars via VC tools are super uninteractive. To make it worse, there is no pizza, no free drinks and also no side conversations and no walking to the station together with the other nerds.

7. There is no way to tell the person speaking that you haven't heard them clearly or you would like them to explain something further in a big group meeting. It's too embarrassing for me to interrupt or let everyone else know in the chat that I haven't got it.

Bottom line: I HATE video conferences without a good facilitator that involve more than 3 people and would like to write my own VC software but I'm already kinda feeling drained because all these chaotic meetings stress me so much :(

The most embarrassing moment is when you look at an answer in StackOverflow and think "Which stupid wrote this answer?" and look at the name only to realize that it was YOU!!!

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.

So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).

The guy didn't reply to me anymore.

Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it...

Grammarly just found and corrected an embarrassing mistake in a legal document...

My typo was "onimated"...

Googles spelling and grammar changed it to "dominated"...

Grammarly figured out it should have been "nominated".

So... I've seen my dad talking a lot about quantum computers, and it's getting quite embarrassing to be there when he talks about them. He doesn't understand shit about them, except that they somehow use quantum mechanics for something.

Last week my uncle from Spain visited us. He's a Cristian pastor, and a cool guy, so they always talk about god and similar themes. We gathered the family to have a dinner with my uncle as he only was going to be one day with us. This is how part of the dinner went by:

" so, <Uncle's name>, have you heard about quantum computers?"

me thinking:*Oh my God. Please not again... *

"The nasa, the US government and all kinds of powerful entities are getting the quantum computer."

He always talks about THE quantum computer as if it was just one big machine.

"They have found that multiple universes exist through it. If this is what they are telling us, imagine how far they've gone. Remember that technology is always 8 years ahead of actual public technology."

Me:*please dad, stop. Who the fuck is made that claim and how many fucking years ago?*

"Did you know that many people remember that Mandela died in prison, while in the oficial version, he died after it? They must be messing with multiple universes, or multiple timelines are getting intertwined."

Me: *please, not the mandela effect again*

Then my dad procceded to talk about multiverses and how THE quantum computer was the future and about some parts of the Bible that supported it. Bizarre, I know.

When we are alone, I always try to tell him how things actually work but he always twists my claims to support his. Last time I told him that the mandela effect was perfectly explainable by psychological phenomena around forgotten memories. But this is going to far... Fuck the guys that made zeitgeist. Fuck Alex Jones. Fuck random youtube conspiracy channels. They make technology look like fucking magic for muggles.

Ho geez. I've been using fake adremover chrome extension for years...
So embarrassing 🤦‍♂️

Embarrassing moment:

Needed to deliver apk urgent urgently​ for push notification testing. I was unable to receive push token. Code is right in every way. Couldn't figured out in 15min. Lead comes to my seat and asks what's issue. And hey suddenly I figured it out. It was my wifi closed.. Bullshit 😬😠

Have children and build a house. You will forget what you enjoyed doing in your free time. Because you will not have any more!

P. S. I could have attached my github activity graph instead, but that is even more embarrassing 😭

The institute where I did my B.Sc is under a ransomware attack, and I'm bracing myself for the publication of my embarrassing transcripts, and possibly the even more humiliating scans of my exams 🤣
Oh, well.

Let's hear your embarrassing confessions.

I'll start: I have never built my own PC's or set up my home network.

I don't really know much about hardware and physical networking, and frankly I can't be bothered to deal with it.

Peopleee of devRant!
It's been a year, I missed the date

I got to know lots of people, it has been an interesting year... certainly
Thanks anyways
To every ++er, to the people I now call my friends

I'm still a student at uni, still bad at stuff, still an embarrassing mess, it is best to not mind me hehe

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

I have to confess. I'm a distro hopper. I've been a distro hopper ever since last year, and it got me tired. I spend entire hours checking distrowatch, partitioning, setting up hardware and drivers and passwords... I've tried to stop, I swear, but every time I do, there goes a new Solus release, an Openbox Debian based new branch, a forensic floppy disk that I know that I won't ever use for real. I just love assigning swap, fighting with rEFInd icons, testing modules, navigate trough different configs... Oh God, I even set up a virtual OpenBSD, just to see what it can do.
My friends have been telling me to stop, because I don't take care of our relation, that I'm becoming a monster. It's shameful and embarrassing to me when they ask me about my day and I say "you know, installing Manjaro on my desktop, and Lubuntu to that crappy old Asus I have for backups" I think I'm going to lose my head some day, this sickness is driving me straight down to the Slackware pits. I should stop it before I try Ratpoison environment but truth be told; I mean not to stop. I'm a distro hopper.
I ride my way live, unstable and restless.

A couple days ago, I went through the most embarrassing interview ever. It was a startup into both hardware and software merged over image processing. I really wanted it. Really really did. It was telephonic, and involved a little bit coding over docs. In the one hour we talked over the phone, he asked me about 30 questions. I hadn't even heard of the words he said! Ive never delved into compilers, lower level things, and memory management. I could answer about 5 questions- including the tell me about yourself question.

So thats about 25 ways I came up with of saying "I don't know" in a span of 60 minutes.

My first post here, be merciful please.

So, I participate in game jams now and then. About two years ago, I was participating in one, and we where near the deadline. Our game was pretty much done, so we where posted a "alpha" version waiting for feedback.

Just half an hour before the deadline, we got a comment on our alpha alerting us of a rather important typo: The instruction screen said "Press X to shoot" while X did nothing and Z was the correct key. "Good thing we caught that in time, thankfully a easy fix" I thought.

This project was written in python, and built using py2exe. If you know py2exe, the least error-prone method outputs a folder containing the .exe, plus ginormous amounts of dll's, pyc files, and various other crap. We would put the entire folder together with graphics and other resources into a .zip and tell the judges to look for the .exe.

Anyway, on this occasion I committed to source control ran the build, it seemed to work on my quick test. I uploaded the zip, right before the deadline and sat back waiting for the results.

I had forgotten one final step.

I had not copied my updated files to the zip, which still contained the old version.

Anyway, I ended up losing a lot of points in "user friendliness" since the judges had trouble figuring out how to shoot. After I figured out why and how it happened, I had a embarrassing story to tell my teammates.

I'm taking an entrepreneurship course and there is this one guy who talks empty words just to impress others.

He uses linux and at every single course he opens the terminal just to run the commands "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt remove", the rest of the time he is on discord.

He always switches to the terminal so you can see what an 'expert' he is

Embarrassing bugs during client demo

People working on the "breakthrough Tongue Detection" for "animojis" at Apple Inc. must be telling their relatives they are drug dealers. I mean what could be more embarrassing than this.

On my first week in the internship, I have to create a small website and it has to be finished ASAP. So I used Bootstrap.

After finishing I tested the website in chrome debugger tools for every screen size (design responsiveness), it was working fine. My stupidity was that I haven't tested on actual mobile/tablet.

The site was live, I send the link to one of my friends and he said "why everything is so small? looks like I'm browsing on PC". I quickly grab my phone and visited the site and it was not responsive on mobile. Started to check the code again, tested again on chrome tools it was working. But not on mobile. Changed the bootstrap file but no fucking changes on mobile.

After few moments of thinking, I realized that I haven't included the "meta viewport" tag. I felt so stupid and it was kind of embarrassing for me.

Now I first include meta tags before working on new project.

Most embarrassing app idea you've had...

This will definitely trigger some people.

New smartphone releases aren't 'tech news'.
An implementation of a technology ripped off from other devices (GPS, VR etc..) isn't 'tech news', it's just implementation of an existing technology.

So please, everyone who reads the self-called 'tech news' to look for a new phone release to waste money on - stop calling yourself a 'tech geek' - "Oh my god, I'm such a tech geek, it's embarrassing - this new iPhone was released and I just couldn't wait to get spend my money on it".

Just shut the fuck up - you are willingly dragging a tracking device everywhere you go and you are PAYING for it to look cool and be full of features you won't even fucking use.

Another incident which made a Security Researcher cry
[ NOTE : Check profile to read older incidents ]
-----------------------------------------------------------
So this all started when I was at my home (bunked the office that day xD) and I got a call from a..... Let's call him Fella as I always do . So here we go . And yeah , our Fella is a SysAdmin .
-----------------------------------------------------------
Fella - Hey man sup!
Me - Good going mate , bunked the office , weather's nice , gonna spend time with my girl today . So what's goinon?
Fella - Bruh my network sharing folders ain't working no more .
Me - Did you changed or modified anything?
Fella - Nope
Me - Okay , gimme your login creds lemme check .
Fella - Check your inbox *texts me the credentials*

*I logged in and what I'm seeing is that server runs on Windows2008R2 , checked the event logs , everything's fine and all of a sudden what I found is fucking embarrassing , this wise man closed SMB service*
Me - Did you closed SMB service?
Fella - Yeah
Me - You know what it does?
Fella - Yeah it's a protocol , I turned it off to protect the server from Wannacry .
Me - Fuckerrrr!!!!! Asshole dumbass you fuckin piece of Dodo's shit!! SMB is the service responsible for files and network sharing!!!
Fella - But....I just wanted protection
Me - 😭😭😭

*A long conversation continues with a lot of specially made words to decrease the rate of frustration which I used already*

Fella - Okay I'm turning it on .
Me - Go on....... Asshole
Fella - It worked! Thanks a lot bro
Me - Just leave me and my soul away from evil and hang up .

*Now the question is , who the hell gives them the post of SysAdmin? While thinking this question , I almost thought of committing suicide​ but then my girl came with coffee and my rubber duck*

Been on a conference call with some coworkers and a huge company which is trying to sell us a new tool for our CI environment. Sales guys ask us sensible questions about our requirements and try to find out our needs. No one of my coworkers says a word. Sales guys rephrase their questions but STILL: Crickets on the line from our side and this call gets embarrassing. So I try to explain our SW dev process and explain what we need for our CI and suddenly Mr. Manager sends me a text msg telling me to to "STFU!"....Oh well THANK YOU, I just tried to be polite to these sales guys who were invited by US and took their time to present us their really good tool. I mean cmon...what is F*CKING WRONG with you?

I've just had an embarrassing moment: discussing in chat with some colleagues I wrote Openshit instead of Openshift.

!Dev

Okay so this is a very embarrassing story but I guess it's kinda funny so I thought I'd share it anyway.

I was playing a tabletennis game in VR and my opponent was a pretty chill guy who started blasting metal music. We were just casually vibing and then we started headbanging. Not a good idea with a VR headset on your head. There are two deep scratches right on my forehead now. Two perfect parallel lines.

I lost the game, and the smoothness of my forehead.

Okay kids, never headbang with a VR headset on, remember that.

One of the embarrassing moment for me..
Whenever some colleague pings me whenever I was busy coding I would reply "1 sec", finish whatever I was doing then talk to them.
But what happened one day was I sent "1 sex" instead to couple of the colleagues... When I realised it was very embarrassing..
Since then I have stopped using "1 sec" and use "1 min" instead.

One of the most hated things by me in my entire Internet using experience is guys who comment on blogs and forums saying "Pls send me help/full code for this: my email is X and my number is Y"

Grow up guys. The admin is not your slave to send you personal help on an email.

It's so damn embarrassing I'm starting to hate my nationality.

I have a few of these so I'll do a series.
(1 of 3) Public privates

We had a content manager that created a content type called "news item" on a Drupal site. There where two file fields on there. One called "attachments" and the other called "private attachments". The "private attachments" are only for members to see and may contain sensitive data. It was set to go trough Drupals security (instead of being directly hosted by the webserver) but because the permissions on the news items type where completely public everybody had access. So basically it was a slow public file field.

This might be attibuted to ow well Drupal is confusing. Howerver weeks earlier that same CM created a "private article". This actually had permissions on the content type correctly but had a file field that was set to public. So when a member posted the URL to a sensitive file trough unsafe means it got indexed by google and for all to read. When that happend I explained in detail how the system worked and documented it. It was even a website checklist item.

We had two very embarrassing data leaks :-(

So salty. Just got off from a long day at work with my coworkers after a significant sprint, so we all go to karaoke to celebrate and let loose. But naturally I have to be under 21, and the karaoke place cards, so I end up taking an Uber home by myself, which felt really fucking embarrassing. I wish there were venues in the city that didn't require you to be above the magical number of 21 years of age to have a good time.

Went to the mall with mom the other day,

Mum: so what do you want?

Me: (pointing to stress ball) that ball

Mum: stop embarrassing us, are you a kid?

Me: they are stress balls

Mum: take a pill or exercise if you stressed

My mind: I told you not to go the mall with your, fucking kid....

devrant a ni**a really need them stress balls

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

A friend saw me on stack overflow and said 'wow, 4,000 points - you must do this all day.' I explained that I just do it to reinforce my understanding and not really for points(although those are useful for bounties). I showed them an account with 22k and tried to show how one might choose questions for maximum points vs quick solves for noobs etc. I write overly thorough answers to try and pin-point the blind spot as opposed to just fixing other people's code. It's not often rewarded by points. My friend - conspiracist - was convinced that the 20+k accounts were cheating the system.

At my old work we had a stack overflow account just for asking embarrassing questions that you didn't want on the company record. Silly, I know. Occasionally some of the guys would use it to have fake arguments or just cause trouble for fun / vote each other's stuff up.

So - I reached into 1Password and signed into that account and showed him that you could essentially vote up your answers but that it's not likely how people get points. I voted up my last 5 personal answers as an example and made some comment like 'that is right.' And that was that. Closed the computer. The next day my account was suspended and I was reprimanded for sockpuppeting. So, - in case you think you can get away with cheap tricks - you can't, which is nice to know - but after reading the email - my face was red for hours. How embarrassing! Not quite as bad as that time I got caught stealing a G.I. Joe action figure at the mall...

me no speak the english

Oh my God. Did any of you catch Sundar from Google being grilled by Congress yesterday?

It is so embarrassing watching congressman who think they know technology ask questions did somebody who actually is technically proficient. you would think they would have hired somebody at least to educate them first before looking like an ass on TV.

It look like I asked my janitor to interview our next developer.

So funny though over his left shoulder there's a guy that looks like Sir topham hatt from Monopoly. Hahahahahahh not kidding black top hat and big white mustache.

Most embarrassing interview rejection was not even in person, it was over the phone.

The company that I was going to work for (quite a big one mind you), scheduled to phone me at 2PM, I was preparing mentally for 2PM, so I took my girlfriend to lunch at 1. Just to relax and calm myself before the phoned me.

It was 34 degrees (celcius - I think that's about 93 farenheit? somewhere close) outside and I was waiting for her to finish her smoke (she was in the smoking area).

They phoned me, and it caught me completely off-guard. My years of knowledge just seemed to flush down the toilet at that moment, and I utterly felt stupid talking to the guy over the phone. It was a first for me, and I hope that it never happens again - he basically stopped me, told me that I had better not apply before I know what I am talking about (as I was wasting his time), and then put down the phone on me..

Worst part was that my girlfriend came back right then and asked me if I am ready for the interview. I hung my head in shame because I was ashamed to tell her that I fucked it up, because you know, I kind of needed the job (the one I had at the stage was shitty).

For me there are two kinds of bugs. The ones where you lean backward and the ones where you lean forward.

If you found a bug and you lean backwards in your chair resting your hands behind your head you feel proud and relieved that you found that sneaky bastard. Good for your dev soul.

If you lean forward, resting your forehead on your fists or on the desk then it was a very stupid bug. Not sneaky at all. Something plain obvious. It makes you doubting all your career and life choices you made so far. Like needing one hour to find out that you named the "MANIFEST.in" accidentally "MAINFEST.in"...

Want to share any embarrassing bugs to make me smile again?

Just had to write an old-skool for loop. Index...termination condition...whole works. I feel dirty.

Bit embarrassing as someone saw me writing it, thought I was a hacker and informed the authorities. Spent the last hour being waterboarded.

We had a big laugh about it when they realized I was just fixing bugs in a legacy app.

National Security. Hilarious.

!personal

So, I was diagnosed with congenital nystagmus at an early fucking age. This is complicated for people who've never heard of it before to comprehend, until they notice the eyes of the person in question. Think of it this way: I lack the biological form of optical image stabilization. Because of nystagmus, I can't fucking drive.

Now, let me tell you, it really fucking sucks. I've never had a girlfriend, never been able to get a job, basically never been able to do the type of shit most of you can already fucking do. Pile that on with college, where I don't really fucking know anybody, and it's really fucking easy to see why I've had depression and nearly fucked my GPA over last semester (2.08, yeah it's embarrassing but fuck it).

That out of the way, nystagmus is rare. So rare that any surgeries to fix it aren't guaranteed to fix the problem, and are only marginally better. I have strong skepticism for any optometrist who acts like they perform this surgery every day, because the numbers simply don't back them up. If there's so few who have this issue, then the amount of operations and opportunities to do them are fucking slim.

Today, my mom came over to Indiana from Ohio, and took me to the local Cheddar's (do other countries have those??). We sit down, and she wanted to re-hash this surgery idea. I have made the statement before that these are the only two eyes that I will ever have, and there's no guaranteed ROI on any procedures, and is probably going to fuck me over if shit hits the fan.

Then she tells me there's this doctor in Maryland. I might be geographically challenged (lol), but I'm pretty sure that's over on the east coast. It's forever from here, we'd probably have to take an airliner.

This doctor made some pretty bold fucking claims. Not only was it possible he could fix the nystagmus, but he could help me use a special form of glasses that would enable me to learn to drive. Knowing that R&D on nystagmus was sketchy because of the aforementioned conditions, I had to tell her that I still don't know how I feel about it. Also, if this doctor moves from Maryland to any of the other states, would he still be allowed to do these things?

I told her I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure it's worth the money if we follow through and come to find out it's not enough, and I still can't drive. She acts like this stuff is dead simple. I don't think it is. You have perceived benefits, but there have to be caveats. This would be a major change, and I don't know how I feel about following through with it.

I get so fucking awkward and autistic when i sit at work 8h a day and just work... I cant fucking communicate with people. I behave like the most extreme "nice guy" beta shithead and its hard to fight it.

Went to put coffee in the sink now and a girl was washing the dishes. In the same time another girl was coming into the kitchen. I stopped and wanted to wait for her to wash them. The girl walking in looked at me weird. I was turning around pretening like im searching something. She asked hey do u need something. I then turned a 360 in place (oh my fucking God) walked towards the sink 1 step and then 1 step back as if i forgot to walk. Then i replied i just wanted to wash the coffee. And then i awkwardly put the coffee in sink for the girl to clean my coffee too

So fucking embarrassing!

Only when i work from home at my pace within my environment ALONE (im the biggest introvert) is when i dont become autistic. I can communicate. Im an alpha chad

It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.

Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.

In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.

I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.

My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on.

The older I get and the more perspective I have on my career, the more I cringe at the times I thought I was awesome but I really wasn’t, especially in the eyes of or in comparison to others I’ve worked with who were much better at this than I am. In that respect, I have very few stories that _aren’t_ embarrassing. I sometimes wonder how I managed to stay employed this long. And whether any stories here on DevRant are about me.

Anyone else go incognito when searching for embarrassing programming questions? #theshameisreal

ok, well, I have a list of worst interview experiences. here is one. This was my very first job interview.

[Things differ with places, but where I live, we give a lot of respect to teachers, interviewers etc]

It was my turn for the interview and I forgot to knock the door. The interviewer didn't like that. But I guess he ignored.

I also forgot to ask to get in. So, instead of pointing out my mistake, he taunted me. When I was already in, in front of him, he looked at me and said "Yh, come in!" as in, you forgot to ask that. But I was already more then, just in.

I felt sorry, quietly sat down on the chair. when I was well settled on my chair, he looked at me and said "Yh! sit down please!". Again reminding me I forgot to ask him to sit down.

Should I have apologized atleast? I forgot to do so! So he reminded me again, "Oh that's okay! don't say sorry."

It was enough embarrassing for me already when I hadn't even utter a word. I don't give a damn about interviews anymore, but well, that was my first one! You must know that feel.

Well, he was quite happy with the rest of the interview, so at the end of it he told me "it's okay it usually happens initially. You'll get used to it pretty soon." I ignored that later but could never forget how it all started. 😂🎃

In my country (too embarrassing to mention), pirated software is so common and it is not considered immoral. It is widespread and secretly & socially accepted. The law cannot be enforced when everyone is an offender. There's no profit of being an angel in the land of the devils. I, myself too, am guilty of this.

Workplace requires formal dress code. In Italy, in July, with up to 30C (90F) outside. And August is going to be worse.
I have to take a train + walk 10 minutes to get there. And I sweat, like, a lot. I frigging DRIP. It gets embarrassing, and I think I was close to passing out a couple of times in the last few days.
I really don't know how to mitigate the damage. Suggestions?

The place I currently work at has got this culture of ignoring developers.

Deadlines get made by 3rd parties and project managers who don't have the technical nounce or experience of our system to make a call on deadlines.

Demos of products are arranged without a discussion with developers as to whether said component will be ready on that date.

3rd parties make decisions about future architecture, offer to assist, then disappear for days on end, to only come back and make out as though they've not been holding us up.

Upper management take no interest, don't listen to the people they pay to do a job.

Currently just moved a PHP web app into a multi tenant scalable EBS environment, but apparently it's not worth asking our view on technical aspects of the business before the shit hits the fan.

Lies to clients about documentation and policies, for example, claims from Sales we have a DR and BCP plan, client called is out, they sent a 2 paragraph A4 document to the client claiming it was our DR and BCP plan without talking to anyone technical, including myself who has years of DR experience. Embarrassing.

Could go on, but rant over.

[NSFW]
What are the odds of a game studio's co-founder starring a R18 decensoring GitHub repo? Welp. Today one did. And I saw because I found his GitHub after Googling (I switched to Duck in September). Welp. This is gonna be embarrassing for the guy. Whoops.

Repo is DeepCreamPy btw if you're interested in "researching how it works".

It's kind of embarrassing not to support random number generation, but not having float types?
Solidity, kill yourself.

Trying to redeem my free hacktoberfest shirt. Click the link in the email, pick my size, hit continue, and I'm immediately met with "this website is under heavy load" and the request fails... That's embarrassing.

I've been programming professionally for a year and it went without any embarrassing experience, even without thinking about preventing any embarrassment ._.

Am I boring?

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

I finally (sort of) understand how to perform an interactive rebase thanks to a single enlightening article. Not sure why nobody explained it so clearly before.

This will make my half-baked commits much less embarrassing.

All my coding interviews where embarrassing moments..

This is embarrassing, but the first days of learning about AngularJS I had to implement functionality about a new component of the WebApp I was building.

I did a good templating, I build the component along with its controller and services, I verified there wasn’t any memory leak and that everything was in an isolated scope. Yet nothing at all appeared on the app. It took me more than 30 minutes until I realized...

I didn’t put the source code on the index.html file 😅

For people who know more about compiled languages such as C or Java... that’s like not putting your source code file in the makefile. 😅

I felt literally like the dumbest person in the planet at that moment. 😀🔫

I just started using git

Looking back on old code is embarrassing... I suppose that's a good sign

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?

My most productive is honestly when I'm on a caffeine high (my personal favorite is a 24oz NOS). I have pulled all-nighters. Accidentally.

But getting INTO the mood for programming is simple and kinda embarrassing. I get excited by seeing programming keywords in real life. For example, at a job I worked at, there was a whiteboard what had the word "include" on it forever. Not about programming at all. But every time I saw it I was reminded of c/c++ and it made me wanna do some code. I don't know why I'm like this.

Me: I'm quite good at C programming language
Also me: Checks man page for library functions' information

damn it! I must be losing my mojo.. Posting my first SO question this year.

For some reason posting to SO feels like a defeat. So embarrassing :/

I’m shocked, some of the hideously embarrassing questions these dim mother fucking senators have been asking Zuckerberg. Is this for real?

This story is related to Docker containers.

Three years back when I heard about docker my first impression of docker was mini Virtual Machine. Then when you start your first container it’s no way to get out apart from pressing ctrl+d or leaving it like a screen. One of the most embarrassing thing with it was I tried really really hard to setup SSH on one of the container to log in there somehow. Then I understood how to use Dockerfiles and the command called `docker exec`

I thought Dockerfiles are the most amazing thing I have ever used for docker. But then I got introduced to docker-compose, and now it’s same with kubernetes

Now a days I read most of the document before doing hands-on on any new technology.

I have a medical condition where my palms sweat too much. I can't use touchscreens for a very long time. I really hope there is a product that makes touchscreens hyper sweat friendly. It's annoying and embarrassing. :/

During my first job as software engineer I was assign to setup meta data upon implementing the meta data I accidentally forgot to remove the static og:title="Im ocabafox and Im handsome AF" and it was deploy to production. After few days someone send an email that when they share to facebook there is a text Im ocabafox and Im handsome AF. :D

I love our industry but it’s filled with way too many tech grifters, fakes and waste men pretending to know what they’re doing. A lot of whom low key hate coding and the people that do it, wish they were as good and those people yet lack the self awareness and humility to see where they fall short and actually learn the technology.

Even if you see the industry as just a way to make some money, learn how to code and if you can’t do that then learn to appreciate the process. Stop talking as if you know what you are doing while embarrassing yourself and coming off as a dunce and condescending to those that do.

Today I sat with my manager wanting to show him the analytics.
I started typing the address and the chrome prediction went up so I pressed enter.
Unfortunately I typed only the first four letters and the prediction disappeared so I googled something totally different 😫

Probably posted this before but don't ever put swear words in log statements because you will miss one and if you're client has a log monitoring system it will catch it, it's fairly embarrassing when your client says "we noticed quite a spike in 'bollocks' around 3am when the reorgs are happening on the database".

One time I had to review some SAP / Excel / Visual Basic toolchain.

It was a huge mess with like 10 layers of if-then cases in around 1000 lines of code analyzing excel sheets, resolving error codes etc. in maybe two functions.

It turned out that I programmed that code about 8 years ago :/

My office has a "Friday Memes" playlist full of all the songs too embarrassing to play the rest of the week.

Something breathtaking about a smooth transition from Linken Park to Default Elevator Music.

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

Have u guys ever wonder, all those devs we rant about (mostly senior developer), how it feels like to be them? Today I realized, I am most probably becoming like one.
I joined devops 7 month back(around one and half year in industry). Right now, I am 2nd senior member in project. I have done deployment on multiple environments more than 100 times. But till today, I never knew how the deployment is being done. I knew to trigger job but I never knew how it worked. Today when a junior asked me, then I learn ansible, then I understand whole deployment process.(and remember I am 2nd senior most with 7 month in project)
Sometime I wonder, till now I always had good rating and most responsible title. But how much is that because of my technical knowledge? Sometime it feels like I have very good luck. But man, it's very depressing. Sometime it feels like my junior don't get enough limelight because I am in their way although they have good knowledge but they lack the though process for now. Most of the time my senior present me as role model to juniors, and it's very embarrassing for me(this will not continue on as I talked to my seniors) . I did work on good projects from time I joined company. And never had any issue and always deliver what needed. But I still can't write code in Java to take input or do for each on array in javascript without seeing stackoverflow once.
Now I fear that someday I will write piece shit of code and whole efficiency of project will go down cause of me. Atleast, the person who will get to fix it will get a chance to have good rant here. I tried open source projects to understand how to write good code but I always have hard time understanding new-projects which I never worked on.
Then there is reputation on Indian devs. This is my another Fear. That someday cause of me, my fellow devs will get bad reputation as well.
This coming year, my goal is to fill up all the holes but I don't know why my fingers are crossed.
Sorry, I had to bring this out somewhere. And please ignore my grammatical mistakes.

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

I can't believe he chose the kid over me.
My boss decided he needs a new team leader, (he led it till now) at start he said none of the team members fit one guy is new, the other is young and this his it's first job after college.
After weeks dragging us, he chose the kid over me.
I am more experienced then him (10 years in the industry) and led the team most of the time.

As "consolation prize" he let me chose a professional course of my choice.

I am so disappointed from his choice and from myself, I just feel like drop it all off and go somewhere else.
I am 3 years there, and people are like "how can it be? You're one of the veterans in the company."
So embarrassing.

Should I stay or should I go

Thanks for reading this long rent.

Let's have a thread for embarrassing new years stories!

This is my most awkward interview experience. I still shudder just thinking about what happened

When I was in uni I applied for a ‘student ambassador’ role at Microsoft. I went to the interview and it turned out to be group interview with at least 10 other people, we all get taken to a room where we sit around a table with the interviewer. She was friendly and asked us each to introduce ourselves and talk about a talent we have.

When my turn comes I introduced myself and revealed that my ‘talent’ was that I can rap, this is where I fucked up because the interviewer then asked me to rap a song in front of the whole group.

I got very nervous but still gave it a shot, midway through my song due to my nerves I forget the lyrics, a complete brain fart. I abruptly stop rapping and everyone is staring at me, it’s pin drop silence for a good 10 seconds

The interviewer then says thanks for trying and the rest of it is really a blur. I think everyone in the room was embarrassed alongside me so we all pretended like that did not just happen. Needless to say I didn’t get the job

Microsoft Teams 👎

Luckily most of our company uses Zoom, which is great UX-wise. But MS Teams... What a joke!

I've even been on a call with MS engineers for some Office integration support. Of course, they scheduled a Teams meeting. It was embarrassing how bad the quality and connections were. But likely they simply don't know any better...

I'm thinking of self hosting all my small web projects,

I have this old laptop running ubuntu server heedlessly I used to store and stream pirated movies, after multiple embarrassing moments with free backend/platform as a service options and not finding a cheap VPS, this seems like the way to go. I don't get much traffic on these sites i just want them to be available when i need to present them.

then there's tons of other features that are locked behind a paywall,

I once had to store images in the database because heroku wont accept file uploads and the project hadn't been paid, in short, I was dead broke

A year ago i made a binary which very quickly checks all stuff we normally check on customers PCs manually via a few WMI queries.

It worked well on 3 dev machines, so i went to my department lead, told him to execute it and the fucking thing just spews WMI errors left and right.

Even though it showed us that some very low level stuff in his Windows installation was broken it was just embarrassing as hell.

Shortly after I had all checks fitted with a secondary method in case WMI fails.

Trying to learn c and I forgot the name of the string comparison function, so I googled "c string"

O boi....

Does anyone enjoy their Windows development laptop? I fight with it so much. I would be happy to smack it hard with a hammer for all of the embarrassing things it has done in front of customers.

They are trusting me to build a multi million dollar system yet for some reason I can't join a Skype meeting, or my mic doesn't work, or the scaling on screen makes everything look oversized.

What am I supposed to say? "Trust me to build your system. I swear I'm not as retarded as I appear."

I just had the most embarrassing moment in programming... I am writing an administration / client / invoice webapp and I was testing an export function that worked locally, because everything that was being exported was inside the folder.

So I exported the files in test production, but some invoices didn't exist. So when they don't exist, the system creates a new invoice.

Because I was running on the test production (with client data) the system emailed the created invoices to the clients.. now I have to contact some clients and tell them the invoices were sent accidentally.

I got the Aero15. Had to send it in because ctrl+alt+shift+s (IntelliJ Preference menu) and some others critical shortcuts weren't working. Got a reply a week later.

"Thank you for using our service. The explained fault isn't actually a fault. If you want to use that button combination simply remap the FN key. Mind you this will disable any FN key combinations."

....

"What about all the other combinations?"

....

"Ok we returned it to the technicians who will do their best to repair it."

....

I await their response. But seriously, for a company that makes GAMING keyboards this is pretty embarrassing. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention.

Unconsciously mistyping pussy instead of putty in front of a colleague is still scarred to my bones especially the fact that s and t aren't even next to each other which makes it even more embarrassing

Very useful!
It's not just about code but the whole package.
Watching great programmers fail miserably at project management, research, documentation, team leading and acting professional is just embarrassing, especially when they slate those who went out to educate themselves.

🎙️ Mic drop, I'm out!

Well I was not actually in this meeting but I had to prepare everything so the CEO could show the new software to the employees and when I saw him clicking on stuff and it wasn't working... I was like: it works on my machine! After a little while I found out that I didnt push it to demo so it was still not updated..
Oh that embarrassing moment when I had to go to the room and say: refresh the page please!!

The whole episode of me managing an outsourced team for about 6 months. I thought because I’ve managed other teams doing non dev things, it would be like that.

I’ve never been so wrong and NEVER AGAIN! I had to own everything and they’re code is so repetitive and confusing. It misses basic structure because I didn’t outline some things like knowing when a operation is complete and that if the same button appears in two pages it should do the same thing! Or that is you break up a SPA you shouldn’t just duplicate the whole files and then confusingly use randomly parts to so random jobs across all layers of the app. Ffs. Never want to work with a team that doesn’t have a plan to maintain the code they write. I felt like a failure but for me to make them successful I would have had to pretty much write the code.

Now I have to explain this embarrassing pile of curry spaghetti to my colleagues who need to do some other work on it. Fuck. I want to throw it out and start over so badly.

I should have told my boss a hard no on that one and let him know outsourcing would slow things down not speed them up. He just needs to stop trying to get software developed and deployed at the same time. Fuckers.

I have sort of an embarrassing question...

I never learned touch typing, hated it as much as I hated my calligraphy lessons in elementary. Forward a couple of years, I'm a developer and trying to dig deeper into vim seems to require learning touch typing... it has been a struggle to say the least and lowered my speed to a frustrating rate. 😥

I know the arguments for putting the work and learning proper technique but, are there any other arguments out there? I mean, as a developer I find myself using a lot of numbers and symbols which are not totally covered in touch typing curricula, together with a bunch of key combinations...

Idk, maybe I'm just asking for encouragement or different perspectives or unknown advantages about learning touch typing even when you feel fast and confident without it... Thank you guys!

So this past few days of a mix bag of emotions. Friday's weekly deliverables on our first dry run at launch, I squeeze across the line in an embarrassing finish. Decision to proceed with the live run to be delayed, not going to happen if I've got something to say about it.

Next day, vendor on the house my wife has purchased (our first!!) and says we can move the settlement date ahead 4 weeks! Winning!

Monday, meeting with all stakeholders on the fuck up that was my deliverables I'm responsible for, granted a conditional pass. "Don't worry, I got this."

Tuesday, received the results of a technical challenge I've given one of the developer candidates - he smashed it. Keen to give him the job!

Leaving the office before everyone else and having to walk out in front of them has to be one of the embarrassing in the office.

You can't really look at your colleagues because they would be definitely thinking something like "hmm he gets to leave before me every day".

You can't really walk out infront of them ignoring their existence. That would be rude I feel.

This is one of that moment where I wish if I had the power to be invisible.

I basically had to start a day late because of a doctors appointment, which was fine. But the next day when my work week actually began, I ended up passing out due to heat exhaustion. It was fairly embarrassing to say the least.

Well that’s embarrassing...

Fairly embarrassing mistake for the lib

I got a job opportunity in another country and went there for a 3 weeks trail working, I've worked on two different projects, one was with a CMS called Contao and the other one on WordPress, I'm fluent on WordPress, I've been developing themes for more than three years now.
With Contao I started the learning curve and for 2 weeks I learned a lot of stuff.

Before coming back for Visa stuff and taking care for few documentes needed they asked me if I could still do some freelance stuff from my home country. I said yes and got invited to the GIT repo.

It's been a week now that I'm trying to understand how stuff work and everything that the senior dev wrote is way advanced from everything that I've ever worked.
I couldn't finish more then 5 minor tasks simple CSS and PHP logic and I'm feeling very embarrassed.

I just wrote to the senior dev and told him that I'm way behind with my coding skills and I'm seeing dreams with code that don't work.

I'm not good in doing presentations and I'm not sure if it is a common style or technique that to engage your audience, you need to ask a show of hands if they know about something..

I attended a "meeting/workshop" and the presenter just kept on asking who among us knows blah, have read blah, have seen blah, who doesn't know blah blah blah.

Why ask us to raise our hands? Are u conducting a survey? For those who raised their hands did u feel a sense of belongingness? For that one guy who raised his hand he was bullied.

I don't understand why ask ppl to raise their hands? For what?

If u want to share info then just deliver the message. Full stop. Don't make it embarrassing for the rest of us.

Seeing a lot of hate against PHP here. It used to be a shitty language with no decent frameworks, update yourselves please, it's getting embarrassing for you. WordPress, laravel, Zend. That's 60% of the web. We run this shit.

All the professors I had didn't accept that I have already solid notions about the arguments in their course. I tried to explain I worked in some agency and they invested in employee knowledge but the tilts was embarrassing, they mocks you but systematically when you hit the highest score in the test they compliments for "how well I've studied" when I didn't spent one minutes on studying while I was engaged with more complex and training exams. I wish a degree where you can attend the exam without following the course if I'm already prepared.

The hotel I'm staying at only has mini toilet paper that I have had to call for an embarrassing number of times yet they're tryna judge me for wanting pasta at 3 am???

Like, we've passed that stage. I feel no shame anymore!!

I’m working on a side project just to not die from the repetitive college workload

I want to public the GitHub page so I can get more feedback then when I occasionally can show my teacher. As well as get advice and ideas from a larger group of people who all have more knowledge and skills than me.

But every time I think about pressing that button to show the world, I get worried about embarrassing myself, like this is my first large scale project all on my own. Using tools and a language I’m teaching myself in my free time with occasional advice from my teacher. What if it’s so horrible I just make a fool of myself

What does devRant think??

Remember how I was - against all that was promised - assigned to a time-sensitive front-end (so definitely not my forté) project about a month ago? Remember how I struggled with the choices of how to go about it - switching from F# (Fable) to Rust (Yew) to eventually settling in with Vue and TS?

Yeah, I’m glad I went that way, even though there could’ve probably been better choices out there: my part is done now, even though it’s not quite prod ready yet (close tho), the team who’ll maintain it takes it over now, after I finish dealing with my current minor issue. And damn their front-end guy is GOOD. Makes me feel very inferior in that department. Well, I am. Back to back-end, thank you very much...

But I have an issue here, that bothers me. I’ve produced a codebase that’s obviously written on a tight schedule: no tests, no documentation, a few embarrassing hacks/workarounds and so forth. I actually feel bad for leaving it out of my hands to them in such a state...

I find it really embarrassing how Twitter, whose mission was to give voice to those who are not heard, has become a puppet in the hands of a CEO who overnight changes the codebase to influence the crypto market for his own ends.

Just made a damn fool of myself with a client. I handed off three projects and they had no idea what they were for and neither did I. My boss gave me these months ago. No code comments, no documentation, just some stored procedures they wanted me to actualize.

The best I could offer was to promise the client I would send a description of the projects to them as soon as my boss gets them to me. Fuck. I thought the client would know what they asked for when I showed them, but fuck me, they didn't remember. So embarrassing. 😡😡😡

What is your biggest embarrassing regret in your career?

I will go first. I regret than those day I don't understand OOP and Bull-shiting around.

Have you ever tried to read your Facebook chat history all the way back when you were younger? What a horrible person I were! Those embarrassing teenage messages! There are things not worth remembering and it sucks that Facebook documented all the detail in your life and you can't do something about it on the other end.

Not the 'most embarrassing' part but not my proud moment either.

My sir have recently put me alongside him as the teacher assistant in this summer's batch. Last week he had to go somewhere so he asked me to take a github session with the class( well not exactly asked, but i just voluntarily commented) . mind you am myself a novice, never done anything beyond pushing data commits and pull requests. (But sir was fine with it , saying he wants the students to atleast enough knowledgeable to submit there homeworks.)

Fast forward to Night before class and i am trying to sleep but couldn't. I had all ppts prepared, hell i even prepared a transcript( hell i uploaded it to pastebin thinking i will look at it and read ).

But worst shit always has to happen when you do a presentation.

When the class started, the wify was not working. Those guys had never had done anything related to it so first thing we did was to make sure every of them gets git installed(with lots of embarrassments and requesting everyone to share their hotspots.not my faluts, tbh).

Then again, am a Windows-linux user with noobie linux and null mac experience. So when this 1 girl with mac got problems installing, i was like, "please search on SO" 🐣 .
So after half an hour, almost everyone had their git/github accounts ready to work, so i started woth explaining open source and github's working. In the middle of session, i wanted to show them meaning of github's stars ("shows how appreciated a repo is"), nd i had thought of showing them the react js repo . And when i tried searching it i couldn't find it (its name is just react, not reactjs ) so ,again :🐥🐥🐣

So somehow this session of 1-1.5 hour got completed in 4 hours with me repeating myself many many many times.
And the most stupid thing: our institute has every session recorded, so my awkward presentation is definitely in their computers 🐣🐣🐥🐥

Databases and LDAP down since 1 1/2 days...so embarrassing...am i really working in an it company???
luckily there are options beside work...hello amazon, spotify, devrant...:D

if we got Server/DB issues it always takes about at least half a day to fix it! *facepalm*

Myself a few months into my new role.

I attend the Christmas work event (free bar) and got super drunk. I go the toilet for a piss...

During that time I strike up a conversation with the dude stood next to me and to cut a long story short I end up betting, stake defined, hand shook that the company we both work for will fail within two years due to some governmental reforms I knew little about.

Turns out the dude happens to be one of the board members. Its big company 100's of employees.

There were other employees in the toilet at the time too not 30 minutes later and everyone knew what I'd said. It was rather embarrassing I almost didn't turn up the Monday following.

Not my proudest moment, but thankfully I wasn't fired. Its been 1.8 years... I and still work there.

I have been having one of those days, well weeks where new concepts that would have otherwise taken a few hours, to learn and implement are taking days !! I don't know how y'all consistently learn new things and implement them, while still meeting deadlines.

My team usually holds weekly progress meetings where we discuss completed tasks and the following week's tasks. During the last meeting, I hadn't completed anything worth noting and I had no major reason other than, not having fully understood the concept.
Which is embarrassing because everyone else had done something.

I know, I know, I shouldn't compare myself to others but we all know my boss does. I don't blame him though, I mean I always pick the cake with more icing, and that's just food!

I don't even know what to do about it anymore!!! Is this a phase? Is it normal? What do people do about it? wait it out?

Honestly my worst career choice was due to the fact that I was severely dissatisfied with my life at the time, so I answered a recruiting email from LinkedIn.

The job sounded great on paper, the office was great, the interviewees were amazing, BUT at the end of the day it was so much less of a challenge than my current job that I was sick of it after 3 MONTHS (for reference, people who had worked there for 4 years and were seniors were asking me for help all the time at that point...on basic java problems...yeah..).

So my only advice when you get the itch to respond to a recruiter is definitely weight your options. Ask yourself "Am I really unhappy with my job, or is it something else?" because it can really save you a world of pain later on.

I got a different job thereafter, but it was sure embarrassing to run into my old boss at a party and he was like "how's the new gig" and I had already left...

Double guns (with clicking noise) at the screen when solving a tricky problem

If workspace has Macs connected in local network.
Use ssh to your colleague's mac and make Mac "say weird embarrassing noises" ( if you know what i mean )

Our working hours is 9 to 6, but it feels embarrassing to go home at 6 because you are expected to work overtime.

Pushed the code without compiling. We weren't generating builds before merging the code back then. It was so embarrassing

Not really most painful, but definitely most painful of the recent bunch..
// yup, a bunch.. I've managed to fuck up a little on every thing I did that day :/ little friday the 13th for me, especially as I went on sick leave the next day and had to fixup my fuckups with a friggin migrane..

Anyways, I was fixing fallback to some default value in plsql.. before it didn't check what the input format was and simply relied on certain format, parsed that and converted to number..threw an error, duh!

I fixed it somehow elegantly to check with regex if the format is as expected and if not default to xy value..and if format is as expected to parse out the number..except that when I copied (or typed?! for the sake of me, I cannot recall how the fuck I managed to fuck this up) over the code to the package I didn't see additional [ at the begining, so everything went to the default.. Most embarrassing part is I commented everything, how it should work, use cases, what the input was and what was expected output..and failed to see the friggin extra [..
It was fixed easily, the extra [ stood out later when I saw the code, but it bothers me how I managed to overlook that in the first place. I think I need a vacation.. but have to fix other fuckups first.. :/

Lol. Of all the dev social media, like Dev.to, Hashnode, stack overflow etc .. I find that the most help I get is RIGHT FUCKING HERE BABY. So I'm at it again, asking for help in the form of a question. I'm still looking to get a frontend job. My question is, is a short and sweet e-commerce website, mostly showcasing the ability to code a design, so not fully functional but has great JavaScript and React features in it, like mobile responsiveness, slide nav, item filter, sale price, add to cart animation, pagination, etc..a good resume project that can get you hired? I'm having a hard time finding which if my projects are good, or embarrassing to recruiters.

hr- "so why are looking to switch from X"
me- "well i currently work in b2b domain amd i really want to work on B2C product where millions of users are being impacted"

hr- "yeah we also have premium companies as users and b2b work is not much different than b2c. what else?"

me- "uh umm, also i saw the opening for a journalism company , so i was very tempted to apply as i always
wanted to work for jo-"

hr- "the opening is for p, a subdomain of our company which is a music player"

me- "umm that's okay. i guess i like listening to music as well 😅 . also i wanted to work nearby to my home"

hr- "yeah that's the real reason. your current company is asking you to come to their city"

me- "no they are still remote!" (they aren't)

hr- "i will connect you with another person. please be negotiable"

🥺😭 mann i am so much out of the game i am embarrassing myself over a phone call. can't even answer a stupid why question

(0. First off, being a job I'd like — native software development that is — and not having to default to some boring backend job because "mUh WeB's EvRyThInG TodAy")
1. If the commute isn't too long I have no much problem working in office I think, but I want this to be clear: you let me work with the tools I want. Things like CI are understandably imposed, but let me choose whatever IDE/editor, Git client, etc.
Otherwise off to work from home where no one can check
2. Not having assholes colleagues (obnoxious, stupid, interrupting…)
3. A decent pay. Not high or minimum, just what I'm worth
4. Not drowning in meetings. I want to take part to them to clarify some things and understand what's going on, but I don't think I need more than 2 a day. Ah, and let me tell what's wrong if there's anything
5. Be basically respected. I don't want to be overvalued, that can be embarrassing, but I don't want my work to be completely ignored

Getting frustrated with errors I can't replicate or identify! After spending ages trying to find what's gone wrong and failing, its so embarrassing to suggest "try logging off and logging back in again"