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It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.
During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.
I guess I was just ahead of my time?6 -
My company is asking me to create a new gmail account everyday and write a positive review with 5 stars for their iOS app on App Store. Is that even legal? Should I say no? I’m a fucking engineer, not a click-farm worker.10
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Somebody made a fake review on my app! That's how I dealt with him 😂
The app is "My Classes" on app store
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Pissed that employers try to post fake happy reviews RIGHT AFTER a bad review. How about fixing your company and not treating people like crap?!2
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Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.
(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)
I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.
Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.
Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.
Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).
All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.
Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.
Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?
Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)
What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.
And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.
Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.
Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.
Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).
It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.
What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.
Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.9 -
So my friend who is currently attending University to major in Computer Science just started programming Java a few days ago. His first assignment was to learn bubble sort and make it organize a table of certain values provided in the assignment with a few other items on the side. Apparently, he was stressing over the assignment and waited till the last night to do this, and was running on 2 hours of sleep. Anyways, a few days pass and he received a 0% on the assignment with the comment "See me on Monday." and questioned what he did wrong (They use GitHub to submit their assignments, even though other classes at the University just commit to the University Server for Computer Science), and asked me to review the code. When I started looking at the code, all he managed to do was just make two tables, one that would print the unsorted table, and then print the "sorted" table. Plus, the catch that got him in trouble, he named his package "fuckthisshit", how does one not realize that when they're submitting their assignments... like seriously? Like I can understand the 2 hours of sleep, but with 1000s of examples out there, how do you manage to fake bubble sort plus end up naming a package "fuckthisshit" and question why he got a 0%. I do feel bad for him in the long run since there aren't many assignments in this class so this was worth 25%.
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Someone created a 0-followers private Twitter account and posted something to try out the new views count feature.
It raked dozens of views in a couple hours.
HOW?!?
Source: https://twitter.com/briggityboppity...
It looks like a funny data reverse-engineering exercise, so let's try and figure out what is going on.
Hypothesis 1) it is the OP's own views.
Reasonable, but unlikely if what OP says about not checking it for hours is true.
H2) It's some background job in OP's device that is refreshing OP's own latest tweets, so even without human interaction technically H1 is true. It would be some really shoddy engineering to count eye-less page views, but that's also what managers would demand.
H3) it's some internal Twitter automated function like back up, replication, indexing and word count.
See H2, it would be even dumber to count that as page views.
H4) it's some internal human reviewing for a keyword that could be associated with porn (in this case, "butts"). Really? dozens of humans to review a no-impact single post? They would have to employ hundreds of thousands of reviewers.
H5) it's some page-loading shit, like thousands of similar tweets get stored in the same index hash page and end up counting as a view in all of them every time someone loads the index page. It would be like counting every hit in the namenode as a hit in every data asset in it's Hadoop partition, or every hit in a storage block as a hit in each of it's files.
Duuuumb and kinda like H3.
H6) page views are just a fraud to scam investors. Maybe it's a "most Blockchain transactions are fake" situation, maybe it's a "views get more engagement if you don't think a lot about it" situation, maybe it's a "we don't use the metric system to count page views" situation.
All of them are very dumb.
Other hypothesis or opinions?8 -
Keeping up the tradition!
https://devrant.com/rants/15030806/...
Now powered by the awesome Claude 4!!!! The latest bleeding edge gem in the LLM trend that by the bold claims of big tech and various youtubers is stunning and will replace programmers/insane/godsmacking
This time, I decided to post because I was on the verge of a mental breakdown and I had a firsthand experience and a bit of free time, so instead of waiting that the rage boils down, I just took the chance and so we have a fresh AI experience to proof my previous rants.
Problem:
I have an application that manages interactions between a Mediator pattern between Kafka, some http listeners and other stuff (Rabbitmq, Redis (redis= another shit) etc etc)
Kafka handling was already done, i needed to exacly replicate what was being done with kafka for http. I said, heck, we have AI, it's good to do bovine stupid work, why not let him copy the whole structure, they have also agents on copilot on vs code, and they pulled out Claude 4, let's give it faith again.
Big error.
Beside the havoc the fucking agentic AI not being able to fully copy an already existing pattern and scaffolding, it did half shit wrong.
One of the most frustrating parts, since today I have an example, was this (summarized version of the prompt because I was very much more specific also giving the AI files and pointers to the code and explaining it):
PROMPT:"I have to return fake http transports, just copy what exists for kafka and adapt it to a new transport type called "Http", this is the structure {json with the class}
AI: "I need to see the current ITransportsItemResponse interface first to understand the structure, then I'll modify ...... BLAH BLAH"
Of course I had to review the whole code.
PROMPT:"any valid reason why you dumb shithead didn't respect the IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse and generic IGetTransportsItemResponse format and you pulled out of your ass a full blown IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse with extra properties when compared to IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse"
AI: "You're absolutely right, I fucked up. Looking at the IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse interface, it has way more properties than the basic IGetTransportsItemResponse and IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse interfaces. BLAH BLAH wall of text reasoning"
Then it modified the api calls to suit the kafka objects and didn't update any class of the Http transports
PROMPT:"So you tought it was a good idea to leave the #sym:IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse like it is respect to #sym:IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse ? Why? And answer the why don't apologize like a little wuss"
AI: "I left them different because they represent different domain concepts... BLAH BLAH EXPLANATIONS WALL OF TEXT"
Now ai tought it was good to do this and that but....
PROMPT: "In your fucking careful analysis didn't you reallize the "items" object are a basic representation and in the fuckin same folder there is also the object with the full set of properties?"
Literally it missed objects used in the same folder for different scopes and modified stuff without caring.
AI: "You're absolutely right. I missed that there are TWO different response types BLA BLAH"
I won't continue to not get too lenghty than it already is but the point is:
AI IS RETARDED.
People say it will replace programmers.
People says agents are the future.
Sad reality it's an overglorified broken ball of if/else that can't do shit well beside bovine work.
No amount of tutoring it with careful prompts, explainig the code and whatever else is going to fix it.
I've used gpt since gpt 3 and no model has been up to anything good, not even NLP. They suck also at the sole scope they were invented for.
I tried to ask GPT to make a curriculum based on another, I gave it the example curriculum and another one with the informations.
I carefully explained that it must not be a copy of the other, they are 2 different roles and to play by fantasy to make it look it was written by 2 different persons and to not copy stuff from the other.
Hope lost. It looked like the other curriculum was copied over and some words swapped, lol.
What a fucking joke, lmao, I am studying deep learning and machine learning to get on the bandwagon to make my professional figure more appealing, but I can already feel this is a waste of time.7 -
What do you do when you need good solder, but you can’t get EU/US/Japanese stuff where you live? No, you don’t buy Chinese. You buy ПОС-61, together with 500g of pure rosin, made in Smolensk, Russia.
The recipe and the supply chain didn’t change since the Soviet Union. They arrived today with the order number of, I kid you not, 666, and the set costed me $9 for 100g of solder and 500g of rosin. That rosin combined with ethanol gets you ФСКп flux that will last a lifetime. It does the job and doesn’t require cleaning.
Yes, some Chinese solder and flux are better, but I didn’t find a single AliExpress shop without at least one review telling that the thing they’re selling was fake. And you can be damn sure that if a Chinese listing says that there is 100g of solder, it will be 98 grams together with the spool and paper.
Soviet stuff is predictable. It says 100g, but weights 119g with the spool. If it says Sn61Pb39 that melts at 190℃, it will be exactly that, every time. And if it was good enough for Soviet tech, it’s good enough for my DIY endeavors.
And yes, it flows like syrup, and after it cools down, it shines like jewelry.
(can't upload pics bc pics are dead again!)3 -
Ok story number 2, this one takes place back when I was at Uni.
We had a group project where we had to make a basic website. Nothing fancy, just basic HTML/CSS/JS.
We were a group of 3, one of the guys did a fairly good job with the CSS, he made a really good looking banner/footer and a kind of ‘featured’ page which looked awesome.
But the other guy... his contribution was the ‘contact us’ page, which consisted of a totally static table with dummy info and an embedded Google map showing the location of our fake car dealership.
Meanwhile I wrote all the Javascript, complete with a fake in-memory database containing our car data for displaying on the home page. Even had basic filtering. I made sure to mention in the peer review that I felt like he could have done more.
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