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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serious Question/Poll

Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...

Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)

What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.

What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.

Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.

Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.

Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.

Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.

What else am I missing?

Aaarrrrghhhh! I am frustrated.

My manager keeps cancelling our 1:1, which I look forward to as a potential platform for
- Me to build a rapport
- Discuss key decisions
- Slowly gain her trust that I can lead the entire product

And whenever we connect once in a blue moon, she started inviting two other team members in. Who the hell does that!!!

My colleague, she is nice and hard-working. But she fucking talks a lot. A FUCKING LOT.

1:1 and such key connects are not meant for status updates and this colleagues goes into every minor detail and explains the shit for 15 minutes each. Non-stop. No one really cares or bothers for that level of statuses.

Today she spoke for 30 minutes without a breather break. Everyone went numb.

But whatever, fuck it. I am getting things done by her so let her talk. I'll get my way through manager and skip level guy.

On the other side, they recruited a half witted potato for training. That was completely unnecessary. I am not putting in my time and efforts on someone who isn't willing to learn and contribute.

I spent more than a week explaining her basics of how to write a god damn user story and detailed functional requirements.

And even after 5 rounds of feedback (45 minutes each) the potato is stuck on colour of the button and alignment.

GOD DAMN FUCK! SOMEONE KILL ALL THE MORONS WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND BASICS AFTER SO MUCH EXPLANATION.

I was really an impatient guy in past but over the years, I developed to be more calm and forgiving. Yet some people manage to get on my every nerve.

How the fuck am I supposed to grow when I am being dragged down instead being with smart colleagues where we can just accelerate to success!!!!

FU*** unnamed company..... lets recap.
I went for a job interview at this unnamed company i was acting like me and dress like i normally do, witch is good not extrem like a model but normal OK. like you would see in any company.

Yes maybe i could have got a haircut but you know time...

but not to drift, i when i was myself in the interview and no out of the ordinary things happend....

3 days later they call with feedback and you properly guest it! they did not like my appearance..

Like why? my feedback to them was to think that refusing someone based on there personal statement of looking fucking average JO is not good thing to do. and that it makes them look like big "i am better than you..." jerks....
of course there was more of this so called "feedback".

They also ask if i had any feedback for them... i kindly suggested that they need to invest in training how to not judge people on how they look but on there ability of there work and skill....

pfff.. that gone! alright thanks devrant for this outlet.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

We're having a training session on how to speak with clients because we're getting feedback that we seen annoyed in our emails.

Probably my fault, not that I mean for that to bleed through into my replies

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere.
AI-based ads
AI-based anomaly detection
AI-based chatbots
AI-based database optimization (AlloyDB)
AI-based monitoring
AI-based blowjobs
AI-based malware
AI-based antimalware
AI-based <anything>
...

But why?
It's a genuine question. Do we really need AI in all those areas? And is AI better than a static ruleset?

I'm not much into AI/ML (I'm a paranoic sceptic) but the way I understand it, the quality of AI operation correctness relies solely on the data it's
datamodel has been trained on. And if it's a rolling datamodel, i.e. if it's training (getting feedback) while it's LIVE, its correctness depends on how good the feedback is.

The way I see it, AI/ML are very good and useful in processing enormous amounts of data to establish its own "understanding" of the matter. But if the data is incorrect or the feedback is incorrect, the AI will learn it wrong and make false assumptions/claims.

So here I am, asking you, the wiser people, AI-savvy lads, to enlighten me with your wisdom and explain to me, is AI/ML really that much needed in all those areas, or is it simpler, cheaper and perhaps more reliable to do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. preprogramming a set of static rules (perhaps with dynamic thresholds) to process the data with?

Sometimes I really feel humiliated in my lab.

We have several presentation/discussion groups in my lab that meet once a week or so where members present their progress reports. Generally people in my lab are not so enthusiastic about them. Which is okay, I also don't like doing presentations, but you know, you have to improve somehow and get feedback somehow.

So I've been in a really passive group for a while and I decide to join this other group since they seem to have good discussions, but nope fuck me.

The first time I present, the professor doesn't show up since he has some meeting, so obviously nobody cares to show up. And I'm there presenting for a guy who is half comatose. Alright, I guess that's the price for joining a new team, it's gonna get better next time.

Second time. Spent all night to prepare my presentation and been training my model for two weeks. I am actually really happy with the results of my networks. But the enjoyment of showing some good results, I shall not have.

Meeting leader doesn't show up. Two guys who should present don't show up. Professor doesn't show up. A different professor substitutes him and has no idea what I am talking about and asks stupid questions that don't really have an answer. Fuck me, I'm so angry, this shit is a waste of time. If you don't show up, care to fucking send an email or a message on slack, but guess you're too fucking retarded to even do that.

I'm so done with this. I've gotten better feedback from reddit, than what I've cumulatively gotten from my laboratory. I'm a moment away from walking up to the meeting leader and telling him that the meetings are stupid and a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, my professor is really nice and knowledgeable, but he fails to see that some people in the laboratory are shit.

What do I do? How do I deal with these people? Right now they're planning a trip! Why are you planning a trip? WHAT ARE YOU REWARDING YOURSELVES FOR? YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING IN WEEKS? omfg

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

Me, pretty new in a big company, still in training, in a new department. I wasn't given any work to to ... for three month! Some scripts I had to write in a few days. Asked the team leader almost daily for a few weeks. In the feedback he told me, if a had asked him more often, he would have maybe thought if some more tasks ... and the worst part: no private surfing ...