A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

Sometimes I feel like my wife woke up with a "--verbose" flag on...

classmate: Hey, "friend" told me you do freelance website development. right? I need to create a new website and need your help.

Me: umm... OK... what's it about?

Classmate: It's for my dad's friend's business.

Me: OK. but I will charge the standard rate.

classmate: No... I will make it myself. I just want your help.

Me(Internally): ...not again...

Me: Do it yourself then.

Classmate: It will be quick. an hour or two max.

Me: *speechless*

Classmate: And one of my uncle who did IT told me that c++ is faster. can we use that instead of HTML?

Me: huh...?

classmate: you don't know shit.

... classmate walks away...

This guy somehow manages to get As in exams (mostly cheating. and our papers are shitty theory papers which you can mug up. so that helps) and in a year will have an IT degree.

There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

You might know by now that India demonetized old higher value notes and brought in new one. The new ones easily tear off easily and generally feel cheaper and less reliable than pervious ones.

One interesting thing people discovered is that rubbing it with cloth makes the ink transfer to the cloth. Sign of crap printing. Here's government response:
The new currency notes have a security feature called 'intaglio printing'. A genuine currency note can be tested by rubbing it with a cloth; this creates a turbo-electric effect, transferring the ink colour onto the cloth
TL;DR: its not a bug, it's a feature

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

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

like, fucking really?

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

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

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

talk about ridiculous.

This a red flag, ain’t it?

I'm sick of how much abuse PHP gets from other programming communities. PHP written well, using PHP 7 is comparatively quick. yes it has its quirks, just like JavaScript, but just because you can do stuff in multiple ways, and the language has a few inconsistencies doesn't make it a bad language. The recursive flag in bash applications changes case inconsistently (I.e. zip and cp) but that doesn't get bashed (lol) half as much....

I think I need to finish my coffee this morning

Tldr : In my country, there is always a middleman .It is so rare to work for end client directly and it is very common to be fuck over by them, because they want milk you out as much as possible

Job description : Salary range from X to Y

Me : I expect 90% of Y $
HR : if you pass technical examination we can agree on this amount.

*Technical interview*
All correct answers, perfect match with stack etc.

HR calling next day:
HR: Great job on interview, but you need to lower your financial expectation to X (around 50% of Y)
Me: Why? We have spoken the other day and you said there would be no problem with the money. I nailed the interview, I don't understand why I should agree to lower wage.
HR: I know I know, but right now we cannot give more. Maybe later
Me: I am sorry, but I feel kinda cheated. For me this is red flag since I don't know what I can expect later if you are not sincere from the beginning. I won't take your offer, goodbye.

Easter eggs you've added to your applications.

Had to wirte and optimize a C++ program that finds for 1000x1000x1000 grid points the 100 nearest points for each (with an additional factor to make it more complicated).
It had to run in under 18 minutes to pass. No matter what I did I couldn't get it fast enough. I tried kd-trees, caching of certain points, optimizing distamce calculations by ommiting any irrelevant factor, saving points' calculated squares etc etc. When Ibwas down to 20 minutes, I realized, that my makefile had an error and ignored the - O3 flag...
Well, it actually ran 5 minutes with -O3.

So today I receive 23 emails on DMCA takedown notice from last year project (which is a personal project). I asked Github why they think it is violating their policy, they told me they receive tonnes of complaints from a company, they shared the chat and that's the ex-company that fired me.

Even the project is not related to them, they seem to want to "Cancel" me on Github. Bro this is Github, not Twitter! Cancel culture does not work here.

Some of my IoT projects they flag it In Github, which I believe my ex-company they don't do any IOT projects. How the fuck it is violating their so called "code nondisclosure"?

The correct version flag is either -v and/or --version not this stupid -version shit

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

Talking with colleagues earlier about dealing with a cocky intern:

"Ah, I had one of those last year. I told him to make sure when using the find command, always use the -delete flag to clear up any temporary files it creates while it's searching."

"Man, that's harsh. Did that take him down a peg?"

"Nah, not at all, but he never spoke to me again after that, so I'm calling it a win."

Went in, done everything perfectly, they want me in… cool.

“We know you have a 2 months notice, but could you boil it down to 2 weeks?”

“I uh… no… not really, I have tasks to pass and I doubt the company would like me to just rush out like that…”

“Come on, just stop working and tell them to fire you”

“I… no? I told you I have an important role it would be irresponsible to just leave like that… assuming they want me out that bad…”

“Okay then give notice and we’ll send you the contract”

1 week later, fortunately I didn’t give the notice

“Aaaah regarding the contract… we are postponing it for 4 months cause we needed 2 roles and we decided to hire the other role as we wait”

2 months and a half later, still didn’t give notice cause the postponing was a red flag

“Aaah sorry buddy the budget is not enough but we have to wait 3 more months cause investors moved the payment to January”

Never heard from them again… fortunately I didn’t give the notice and I started to search another job after the 2 months and a half thing.

Remember: until the contract is signed, nothing is set in stone.

So I have a teacher that when he use "C++" it is basically C with a .cpp file-extension and -O0 compiler flag.

Last assignment was to implement some arbitrary lengthy calculation with a tight requirement of max 1 second runtime, to force us to basically handroll C code without using std and any form of abstraction. But because the language didn’t freeze in time 1998, there is a little keyword named "constexpr" that folded all my classes, arrays, iterators, virtual methods, std::algorithms etc, into a single return statement. Thus making my code the fastest submitted.

Lesson of the story, use the language to the fullest and always turn on the damn optimizer

Ok now I’m done 😚

I love when job postings are like, you will use THIS tool, and THIS is how it will be accomplished!!!! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

bitch, i'm the senior engineer, I should be the one picking and choosing tools to match your needs, not you and HR pals!

no wonder your job offer still isnt' filled!

i'd love to ask these organizations why they chose such boomer technologies in the first place and why there is no effort to change to much more developer / user friendly tools.... just a red flag from the start

An application based on a single MySQL stored procedure that contained all the application business logic inside of it (plus a poor webapp that simply called it). The stored procedure had 97 (yes, NINETY SEVEN) parameters... and about half of them were boolean flag used for enabling/disabling another parameter. I think that Uncle Bob could follow you holding an AK-47 if he saw that. The saddest part is that the shit was written by a guy having a PhD in computer science, and he knew that was bad, but the boss asked him to do it in that way. The guy left the company before I joined it and I had to maintain that crap. Guys, the first time I saw it I thought that should be a joke. Code generated by decompilers was easier to read, maybe even Brainfuck. I tried complaining with the boss but she said that the system was wonderful and very efficient. This was one of the reasons I moved to another company after some months.

potential new client, immediately says:

"we have to get this website to number 1 on google as fast as possible!!!!!"

god why is it always the same

i'm tempted to ask, "great, no problem, do you have thousands to spend?"

i already know what the answer is

🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡🚩🤡

Just scored my personal red flag bingo in new project:
- engineers who work there for 20+ years
- their own in house build tool
- "we have Jira so it means we are agile"
- "we have Jenkins so it means we do Ci/cd"
- git adoption is "in progress"

(!dev)

Fuck Twitter.

I get sucked in for 10 minutes through some news article, and my blood is boiling.

I think the platform does not even deserve to exist.

And I didn't think I would ever say that.

I used to be a staunch defender of the free & open internet, even with it's ugly and extreme sides, because I was convinced the good would outshine the evil.

I displayed the Pirate flag with pride on the mast outside of my house, I was intimately involved in the founding of their political party in my country. I was convinced of the power of the internet, I believed it would empower democracy and debate.

So why do simple tweets, even just the ones about technology, incite an endless stream of vile ultranationalist & misogynist hate?

How is it that those who are reasonable get drowned out?

That fucking character limit is a cancer.

The orator's wings are clipped. The richness of language is wilting before our eyes. All that remains are a bunch of caged chickens pecking every argument to death.

I will defend the right to free speech, even when it comes to the most disagreeable and controversial opinions.

But Twitter does not promote free speech. It's poison to free speech.

It's an endless torrent of non sequiturs, which constricts all reason and intellect. It replaces free speech by pretending to have equal value.

I really don't care if you are left or right, socialist or libertarian, globalist or nationalist.

You can argue to me that we should close all borders for immigrants, that Apple makes great products, that genocide has its pros, you could try to convince me that Heineken tastes acceptable (sorry AlexDeLarge), that Linux should be outlawed or that we should really try to bring this Eugenics thing back again.

Just be fucking rational -- and "Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe"

You can NOT fit both your beliefs and their supporting reasons in 140 or even 280 characters.

So what's left is just your beliefs.

Stripped of all reason.

Repeat it often enough, keep spewing, keep throwing out incomplete arguments, and you'll train yourself to forego ratio in your convictions completely.

All social platforms should get a forced captcha for every spelling/grammar error, and a 1000 character minimum.

The world would be a slightly better place.

If I flag a bug on your PR don’t fucking do this:

if (bugOccurs()) handleBug()

Fix what is causing the bug, don’t bandaid it.

Manager: wElL yOu NeEd To ExPlAiN tO tHeM eXaCtLy HoW tO fIx It, hOw ArE tHeY sUpPoSeD tO kNoW?!

Dev: …

Why use boolean for a simple flag when you can use a fucking nullable string? Kurwa no.

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

*ring ring*
Me: Hello?
Unknown: We received info that your computer has a wirus
Me: and how do you know?
Unknown: We received a report
(Playing Along)
Me: Ok? How do I fix it?
Unknown: Sir, are you by your computer?
Me: Yes (No, I am at work 😇)
Unknown: Sir, do you see the ctr key?
Me: Yes (here it comes)
Unknown: Do you see the flag picture?
Me: Yes (Getting closer)
Unknown: Press both the flag key and the r key at the same time. (BINGO!!!)
Me: My computer crashed and it is saying your a scammer, so bye.

It is fun to trick scammers!

"This is incredibly unprofessional. You need to give at least 2 weeks notice like any other company that you work for" - Hiring manager to me after I said I couldn't come in today to the office.

Background for y'all:
1. I did a 2-day interview process and I never received news from HR that I got hired
2. I followed up today with HR and only then did they tell me in WhatsApp "Oh well you're hired"
3. HR didn't go into details about the contract, I was the one who proactively asked about it and HR just said "Oh I will send you your contract tomorrow and all the details."
4. Ergo, no contract has been signed TODAY and I have not gone through it and above all, I haven't accepted the offer yet

I gave the company a notice 30 minutes after thinking this through and said I won't come in today and made up a story (that I accepted another offer but really come on that's already a red flag - asking somebody to come in without a signed contract hey I'm not working for free)

Hiring manager said the above plus "I understand there's no contract yet but we're short on the team now so you should be on the train to come here"

No. I'm not obliged to do a 2 weeks notice when I do not have any contract binding me to this. You should appreciate I gave a notice instead of not showing up. Please tell me how professional your company is when internally your hiring team doesn't communicate with the hiring manager and you don't know the hiring laws of the country???

Eh fuck it, it's a 1 hr 41 minutes commute anyway if I ever did accept their offer.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

Unless you had a horrible accident where you lost most of your fingers, I don't understand why anyone would do this. I had to double check I wasn't looking at obfuscated code.

```
String a;
String flag;
String tp;
String n;
String chn;
String lt;
String lg;
String bid;
String d;
```

Story time...of how HR actually did its job of taking care of employees.

So, I started at this new gig on December, the boss was all sunshine and promise (big red flag now to think back). Then as time passed, he started seeming...off. To a point I considered quitting my boss just after 2 months of working for him.

Then one morning we had a project meeting. He started verbally abusing me, calling me incompetent, bashing my work (of which he knew ~nothing, his experience 30 years back). Earlier in the week he demanded me to make a presentation which he in this meeting told is complete bullshit without actually reading any of it. He told me 'I am your boss, you do exactly as I say' when I told him something is technologically impossible in the situation we're in. He *actually* told me to break the law with data protection...

This was like wtf dude. That's not how you manage people. So, I made an HR ticket about his behaviour. They were *shocked* and escalated the matter.

Long story short: he was a bully, he's getting fired, my team has a new manager. My workplace actually appreciates my expertise.

Bad thing in this is, now I actually need to continue doing my job. ;_;

C=consultant
M=Me
D=my Dumb boss

M: so how are you guys planning to implement the block all accounts feature?
C: oh it should be easy! We will just loop over every account and lock it!
M: what about implementing a flag that just blocks anyone from accessing the site till further notice?
C: what? I’m sure it’ll work. Just need a list of all accounts, we don’t need anything fancy!
M: what happens when we want to revert back to the pre-block state?
C: oh, so we will just unblock everybody
M: even people who were previously blocked for good reasons?
C: i guess so, unless you think otherwise
M: we r….
D: listen! We just need to be able to block all accounts, who cares about this details! So long as we block all accounts! We need this nuclear option in case something bad happens…
M: but what about when that bad thing passes and…
D: when it passes it passes who cares!

Arghhh so much rage here… like first at the stupid engineering design of looping over all of the accounts instead of using a simple flag. Like 1 http call (from one microservice to another) is a lot better than O(n)… not to mention, we won’t have to deal with failures and retries.

And second for my boss being a dumbass… ok you deal with being to afraid to unblock people after we used this “genius nuclear option”!

A tip to tech folks from my personal xp.

If you fuck up and make an impacting mistake in your company, like taking PROD down, noone is going to fire you on spot. Assign some more mandatory trainings - maybe. So you'd be more careful next time.

See, it's not worth getting rid of someone who made a mistake. You should be seated down and insisted to fix it. If you don't - then they might consider firing it. If you do fix it [with help or alone] - you become a more valuable asset to the company as you prove you are responsible for your actions and you take it seriously. You show that you can clean up your own shit and you don't need a babysiter next to you.

If you simply make a mistake and they replace you with someone else, that someone else is likely to be unaware of your mistakes and is doomed to repeat them. It's just bad for business.

Ofc if you making mistakes becomes a tendency rather than an exception, it's also a red flag for the business.

Don't get too laxed! And always answer for your shit. Never hide a fuckup - always alarm about it asap so that corrective actions could be taken by respective organs of the company while you are fixing it.
Come up with an action plan, announce it. Estimate resources you need [like help from others] - announce that too. Update concerned parties every half an hour or so about the status. If you find you need anything else while fixing it or you come across some blockers/delays/change of impact - always announce asap. Do avoid false alarms and disinformation.

// inspired by someone's rant today

Horrible interview story:
I was interviewed in a meeting room along with 2 other applicants at the same time. Our CVs were read to us in front of each other, and the questions were asked game show style where the fastest one answers.
It was terribly unprofessional and a huge red flag.
They wanted to give me a starting salary of 1000$.
Thankfully, I got accepted in another much better company before making a possibly huge mistake.

What’s the advantage of living in Switzerland? Well, the flag is a big plus.

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

The worst project is the one I am currently working on. I didn’t build it but have to manage it, because... Reasons.

The projects is made on Core PHP(red flag right there).
But when I dig in I get to see there is no authentication used in any of the REST service. Yup. What's the fucking point of login if you are just going to update profiles based on user_id you Twat! The querying used is simply mysql_query (I have to say I expected that).
No relationships defined in the Mysql table structure. No migrations.
There is an upload feature which is forcing the image to be saved as jpeg, therby corrupting the images being saved on the server.
No security, terrible logic, no classes, terrible architecture.

And I am the chosen one to maintain this shit!

Truely, FML!!!

I was about to use the Duolingo but I think it triggered me to hard. 2 mistakes in a row.

1. I have Portuguese origins and they used the Brazilian flag

2. I was born in Luxemburg and they just used our flag for The Netherlands (I know they're pretty similar but cmooooon)

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

A friend asked if I could take a look at the function, which he wrote, to see if two trees are equal.

The chat conversation:

F: I sent code.
Me: *put eye on "flag and && true"
F: Hey?
F: You are there?
F: All right?!

A few hours later...

Me: Each time this function is executed, a programmer dies. Goodbye.

And so it's over.

Red flag, when a company says: "You're never going to leave us, right?".

Previous dev created a switch statement on a boolean flag. WTF

So I just got this email from a tech company, I registered to send my CV some years ago , about a dev Job openning.

The descripition included:
Java and Angular ( first red flag )

So I go to their site to check it out ...
No https, ping the domain returns an ip from another continent with 500+ ms latency.

Major flaws on the site usability...
Super dumb password recovery method...

I'm fucking outta here dude. I might send them a proposition to fix their servers and at least put it behind letsencrypt though...

And these morons have big clients, like my bank... wtf...

Just had a talk with our backend Java guys

Our Java code is so FUCKED UP now because of frequent changes that you can easily upload it to porn sites as a gangbang video and nobody will flag it as inappropriate 😁😐

The company who sounded like Dominic Toretto during interview, Is a big red flag.

Employer : "We are family"
Me : 'Really ? Since we are family... Can I have your car please? , Bro I need 5000 MYR'.

If ever anyone from workplace say "we are family " again, I am going to act as if "we are family". I shoud be comfortable to ask for employer's money and drive his car out like a bro.

No? then we are not family.

Hehehehe (n_n)

!rant;

I'm so sad today. I completely lost my confidences in what I do. I recently I created an app , spent 72 hours doing that , made the app as simple as possible, The intention is clear , to help those who are in need during this pandemic.

Recently my country have the campaign (initiate by the people) raising white flags for help (food, financial help). Since our government begin to arrest those who raise their flag for help and summoned them for MYR 3000 .

So I thought making a platform where people can raise their flag digitally might be easy, but I go rejected .

Well in Malaysia, No one give a fuck about you unless you are a celebrity . Sometimes I wish I am , therefore I do changes. But unfortunately I am just a 25 year old self taught software engineer but not someone with PHD or fame .

Fuck me.

I'm task to amend the code smell in the project. I literally can cry a river.
I see such thing as i = i++; - It's flag out as a bug.

I have also seen check in classes. With un-used variables. I literally cried.

In the past, i ask why do i got to care about code quality. I actually start to get angry like the team leads in my project.

Ouch. Friend started at a smallish company (~20 employees), and instead of a new machine he got handed the CEO's 5 year old Dell so the CEO could buy a new machine.

He sees it as no big deal, but am I the only one that sees that as (to put it mildly) a bit of a red flag? It's not the machine itself that's so much of a problem, more the attitude behind the decision that stinks.

Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.

It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?

I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.

If you can get a chat with the CEO I would ask this question.

“From your vantage point, what do you see as your job as CEO?”

Anything less than a list of 10-50 different job responsibilities is a total pass. It shows the the CEO thinks he knows it all. Everyone can and should grow and it has to come from the top down.

If you don’t hear anything about building culture then this is a problem. If you do, then probe further.

If the CEO seems to give the impression that he is above answering this question for “someone in your position” then this is a big red flag.

In my view everything in a startup come from the top down, and shit runs up hill. Therefore the CEO has to not only perform every conceivable task but must have a desire to learn and grow. A CEO who doesn’t learn builds companies that don’t learn. Companies that don’t learn, fail.

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

!rant
My first design work (in Adobe XD)

Design has never been my strong point (implementation or design) but am very interested in designing interfaces.

Don't hold your horses. Criticize this. I want to know what you think about this.

Godammit Homebrew.

It's bad enough having to develop C on a Mac, now Homebrew is refusing to let me install a package that needs root privilege. Support simply says "no package needs root privileges" and "run as an admin". BITCH, THIS PACKAGE NEEDS IT.

So now I'm downloading homebrew source just to add a "--fuckingdoit" flag that skips their shitty "no sudo" rule.

Tooling should save me time, not WASTE it.

Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.

Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent

After months of searching for jobs, ended up I got called by a guy who claimed that he would want to partner with me to start a company. Well, I would love to start one, not without certain knowledge.

The so-called "partner" has a very bad attitude, unable to communicate, blames others for his own wrongdoing, arrogant, gullible and ignorant.

He asked me whether I believe in a deity (God). He demanded me to swear to the "upper heavens" that I will get "eternal punishment" if I ever cheated or betray his every decision.

This is a huge red flag!

I just want to have a "will smith slap" him so hard.

I accidentally created something adorable. See, what happened was I wanted to figure out how to programmatically create blobcats for different countries, since I’d done it by hand for every country represented at my company and wanted a quick way to catch up once we add people from different countries.

Enter Cloudinary!
Wrote a transform that would take the image, shrink it to 150 px wide, then add the blobcat emoji as the underlayer behind and above it, then add the little arms I drew die holding the flag on top.

And that worked! I had a folder of flags and the frontend could query them using the transformations and the country blobcats were born! I even added a preset so I could view the little blobcats with their flags when I looked at the uploaded flags

But then I’m like “Eh, each transform adds a thing against my limit and I really don’t want to go over if this gets popular (why do I ever think _that’s_ a possibility?). I know! I’ll just add the transform on upload and reupload all the flags to a different folder! Then I’ll just need to request the image instead of having to do the transform per request.

And that worked!

But I forgot I still had my preset transform on.

So in addition to the successful country blobcat, I had a preview of what I like to call papa blobcat with kitten blobcat.

“Let’s not worry about the future and stick to the specs, please.”

Or as I like to call it:

The reddest flag in a bad manager.

So we've been working with a VM at a university course I'm taking during semester break. Keyboard layout was QWERTY instead of QWERTZ, and I'm not used to the first layout, but no problem, I can fix that.
Or so I thought.

So I spend nearly half an hour trying to configure the VM to use the desired layout without altering the Ubuntu instance that much - only to then suddenly discover a small USA flag in the corner of the panel bar which could be changed by clicking once to the German flag.
This also changed the keyboard layout instantly.
So, yay, I guess. D:

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

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

Boss: So what are your biggest achievements for this year?
Me: mmm, probably not killing myself
Boss: .....
Me: I meant I reduced the number of fraudulent transactions in our service by adding machine learning to flag suspicious transaction
Boss: Yeah, you should've start with that
Me: .....

The feeling when random dudes downvote a question, because a guy who finally earned some points on SO dared to format the code with `<code>`<br> He pasted code, log, even explained a little bit and ~500 point guy even flags it like _unclear_ although there's clearly visible import error.

I mean... as an answerer or moderator, I'd be damn ashamed for such behavior! I have absolutely no problem kick a person with words + explanation in my answer or comment, so that (s)he remembers to ask better questions and feels bad about that, because nooby questions are already answered so many times there.

But to downvote because of formatting even if you have a permission to edit and a flag for low quality or because you can't read ~40 lines of log makes you just a retard and hurt the whole remaining community of guys like me who find time to sit there and answer questions to help another people.

!dev but rant

Samsung
Samsung...

Samsung!! What the fuck is wrong with you?
Some longer time ago you earned forst red red flag called knox. What the fuck you mean there is physical diode in phone that will burn out when I do whatever I want with phone? Its my phone. My. I live in europe and european law is with me. Its **MY** stuff and Im allowed to be super user so fuvk off with knox bullshit.

Okay, now, more and more phone are missing critical feature to save few cents a phone. You were last bastion. You were **that** company who was loyal to audio jacks. And why the fuck you plan to remove it? You know what? That one thing brought your phones from one of best (becouse retained audio jacks and didnt do much of notch fuckupery) to literally worst one thanks to knox.

And before anyone tells me bullshit apple tried to say "thats space saving", no its not true to point where one of their very own Iphones had internally space and traces for audio jacks. Its to save pennies on phone for profit margins and to force us to use bluetooth stuff, that I dislike. I stick to my K518 few years now and I am super happy user of it. Why y'all want to take away good stuff?

Oneplus, your turn. Why the luving fuck your big bulletpoint of marketing was "yes, we will keep loyal to audio jacks" and later down the line you shown one big fat middle finger to all users.

Goos job, guys, well fucked up.

So any good modern alternatives for my OnePlus 5 when it becomes obstole in few years? Nope. Fuck nope.

OP7 pro is awesome but no audio jacks absolutely kills off this phone in my eyes to level of not existance and inability to be considered.

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

WTF is this shit? Multiply by 0 * Math.pow(2,0) upto Math.pow(2, 10).

Like why the fuck would you write that and not write a comment as to why that logic and explain everything else. Fucking fuck.

Turns out this logic is supposed to mimic the back end logic of breaking the flag value into binary and then set other flags depending on each bit. But why would you do that? I was starting to doubt if 0*n = 0.

This piece of code is inefficient, trying to be smartass, doesn't explain shit and doesn't have the only comment that mattered.

I once reviewed some code that parsed HTML using regex (red flag #1), and it turns out that it had to be done that way because the company's HTML was so malformed that no actual parser would accept it without erroring

A chick asked how much I earn, and I politely declined to answer.

She seemed annoyed and insisted, nudging me by saying how much she earns.

Again I told her I'd rather not say.

She got mad, started trying to emotionally blackmail me into telling her my salary...

This must be a red flag cuz I don't give two fucks about how much money people I date earn/have and expect them to either respect or share my view

I JUST HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT MAKES ONE WANT TO BANG TWO BRICKS ON HEAD SND END THE PAIN THE STORY STARTS YESTETDAY WITH ISSUES AFTER A MIGRSTION AND THEY ASK ME TO HELP TROUBLESHOOT EVEN THOUGH I'M A DEV DBA AND THE ISSUE IS IN QA/SAT AND I HELP ANYWAY AND THEY CAN'T FIND A VIEW AND SO I LOOK EVERYWHERE AND CAN'T DOING IT EITHER AND IT DIDN'T EXIST IN PROD OR DEV SO I TELL THEM IT'S NOT THERE, AND THEY ARE LIKE, CAN YOU RETRIEVE IT FOR US AND I'M LIKE FROM WHERE? I DON'T KEEP VIEWS IN MY BUTT AND YOU GUYS ARE SMOKING CRACK AND THE GIVE ME THEIR QUERY WHICH CONTAIN THE VIEE ANYWAY AND THEY SAY CAN YOU RUN IT AND IT RUNS AND WORKS AND THEY CAN'T MAKE IT WORK AND IT WORKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CALL THE VIEW THEY HAVE ME SO NO PROBLEM THERE SO I FINALLY ASK THEM ARE YOU POINTING TO THE CORRECT DATABASE AND THEY'RE LIKE OH MAN WE TOLD YOU THE WRONG DATABASE AND SO I LOOK AT THE RIGHT DATABASE AND FIND THAT THE GRANTS ARE MISSING AND YEAH THANK YOU FOR TAKING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE WE WERE IN THE WRONG DB YOU GAVE ME AND I HOPE THE FLAG OF A THOUSAND CAMELS INVEST YOUR ARMPITS AND THE CHIGGERS OF A THOUSAND SOUTHERN LAWNS INGEST YOUR SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. YAAAAAA!!!!

Stress made me fall into old habits of instead of saying stop and letting my team now that I was falling apart (not realising it myself even) I just kept saying "Yes, I fix that." to every single request that was made in the project.

The closer we got to the deadline, the more I hyperfocused and ignored the signs. I just kept working. The last two days I didn't even sleep.

Of course the launch botched. I finally broke down and both my mind and my body have given up, since yesterday I'm in a mental feedback loop causing continuous anxiety attacks and migraines. I literally CAN'T do anything but trying to not go back into fight- or flight mode and remember to breathe.

I FINALLY made my project manager aware (something I should have done days ago) that I am incapacitated and now I am waiting for medication (Oxazepam) to be picked up at the pharmacy by my husband.

I almost literally worked myself into the ground.

I've been here before. Never again.

This is what happens if you don't listen to your mind and body and put up a white flag in time.

That moment when you're dragged to a meeting with a group planning a dating app with custom avatars, discuss about what art style to use (realistic vs cartoonish) and the guy in the suit casually mentions he doesn't understand how there are people attracted to "hentai" and its related art styles.

😨

This is my first rant! I feel this every time I flag each function on my code looking for my mistake and still doesn't work:

i got my account perma-locked on twitter over a joke the other day and the only presented option was to delete my account. Apparently you talk about cool shit all day and 2 people see it, but you make a joke about a bad neighborhood and 700 people flag literally every tweet and reply you've ever made.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

So I've opened myself to new software engineering positions and was recommended one where the first *benefit* stated:

- High engagement opportunities across our global client base

Am I the only one for whom this is a gigantic red flag and con rather than a benefit? wtf

Cool terminal colours..

Quake 3 on a local server with my team and our bosses. Capture the flag was the best.

So flashing microcontrollers gets kinda annoying when you have to simultaneously fight Windows defender's urge to flag the flashing software as Trojan every 30 seconds like a 10 year old kid with ADHD that just discovered coffee.

It doesn't get easier when suddenly only one of three USB ports recognises thumb drives with the current Windows version, and only after two reboots.

Maybe I should just run it in a VM like the three remaining QA testers at Microsoft do, but on the other hand I don't really like the idea of flashing firmware from a VM. Just feels even dirtier.

A tech stack including Microsoft Teams, Apple Safari, and WordPress - all in the same project - might have been a red flag not to work with that agency

Both Conservancy and the Git project are aware that the initial branch name, ‘master’, is offensive to some people and we empathize with those hurt by the use of that term.

Offensive my butt. It's not like any developer alive today had experienced the life of a slave. It's all in the past. Should I get offended by imperial Japanese flag?

OK so... project I've been working on! It's a virtual processor that runs in the browser coded in JavaScript. OK so I know, I know, you must be thinking, "this is crazy!" "Why would she do this?!?!" and I understand that.

The idea of Tangible is is to see if I can get any tangible performance over JavaScript. I've posted a poorly drawn diagram below showing how tangible works.

The goal for tangible is to not use html, javascript, or CSS. Instead, you would use, say for instance, c++ and write your web page in that, then you compile it using my clang plugins and out pops your bytecode for Tangible. No more CSS, no more html, and no more javascript. Instead everything from a textbox to a video on your web page is an object, each object can be placed into a container, each container follows specific flag rules like: centerHorizontal or centerVertical.

Added to all of this you get the optimization of the llvm optimizer.

I think the reason why git beginners have a hard time with it is because the api is a bit untuitive.

For example: if you want to "unstage" staged changes, you run git reset, and if you want to "delete" those changes from your working copy, you git checkout those files.

But then, you find out that you can do all of that if you git add . and git reset --hard.
So you're like "huh..."

And then you discover that if you end the resethard with a branch name/commit id then you also make current branch point to the commit or that branch/commit (respectively).
So you're like "huh..."

And also if you add a commit id or branch name to git checkout, you change the current branch to specified/enter detached state with HEAD pointing to that commit (respectively).

Oh and you don't use git branch to create branches, you use git checkout -b because it's a lot shorter.

So here's a rundown: git reset mutates things related to files, but also mutates things related to branches.
git checkout also mutates things related to files and mutates things related to branches too (in a diff way). Also, creates new branches.

I don't think this is intuitive. We users use the same commands for different purposes with just a different flag.
Commands shouldn't mutate different types of things. But don't composite commands (as in, "smart" commands that mutate different things) shoudln't be a flag in an existing command, it should be a single new command of its own.

Maybe if I reread the internals of git now, I'll be able to disgest the dozens of technical terms they throw at you (they are many). And in my mind, the api will cognitively fit to the explanations.

Here's another one that feels weird too.
If you want to make your changes start on top of someone else's commit, you do git rebase.
But git rebase -i can be used for that, and also to delete, modify changes or message of, reorder or combine previous commits of the current branch.

Maybe the reason why several things we do overlap with the same commands is because they internally do similar things, and while not separating those commands might make it less intuitive, it makes them more sensible? i dunno...

disclaimer: I'm not setting this opinion in stone though, and am aware that git was created by one of the most infuential programmers.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

My dissertation at university was to analyse chat logs of pedophiles in the hope that the application of a density metric could flag up both explicit chats between parties (which it did very well) and more importantly flag up potential on going grooming (it was a bit hit or miss) I love telling people about this because it freaks them out

The scary thing about burnout is that you usually don't realize you are burning out before it's too late.

Personally, at least, I've worked on projects that just felt a little intense at the time, but after taking a step back due to holidays or hitting some milestone I realize I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. One project makes my stomach drop even today every time I see the code; Not because the code is bad, but how it takes me back to how miserable I was without admitting it to myself.

The biggest red flag I look for is when I'm tempted to work on stuff in my free time. When this starts seeming like a solution there's a serious problem with the project that needs to be addressed.

Started a new job last week. Pays a tad below average for position, but i get training time and budget for anything i want.
So far i have had few days of company introduction, and now a week for training courses related to position.
I have not seen any code yet, brought no value in, just joined.
Massive green flag to me.

Why do people still use both curl or wget? There's httpie and it's awesome!

http PUT your-host.com header-name:value parameter=value

Profit!

And it formats the response for json without jq. It will just show binary for binary content and you download by adding the download flag.

Yet why is curl still the default!?

If a company says that they have no hierarchical structure or they have a flat hierarchy consider that as a definite red flag.

What they basically mean is that Noone is responsible for anything and everyone is going to be passive aggressive towards you if you have any skill at all in fear of losing their *position* in others mind.

There is no growth in such a company.

It's not always certain whether we do a morning standup, so usually someone asks "su?" in our Slack chat around 9:15

I'm _so_ tempted to send the flag of the Soviet Union every time someone asks that.

hsctf (high school capture the flag)

Sounds fun
Looks fun

first hurdle: you gotta have a mail server that accepts RFC uncompliant emails
second hurdle: even when you have it the acceptation link won't work
third hurdle: its FUCKING IN PYTHON
FUCKING HELL

If this how you wanna educate your youth, the for gods sake, die

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Do you take it as a red flag if the interview is really really easy?

Something I have learnt in the past month:

Never settle for a low salary no matter how good a company sounds (unless it's a really prestige company) if they don't realise your worth and don't care about their employees. Salary is important. You are important. And customers are important. Any company that just values money, income, profit and growth over their customer and employee experience is a huge red flag. If your work life is so stressful that it doesn't let you have a good work/life balance then avoid it. What comes above being a developer is being healthy and I think alot of people don't realise this. It may sound good to work as an engineer for a big platform but if they only value themselves you are just a cheap slave, move on and do something respectable and enjoyable.

Just my life lesson in applying for grad jobs.

Why the fuck this company's number of employees keep decreases?
It seems like big red flag I know

I think the -f flag in apt-get means "fucking install it". Whenever apt reports some dependency error shit, I'll just do "apt-get install -f" and it magically fucking works.

I've finally found a goldmine of accurate job listings that don't include Windows shit-administration... So I'm thinking of sending out applications to all of them. Problem is, as you might recall from my previous rants, I had a flash drive with my GPG keypair on it stolen from me. I still haven't fully replaced the key (I made another one and published it but I'm not using it yet), and because I'm fairly confident that this flash drive's data has never been used (so likely just plugged into Windows and formatted), it's unlikely that I'm gonna bother rotating all of the contents that were on that flash drive.

That said however, my emails now all have signatures underneath them as follows:
Met vriendelijke groet / Best regards,
[my name]

- My outbound email is usually signed with my private key. If not, please don't hesitate to ask me about it through a different communication platform.

IMPORTANT: My keys have possibly been compromised. An encrypted flash drive on which this GPG keypair was stored has been stolen from me. I'm in the process of phasing out and replacing this key. Please do not use it to encrypt any emails to me anymore.

Not entirely sure whether I should remove or keep that last bit. As a potential employer, would you see this as a red flag (he's got encrypted data stolen from him, wtf that's incompetent), or as a nice thing to know that it was properly disclosed (so no secrecy around potential data breaches)? Both seem equally likely so I'm a bit confused about what I should do.

Discovered CTF challenges a while ago, and let me just say that it is soooo rewarding when you find that damn flag. I'm proud of myself ^_^

Question: is it a red flag if I'm "not supposed to" blog about tips and tricks I've found at work (not even code level, just organization and general design patterns)? Reason given to me: "we need to be careful about due diligence and intellectual property for our investors to be satisfied". Am I working with idiots?

Adm Grace Hopper. I mean what's the chance of a dev getting to flag rank?

Thanks Android 14. Now we have to install outdated apk's with adb and a flag 🙄. May apply to devRant too.

Have you ever ask something on StackOverflow and someone flag your question as duplicated but he doesn't know what your question is really about! 😒😊

So on a PowerBuilder app I worked on last year (I know right...), suddenly the business users were reporting that they couldn't edit some of their prices! When they clicked save, the screen would refresh and lose their work.

We had recently upgraded the system to allow them to enter hundreds of prices at a time, much more than there had ever been. But that code wasn't anywhere near this part!

Tracking this down was really fun... By great fortune, I discovered the row the users were editing was the 99th row in the DataWindow. As it turned out, in the distant past (this is PowerBuilder, after all) the returns code "99" had been used as a flag to mean "cancel/refresh the screen".

I of course offered to "fix it right", but the powers that be wanted it fixed cheaply, so we just changed the flag to "9999". 😬

If I was to name one reason I use Safari on my Mac, it would be internet captchas disappearing completely from all sites. And this is with privacy-protecting measures enabled. I tested them, and it fucks fingerprinters even better than resistFingerprinting flag does in Firefox, and that's HUGE.
It seems like Safari is so rarely used by bad actors that if you use Safari, you get a pass.

My eyes hurt everytime our backend guy gives me a new REST API to implement in our app and always the formatting of the json is something like this. Like why can't you just fucking format it properly so I won't have to look at my code and feel disappointed for writing such ugly code. All because your lazy ass didn't care to understand the fundamentals of how json objects and arrays work !!! It's been a month since I've joined this company and I'm tired of explaining why we should use the status code for failure checking and not this stupid pass/fail status flag. I don't even remember how many times I've brought it up but everytime I get reasons like "Dude, you know what our server is never going to go down or fail so it doesn't even matter". And at that point I feel like I shouldn't even argue with him anymore.

~ before sprint starts, suring planning phase ~

Me: “There’s no chance this will be done in a sprint”.
Scrum Master: “Great, let’s just mark this as a risk and continue”.

~ two weeks later ~
Me: “oh jeez, I don’t think this task will be done this sprint!”
Screwyou Master: “Why didn’t you raise a flag sooner so we could plan better?”

~ Me proceeding to jumping off that beautiful skyscraper office ~

I always read the full job description whenever there's a job hiring.

I have a keen eye in some job description that this company is a red flag.

"Must have 4 years of experience in Blazor or other related web development"

"Be a multitasker"
"Must have experience in frontend web development using Figma or other prototyping tools"

Worst documentation is the one so confusing and poorly written that even no documentation would have been better. And more than small projects, large corporations who don't give a fuck *ahem* Oracle *ahem* are guilty of this

Tl;dr was told I couldn't and found I like programming. :)

Went to some school for testing out different industries but didn't have any goal nor found anything I was really interested in..
So i was tested for qualifications and told I was too stupid to be in IT..
So I decided to prove them wrong, went for an it supporter ground course and aced it with top grades + extra courses..
But still had no goals or dreams.
On that education, I met a friend who wanted to be a web programmer, so I decided to walk that path and aced another education with top grades..
Then I found, that I actually sorta enjoy programming and doesn't get bored quickly so then, I decided to plant my flag and become a programmer :)

Translating win32 calls to whatever the hell there is in Unix and Unix-like OSes (well, most of them) in order to port a certain game net code library and dear god why did I volunteer myself for this task

At least pevents is there to help, but too bad cmake doesn’t want to compile it with the flag I need (“-DWFMO”) in order to make the “WaitForMultipleEvents” method to work at all. Instead no matter what options I give it on the command line or how I tell VS Code to do it, it seems to give me the finger to my fucking face.

Doing it for games on the cooler OSes... doing it for the community... come on...

Someone wrote to me on linkedin for a php job. I had enough time and accepted the interview. We set it for the next day at a time that both me and the recruiter wanted.
I waited for him to even contact me until 5-6 hrs after the time we set, to tell me he was busy with meetings (wtf you wanted 14pm). I gave another chance and we set the interview the next day at the same time.

I waited for 2-3 hrs. This time he wrote me back even later, it was almost midnight to tell me the same excuse.

Is this a red flag for you? Should I even consider working with this guy?

What's wrong with Mozilla?!

Savvy webdevs use link preloading to break up dependency chains for late discovered resources, and users like the faster loading as result. Firefox 56 started supporting that two and a half years ago. Turned out they had screwed up and it didn't work with non-cacheable resources. So Mozilla "fixed" that by disabling the feature altogether behind some config flag.

And they left it at that - still not supported. They even had patches, but decided not to merge them and instead try something different, some day.

Is Firefox becoming the new IE or what?

Not sure if I found a red flag or a green flag…

“The candidate needs to know react well. No, using npx create-react-app is not enough!”

On a first sight one may think: “oh cool they search someone with in depth knowledge”

On a second thought, tho…
- Am I going to need to start many react projects in the role? Don’t think so.
- if I am… am I forbidden to use cra? Why? 🤔
- how is not using a bootstrapper a sign of “deep knowledge”?

Sounded interesting at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think this request is a red flag.

Could the least significant bit in an integer technically be considered the isOdd flag?

I get distracted too easily at home

My laptop battery is shit so I can't use it outside

So Google apparently removed the most important Chrome feature:

"Toolbar auto-hide in fullscreen"

This change came with the new UI recently and there are no #flags around to fix it

Previously the chrome browser was easy to use as a multi-tasking machine, but now it feels really dumb.

This resulted in a loss of 15% of screen-real estate.

Please give me back my choice

"I'm a recruiter for this company that does mostly finances. It's a very stable company. It's over a hundred years old."

That sounds nice, but I can't help but wonder the abyss of legacy codebases a company that old can have. Specially since it's not a dev agency.

People that topic emails with ULTRA URGENT

Isn't there a lovely mail flag for this 🤷‍♂️ gimme a break

If you are looking for a job. Just post on linkedin a picture of you with few children, make sure there is a blueyellow flag on it as well, and say that you are looking for a job. You will have hundreds of offers.

Today I met a guy who fuckin remembers some shitty flag he had set in a code 10 years ago and can read code in his brain for anything he had coded.

Fuck you ass hole you got be shitting me, oh come on show me something fucker. You make me sick.

I'm pretty sure some users only browse StackOverflow looking for questions to flag as "Not Constructive" or "Opinion Based". Some of the best programming discussions I've read have been in the answers and comments to closed questions, so get over it, happiness haters! Sometimes I want to hear people's opinions.

Just realised chrome almost has picture in picture working for videos... If you enable the PiP flag you can double right click on videos and it has an option to enter PiP... Come on please finish this!

Friend from a company I did an integration delivery with sent me this lovely slack discouse. I had no idea their HR lady let her freak flag fly at work 😏

Wonder how many years she's been casually tossing that one around.

In a helper for a testing environment there was a flag called CheckLayoutConf. The documentation stated: if set checks if the layout configuration is valid and fixes it. I was curious about the validation and fixing mechanisms, so I looked into the code. But if the flag is set, then the layout configuration is just deleted, so in the next start of the program a new default layout configuration is created. Nice "validation" and "fixing" you for there, I thought to myself.

Ive been working on pseudo-Java (ie some 3rd company's UNDOCUMENTED programming language) that they parse into Java in their backend

It doesnt even support if-else (only ifs and elses) or a boolean combination of False and OR together lmao

mainly a GRPC middleware-language

Given its lack of features (arrays/collections) or documentation, I just had to implement a flag-array using a 0-1 string

Im throwing exceptions unless combined strings equal Lengths and is only 1s

living like in 80s-90s 💀

Is it just me or are there too many people praising or ranting about Java today

!rant !dev

I was just on my way to work back from the University cafeteria when a guy in a black car - who I thought was moving the car out of a parking lot - stopped the car and asked if I had a second.
Naive me, thinking he might need directions or something decided to listen to him.
He looked older, around 60ish, with sunglasses on ( making it harder for me to read him).
He said that he had a stroke (or something) a few years ago and got damage to his brain, so that sometimes it can happen that he would faint. Therefore, he cannot go swimming unsupervised, and was asking if I would have the time to accompany him to the university lake, so that he could swim for an hour or so. He offered to pay me 40 bucks.
Me, being paranoid af, declined politely, saying I have to go to work ( which was actually true).
He goes on to say how he was a teacher, how he worked at the university before, how I look trustworthy, how I am the first person he asks today, and asked if he could have my number, so that he could call me sometime to supervise the swimming. I would just need to look out for him not to drown and if anything looks weird I should alarm the people working at the lake ( lookouts? not sure what they are called).
I kept declining politely and he backed off, letting me go without any fuzz.
Previously he also mentioned how some students are rich, others are poor, and how he would have done anything for 20 bucks back in the day. But also said that he accepts a no and won't bother me further.

He also mentioned he wouldn't lay a hand on me, that he is not a creep, since I could see his car and license plate, and if I gave him my number, I would also have his. That I shouldn't worry about anything, if I later decided to say no he would delete my number, and that he is not big on the technology and Internet so nothing would happen.

Uhh... well if he was genuine I'm sorry for him, but then you can just ask authorities at the beach to pay more attention to you, no?
Mentioning "all my worries" raised a red flag for me sort of.
Also, if you keep on fainting occasionally, even if you haven't fainted in 2 years, how are you allowed to drive? Or actually, why do you even drive then?
I don't know. The more I think about it, the more I think I should have taken a picture of the car or license plate.
And there are literal services for this kind of thing. Pretty sure you can get one of these if you are willing to pay even.
Jeez now I'm worried for the entire population of my university...

Monday morning we found out our main event queue hadn't processed since late Wednesday afternoon. Shit was hitting the fan and we were stumped. What had changed?!?. Why wasn't the queue processor running?!?

Turns out a server restart had killed the job (no worries there, surely?!) but turns out the job checked for a system flag on disk to stop it running multiple instance or in this case as the flag was still present any instance at all. Got to love the little things that really screw you over.

- wake up
- check the news
- find some interesting video to watch [listen] to
- go get some breakfast
- heat it up in the microwave

*BT headset* stops receiving audio
*video player* stops receiving data via wifi

- write a rant in dR
*phone* sorry, wifi conn jeopardised, can't post

aahhh, the beauty of wireless. If only hostapd had a flag bypass_microwave_noise=1 for bgn APs

So this will steal our jobs?
Fun fact: there's no `--exclude` flag in cp.

My Last few days:

Working on a new project I started few days ago. Decided to push to GitHub.

Working on setup python script a this project requires a little work to get up and running

Working on markdown files and docs.

Moves to working on the GitHub page.

Now I am working on a website for a project that isn even 10% done.

Ugh.
I got a common cold and was operating on half a brain the last days - today, it took me about half an hour to find the option/flag to set when resizing a shape in the CAD-Tool. Dm
Programming is impossible atm. I hate this feeling.

How would you explain SSL, certificates, and CAs to a layman?

I just spent 30mins trying to explain it to them in a chat (related to Mpngo driver configs and the sslValidatrle flag), they sorta went silent on me so not sure if I explained it or understood the roles/purposes correctly...

One example I used was it prevents a man in the middle attack where your connection gets rerouted to another server. If the CA didn't recognize the cert the new server replies with then it rejects it and prevents the attack.

Until today, I had assumed deploying stuff to prod would NOT be one of my responsabilities in this company. Apparently that's not the case.

Had to deploy my code and pray it didn't break anything. Why is this a big deal at all?

Well you see, there is no repository. At all. No git, no svn, not even duplicate folders. No tests, no pipeline. Just a bunch of CPanels.

Had to manually copy files and folders from the development site to the production site and partially copy a database. "Just drag and drop" were the instructions I was given.

As if using CakePHP2, PHP5 and having to parse fucking Excel files wasn't bad enough, now I have to deal with one of the worst ways to deploy code.

Fuck it, I'm switching on the looking-for-job flag on linkedin.

I am curious if this companies hiring requirement would be a red flag for you. They want at least one year of Typescript experience. Fine. They would not consider a person with 5 years of Javascript and zero Typescript experience.

Worst "hackathon" turned out to be the boss (scrum master type) and a Magento guy (super OCD) working on a tiny tiny adjustment to a email template. They didn't really do anything and expected me to just make it all way better with CSS alone. I built out a robust responsive email in a codepen for them. They acted like they couldn't trust me to be a part of the team because I wasn't contributing - but I wasn't even sure what was happening. Between gathering refreshments and patting themselves on the back... it was hard to see what they had done. The online presentation to the magento people was pretty funny to watch though. If you think you can't have a presentation about nothing - think again. Magento is totally fucked. The word 'hacking' is not really suited to describe 'programming websites/applications quickly' anyway. 'Ninja' and 'hack' should always be considered red flags. 'Magento' should be a triple red flag: Jerk-off Jesus-complex boss, self-centered out of touch programmers, crap product. Watch out!

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

Sometimes I wish that Google would let me set a flag like -defaultProgrammingLanguage so I stop correcting it everytime it gives me something different from than target language...

God I can't wait to get a new phone.

Going from a shit phone to a mediocre phone to an older flagship and back to mediocre really shows how bad the mediocre one was.

Since my first one was shit, the mediocre was like "wow this is nice!"

Mediocre to (an older) flag ship was amazing, because it kinda felt like I was still using a relevant device and getting a nice experience.

Now I'm back to a mediocre phone and I must say, all the faults I didn't notice before the flagship are basically screaming at me now and every day I'm forced to use this phone makes me hate it even more.

Salesforce lightning web components have such bullshit limitations that they claim is because of security but it's just because it's overengineered garbage.

Want to use web components? Nope.

Want to pass in a value to a function in a click listener expression? Nope.

Want to use scss? Nope, compile it to css yourself.

Want to use the fucking document object? Guess what it's overridden except for very specific third party frameworks.

Who in the fuck thought it was a good idea to override the document object? Your app isn't more secure, literally the entire internet uses the document object and it still becomes available in runtime anyway so what the fuck??

LWC is the biggest garbage I've ever seen, you know a framework's a big red flag when there are developers solely for the framework.

There is a new security release coming out that apparently removes some of these nuances (understatement) so there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.

A friend told me he added a user to the linux-box and by misstake set the homedir to /
Ahh damn well I just delete the user but forgot to skip the -r flag. Happy times.

(-r means remove homedir)

A program I was using did not recognize a flag that I needed, so I edited the EXE file (using notepad++, no hexeditor) to replace a flag whose name was actually checked with the one I needed. Worked like a charm.

The response for my bug report was "this feature should not be there in the first place, we will remove it". Lucky me they did not remove it earlier.

Spent a good minute figuring it out, but ES modules are pretty great. Using Node.JS 13 (and the --no-warnings flag) I can use the exact same file on both client and server. Wonderful!

Hmm, just noticed lifelog recognises devrant as communication. Found that intresting for some reason. Also dr is the only "communication" app i use for extended period along with sync for reddit.

Also, its 7.50 in morning, not evening. I am not that lazy.

The last two years of degree have really opened my eyes on how studlpid and difficult people can be. I genuinely think that the next time a teacher tries to pull a stunt or fucks something up for us I'll go full ballistic on them. Still have one year to go. God help me.

Oh yeah, that one's good.

So it's been at least one year since my Lenovo Y520 (bought about 18months ago) has been throttling its i5 at 800Mhz for no reason.
The thing was so fucking slow, you can't even imagine.

A few months back I found why: the fucking processor raised a PROCHOT flag constantly, even though it never exceeded 60°C.

So now, everytime I boot my computer, I have to run a fucking script to reset this fucking flag. Seriously Lenovo, what the fuck?

My experience with Fedora:

1. Copy to thumb drive
2. Find out the thumb drive wasn't good enough
3.copied to another thumb drive
4.Successfully booted
5.start installation
6.Shit forgot to partition my NTFS drives
7.Back to Windows to do it
8.back to install again
9.Start installation, setup partitioning
10. Didnt notice that my EFI partition wasn't detected
11.Fedora tries to install its bootloader in God knows what place
12.bootloader install fail
13.reboot comp
14. Missing operating system
15. Spend my whole fucking night repairing the boot partition and the problem was a fuckin missing BOOT flag
16. No grub
17.spent another decade trying to fix it
18. Give up and get some sleep

Probably Fedora will have to wait for another day, tiring experience

Me working on html/css updates for a banner message.

Web Ops Director: [slack] Hi! nice to e-meet you! I was talking with the Mgr of Product. He thinks it would be great if the banner message updates were on the site right away instead of having to wait 10 minutes for the cache to clear after updating the banner content in admin. Can you add that to your ticket?

Lol that’s a load of crap. 1) Product would have just told me himself and 2) Product would never pull this bullshit of bringing a ticket out of scope like you’re pulling right now. And 3) My spidey sense says this is a red flag 🚩.

Me: [in words web ops will understand] That’s going to a lot of time. And it would keep your content updates from making it to the weekly release. 😁

Working on an app to sync data between our ticketing system and an API a vendor made for us to interact with their ticketing system. I put off working on it for months, mostly because I had mountains of other "urgent" things that jumped in my face, but also because I needed to design the whole thing, and I really have to get into the right frame of mind for that kind of creative organization.

Today I dove into it. I built the JSON to submit, given whatever variables are necessary, and figured out after a while that the smartest way to handle this is not to search for an existing internal ticket, but to have the creation of the internal ticket set a flag for an automated sync process to check when it runs.

It's going to be much easier when I get that built, but now, knowing that, I'm daunted enough that I'm procrastinating. Think of something, chart it out with notes in a text editor, procrastinate.That is probably like 95% of the time I spend in "development."

My do-over would be going to a different coding bootcamp. I wonder if I could be making more money if I went to a better school.

The one I did go to was a big scam. They were more obsessed with teaching you to pretend rather than teaching how to code. They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—the students, the volunteers, the donors, the community. They were very cult-like with mantras like “trust the process.”

I spent 9 months there, but I felt I was a year behind. I am not misspeaking. I would have to relearn basic concepts the right way because they taught them half assed or not at all. I didn’t realize I was behind until I went to interviews and bombed. Seriously, I learned more in a 40 hour free library coding class than I learned in 9 months at the school. Most of the interviews I was getting were for unpaid internships. The school was telling me to go for mid level roles.

I found out recently that they’re breaking the law by operating without a license. In my state code schools do need a license. There are screenshots going around of a letter from the education department. They’re defense is “they’re not a school.” They’re still open. I think ppl should be warned away, but there’s only so much I can do. And I know ppl will give this place the benefit of the doubt before taking any student accusations seriously.

The biggest red flag is they want students to pay up to 70k and bind them to payments for 8 years. I say it’s a red flag because this place is operating as a nonprofit. Shouldn’t a nonprofit not be charging 3-4x more than competitors? They’re definitely not going to give you 70k worth of services.

They really just exploit the poor and POC by signing them up for debt and knowing those ppl would not be able to pay even with a 100k job. They have a very poor understanding about how poverty works.

It had MLM/pyramid scheme vibes when they started making recruiting students a game. They give out tickets to their annual fundraiser or promote you on social media if you refer the most students to them.

I’m one of the lucky ones who was studying coding before I started at the school. Also, job searching is mostly luck, so I was lucky at that too. But I still had to take a job that paid below market. I still wonder what would happen if I went someplace else.

I don’t even put this place on my resume or LinkedIn. Even without these problems, it’s not like anyone would have heard of the place anyway.

No this place isn’t Lambda or Holberton school.

What’s the best thing about Switzerland?
I don’t know, but the flag is a big plus.

(Part 1/2?)

Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.

Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.

So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.

THE INTERNSHALA ARC:

I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.

I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.

I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.

THE WHATSAPP ARC:

I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.

The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).

So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?

Him: So, which parts CAN you do?

I thought of it as an HR thing.

Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.

Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.

I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.

Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?

Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.

At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).

Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.

And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.

I consider it a red flag when a meeting invite is for Microsoft Teams.

Worst coding procrastination story?

Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"

Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."

I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.

There should be a button on a rant that would allow you to get notifications without commenting.
(And probably a notification group for those "marked" rants, as there are many comments from rants you commented on that would bury the ones you actually care about)

Him: can we build something using which we can ensure that all the code related to all the rally user stories that have been tagged for a release, is part of the build?

Me: stares blankly

Him: you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I’m looking for automating things to flag human mistakes.

Me (cursing silently): that’s why there are source control softwares and fucking code branches that get deployed and it’s not my problem if some shithead doesn’t merges his code to the central branch.

In some comments on a rant I saw @bahua wrote this:

>Red flags in the interview process are >the biggest risk signals I know, and I >take them very seriously. #1 red flag: >they want to know your >previous/current salary. If they won't >bend on that, then I end the >conversation.

Seems quite interesting, can anybody list more such "red flags" and maybe ellaborate a bit and give a few anecdotes?

(sorry, @bahua, if you dont wanna be quoted. just tell me if so)

My company just released its website today. Previously, it just used its parent company's site.

Now, the problem is that it sucks big time. Awful design, pixelated stock photos, bad navigation, and broken grammar.

In the company's defence, it's not a web shop. It employs zero web devs. The site was built by an external company.

But if you are like me, you visit company websites before you apply for a job, and in this case, it would bed a big red flag.

Or maybe the hard-core embedded devs they are looking to employ wouldn't notice? Maybe they are all stuck in the year 2000 as well? I used to be a web developer so maybe my criteria are broken?