Me: (putting headphones on)

Boss: You are an engineer. You need to focus. You cannot multitask. Nobody can. You need to concentrate on the work and deliver. If you ...blah.blah.blah.

Me: 😃 hmm yes you are right (dying on the inside)

Boss: if you are listening songs, your attention is towards that, you learn nothing of what you are working on.

Me: 😃 True Indeed.

Inner me 👿: Motherfucker. I use headphones so I don't have to listen to you giggling about with your mates in a bragging battle, in a language I do not understand, which is noise to me.
And technically, I do not listen to songs, I listen to music, while doing repeated tasks, so that I can overcome the boredom and do it quick in a rhythm.
But you wouldn't understand now, would you, YOU OLD FART, you fuckin Remnant of the Ancient times.

Do you ever feel coding fatigue?

My dev mana has run dry, I've hit my rate limit.

That moment where your brain thinks "I should finish building this React project, it's good for my portfolio" or "I should really work on fixing this query performance issue, I already know what the problem is" — but your stomach churns at the thought of having to interpret even a single line of code?

The last few days it really does feel like a physical illness, a nauseated feeling whenever I open an IDE. I have written about 12 lines of code since Monday.

It goes beyond writer's block, it's not a lack of focus or inspiration, it's a big knot in my head of everything that's wrong and inconsistent in development, and it causes feelings of dread, desperation and revulsion when trying to wrap my head around the simplest stuff.

Does anyone have good tips to overcome this feeling, something faster and less savings-account-destroying than "take a sabbatical year and travel the world riding an emu"? (seems tempting though)

I need to focus on work..........
ENGAGE TUNNEL VISION

The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

Weirdest technical interview:

I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.

The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.

Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.

I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!

It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.

• Good night’s sleep (8-9 hours)
• Clearly defined requirements.
• A fun challenge to solve.
• An idea of how to begin.
• Music! Something fast paced and/or harsh. I find soft tunes, good lyrics, etc. are usually very distracting.
• Deadlines help, too, even if they make me stressed out and work too much.
• No political BS / hateful and intolerant political comments from my coworkers within the past day or two, as being called a horrible, racist nazi by association absolutely kills my desire to do any work for them. Going two days without something like this happening is exceedingly rare.
• Being left alone, *especially* in the morning before work! The more distractions, the harder it is focus, even if i have peace and quiet later on.

- you don't like math
- you don't like study
- you don't read documentation
- you throw out the manual
- you like to punch a clock
- you dislike books and reading
- you don't ever work more than 8 hours
- you can't tolerate the occasional weekend work day
- you fold under pressure
- you aren't good at crunch time
- you can't do on-call without committing seppuku
- you don't have attention to detail
- you aren't interested in technology
- you're not good at explaining things
- you can't deal with change
- you're not excited by the prospect of extreme variety
- you don't have the ability to focus
- you can't deal with ego without resorting to violence
- you can't deal with someone calling your baby ugly
- you can't discriminate between fact and opinion

And many, many more

Fuck javascript
Fuck css
Fuck even html
And fuck web dev in general.
i can't do this shit anymore.

i've been working in web for ~2.5 years, 4 different companies, countless frameworks, technologies and tools and it feels good having that kind of knowledge and ability to do anything in this field, but god damn. I'm exhausted of "moving pixels" most of the time.

And i know, maybe different company and position would better suit me, but how often do people hire pure breed back-enders ? not that often, at least not in my country. Everyone has to do everything. And even then, php/sql/sysadmin/devops work doesn't motivate me as much. I need something that would make me actually think.

And so i decided to change my specialty, i'm going to follow my long lived dream - game dev (C++) :)

Oh i know, i'm not naive. I know how difficult and hard it is, but it seems like i've finally matured for it. So i've been waking up at 5 a.m and learning for ~3 hours before work for a few weeks now, and plan to go part-time at my work, after a few months (need to save up some money) for ~6 months, to focus on C++

Then hopefully i'll be able to land a junior position. If not, well, i wouldn't be a problem solver if i let that get to me :)

Never gonna happen:

* Port our API to graphql. Or even make it just vaguely rest-compliant. Or even just vaguely consistent.
* Migrate from mysql to postgres. Or any sane database.
* Switch codebase from PHP to... well, anything else.
* Teach coworkers to not commit passwords, API keys, etc.
* Teach coworkers to write serious commit messages instead of emoji spam
* Get a silent work environment.
* Get my office to serve better snacks than fermented quinoa spinach bars and raw goat milk kale smoothies
* Find an open source IDE with good framework magic support. Jetbrains, I'll give you my left testicle if you join the light side of the force.
* Buy 2x3 equally sized displays. I'm using 6, but they're various sizes/resolutions.
* Master Rust.
* Finish building my house. I completely replaced the roof, but still have to dig out a cellar (to hide my dead coworkers).
* Repair/replace the foundation of my house (I think Rust is easier)
* Get slim and muscular.

Realistically:

* Get a comfortable salary increase, focus more on platform infrastructure, data design, coaching
* Get fat(ter). Eating, sitting, gaming, coding and sleeping are my hobbies after all.
* Save up for the inevitable mental breakdown-induced retirement.

FUCKING SHIT.
I'm at my first Hackathon with my best friends in life and there has never been a time when I've felt this miserable all my life.
The theme is IoT (something idk jackshit about) and people here are done with the projects when we are still at the idea stage.
Yes, it's true that this shit is intense but I really want to do good at this.
This is what I've learned from my first Hackathon:
1. Prepare your shit.
Unless the problem statements are given on the spot, you should've discussed everything that you would be doing and not divert. (We spent 5 hours on a problem statement and then we decided not to go with it.)
2. Have people with different abilities who you can trust to get the work done without you having to give a second thought.
3. Don't you dare build a sub-par application. What's the fucking use of that? Don't do it for the certificate or the stickers. If you do that, then how the fuck can you make yourself put those stickers on your laptop?!
4. Have food. Keep yourself healthy and up to max potential.
5. DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED. A lot of people will look like they're done with the shit. You know what you have to do now? NOT GIVE A FUCK! Just focus and do your thing and make it awesome.

Managment...

Where do I start?

So I have a task they set to priority "P0 - drop everything". Okay, dropping everything, doing the thing.

It's 11 and I already had 3 calls and meeting...

GOD FUCKING DAMINT LET ME WORK ON THE THING
and please let me focus -_-.

Oh, oh, also, calls were like "hi, we have a really dumb question to you, we know we could sit down for 10 seconds and use so-called logic but calling you is easier." Oh and also whats the progress on this P4 task?

holly motherfu... eghm. I mean.. They really like to piss me off. Best part of call #2. I prompt them "hey, please message me on slack, it does not destroy my focus and allows me work more efficiently"
and response... "I prefer talking than typing"

Need to work on my focus. I feel like it's one of my greatest weakne ... hey look, a DevRant notification.

I applied for the wrong job for my placement year. Put down COMPSCI on the form (which, it turns out, is computational biology, which I knew nothing about) rather than ITSEC, which was the software dev side of things.

I only found out in the interview, when the first question was asked:

"So Almond, I'm a bit confused as to why you've applied to this role specifically given you've no biology background at all - could you fill us in?"

...errr...

I spewed some kind of crap on the spot about wanting to work in a field where I saw a direct & differing application of computing than I'd seen before, and thought my focus on the technical, rather than the scientific side of things might be an asset to them. This awkward exchange went on for a while - but somehow it seemed to work, because I was offered the job, and decided to take it - had a fantastic year there.

#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.

var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"

In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";

His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it.

This process took him a few months to complete.

When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)

T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."

Mgmt bought it again.

Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.

By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).

In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."

DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).

One of my previous managers would constantly make promises our team couldn't keep. "You want it in a week? Sure, we can finish it in a week! You want it tomorrow? Sure, we can do that!"

It got so bad that our team basically had to stage an intervention. At one of our standups, we flat-out told him that even if the entire team dropped all of our other tasks to focus on the one big project, we still would not be able to meet the deadline he'd promised the client.

And that fucker actually said, "Well, if you want to come in on the weekend to work some overtime, I don't mind." as if he was offering to do us a favor by "allowing" us to work more.

No overtime pay because we had salaries.

So glad I don't work for him any more. Of course, my next manager wasn't great either, it just took longer for us to figure it out because she wasn't nearly as blatant about it.

A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

Beware: this is me expressing how I feel about my programming/my skillset, and so on. It might be imposter syndrome but I am having a fucking bad episode right now and I just need to get this the fuck out.

I work at a distribution center right now. Can I provide for myself? Yes. Do I even slightly like my work? No I fucking hate it to the point. I hate going there every day, doing shit I don't like, not being able to focus on the shit I love but that's it for me for now.

In my free time I still am able to program a little but then the (I will call it imposter syndrome for now as I have no clue how to call it) imposter syndrome comes looking around the FUCKING corner.

*What the fuck are you doing? For real man, someone else could do that like way fucking better*

*Wow man your code..... there are so many people who would write that a million times better*

*You have re-written this for 10 times now. But seriously, this still sucks fucking balls*.

Fucking hell. Yes, at programming level I am still a junior, I fucking know that. But it fucking sucks feeling like anyone but you would do the shit you're making better anyways.

How fucking down can you get yourself. How bad can you make yourself feel through just a few fucking words/thoughts.

The only thing I am happy about right now is the fact that a very good friend is able to keep me at least slightly sane right now.

My morning motivation on the wall next to my desk.... Have an ever growing collection of Oatmeal art now....

So I walk to work and pass this sign for a place called helloworld experts in everywhere.

And eventually I was curious enough to go to their website and to my surprise they're a travel company :(

I was expecting some sort of software development company with focus on cloud software due to their slogan, pretty disappointed.

Focus on algorithms first and syntax last. Solve problems, then code.
If it uses power, has an I/O interface, and stores code, you can do stuff.
Dont get caught up in the little shit like specific code formatting and who's right or wrong between tabs or spaces. (It should be TABS anyway.)
Don't take shit from anyone.
Be confident not cocky.
Learn GIT as much as you can.
Don't burn out.
Get up and stretch.
Don't argue with your Operating Systems professor about why you shouldn't have to learn Linux.
Don't fall into the "I want to be a game developer" trap. Make your own games on your own time. You won't learn shit at school about it.
9/10 of the real world workforce is who you know, so don't be a dick. Those people might be the difference between Ramen noodles and steak dinner for you.
Charge market competitive rates and set an hourly rate that defines the clientele you deal with.
Don't ever, EVER, do trade or spec work. Free work don't pay the bills. Always start the clock when you're not sleeping, eating, or shitting. If you're emailing, calling, texting, or otherwise interacting with or on behalf of a client, bill them. Don't be a bitch when they decide they don't want to pay you. Get yours. Watch "Fuck You. Pay Me." at least once a month on YouTube.

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

Things you can enjoy when working in an office with other people:

- listening to everyone chew gum with their mouths open.
- being constantly interrupted by coworkers asking for help, even when wearing headphones.
- getting distracted by someone bursting out in laughter of some private joke.
- having to take a break when everyone else does, because everyone is so loud you just can't focus.
- being hit on the back of the neck by a nerf gun bullet, right when you're most focused.

Why would anyone ever want to work at home?

Up for a rollercoaster?

I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.

Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)

Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.

Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.

Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.

I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!

🥶👰‍♀️💍👰🏻‍♀️

DAMN IT JUST SEND ME SOME FLOWERS

Started a new job yesterday, and rather than making my partner work to pick up hints I have said explicitly a few times that I want him to send me flowers at work, because

1) Yay flowers!
2) Displays dominance over other women at work because it demonstrates I have a caring partner
3) Did I mention pretty flowers?
4) Let's the dudes at work know I'm in a relationship so that means we can all just focus on being colleagues

FFS I even sent a link to a site that does local same day delivery for no extra charge, and pointed out the three bouquet styles I like best. So easy.

But he has yet to send me any.

And as I'm filling out the W-4, learning that I have to pay an extra $10k in taxes, because we eloped a week ago and apparently that's what happens when two high earners file jointly and it's making me want to rant because THE COST OF FLOWERS IS INSIGNIFICANT TO MY TAX BURDEN SO SEND ME THE DAMN FLOWERS.

(and yes technically it's "our" tax burden and yes the money spent on a bouquet would only add to our shared house expenses but I don't care; I'm generally anti flower but there's a time and a place and this is the time and the place)

And if he sends them late in the week, a significant portion of their prime blooming time will be during the weekend which is just wasteful so ugh.

</rant>

Satoru Iwata.

You might remember it as the former president of Nintendo, but he was also a very impressive programmer. As he was president of HAL Laboratories, he helped with the development of Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64 by porting the Pokémon Red/Blue battle system not by having any sort of documentation, but by reading the assembly source code.

He did so to allow Game Freak's developers (who were only a team of 4 at the time) to focus on their work on Pokémon Gold/Silver. But he did more: when they had to localize Red/Blue for America, they couldn't fit everything in a cartridge. They had the same problem while developing Gold/Silver, since cartridges had at most 8 Mb of storage capacity back then, and they had to fit not only the Johto region but the Kanto one as well! So Iwata stepped in, and created a graphics compression tool which managed to make everything fit in the cartridges.

He did this while not even being part of Nintendo, and the work was so impressive that the Pokémon devs thought it was "a waste to just have [him] as president!" (ie. why not make use of such programming skills).

Truly someone I look up to.

Well, some time in the future, i will have to sit a computer science exam with C#. It can't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

To start off, Visual Studio 2013. Why the fuck someone would use this pile of garbage in 2018. I have no fucking clue why any semi-competent IT department would decide to skip TWO fucking releases of the software and decide, that it's okay to just roll with it. It's okay to not have any updates. It's okay to just no care at all.

I literally brought in my laptop with a VM installed since Visual Studio 2017 is really superior to the crap from 5 years ago just to do my coursework most lessons.

-------

Second issue, you know thoes desks where the monitor is literally under the desk and you get a small little window to see the monitor? Yeah, well I will have to take my proper exam in one of these all over the fucking room. Pic related.

Today we had a mini mock - - it went something like this:
- There was glare from the glsss on the desk because of the lights in the room and literally the monitor itself.
- The glass was beyond fucking pig filthy.
- There was neck pain from my back because i was constantly looking down and bending over the see the screen.
- There was eye strain because the document given to us was a tiny piece of paper with tiny writing and the monitor was far away and the paper was close i couldn't focus my eyes.
- Literally every desk was as bad as the next.
- I did fuck all work because i just couldn't focus because of the things above.
You can tell how great that felt.

If i was in a room with a man (or if it was a woman, let's just pretend she has balls), who was the creator of the room i just described, Hitler, my College's IT staff and other really bad people while having infinite ammo, i would continuously shoot the creator in the balls while not giving a shit about anything else.

Forever.

Until heat death.

Thanks for reading.

After 8 hours of focusing on two monitors at work, I go home so I can focus on my own two monitors.

"Hey ,we just hired a developer to work on app A ,so you can stop working on it and focus on B"

**2 weeks later **
"It's been 2 weeks.Why haven't you finished A already?"

When I'm tired, I can't do a damned thing. If it takes effort or concentration, I'm useless. Games are just frustrating. If it's something enjoyable, I simply can't care enough to enjoy it. If I read a book, I can't focus on the words, and won't remember anything I read. If its mindless like watching Netflix, I won't remember the next day, or rather I'll remember just enough to ruin it for myself.

So why not sleep?

Because I've been feeling like this every day, all day long for months. No, that vile liquid called coffee doesn't help. If I rest my eyes and stop thinking for a few minutes, I wake up a little and can function normally for a minute or two before passing out again. I'm not depressed, or at least I don't think I am. I feel like my brain died or got replaced with a lizard's.

And this sucks because I'm still during the probation period at work, and learning the sprawling and intricate codebase is actually challenging. And they're giving me large tickets because I was a dummy and impressed them too much.

Idk what's wrong with me, but I hope it stops soon.
I miss being able to think and plan and do anything besides just struggle to stay awake. 😞

Hello.

Is there anyone else who starts massive amount of projects and never finishes one?

It's a big problem when you lose time you should spent on orders because you work on that-amazing-idea that you'll drop few hours later.
I'm lucky as my employer thinks that all these unfinished stuff are pushing my experience forward, but for me it's depressing to not be able to focus on my work.

What do you do to fight with the urge to code that one more project? What do you do focus on the current work?

I've tried making myself a system for better client-programmer communication to keep myself motivated with better organised feedback and deadlines but ended up dropping it and sticking to terribly messy mailbox.

I lost motivation and focus on the company where I worked for 12 years.
And after 12 years I quit my job last week.
I'll work for a new company next month.
And I won't wait another 12y if I won't be satisfied or disrespected.
Never give up.

A couple weeks ago, my coworkers built a site where 90% of pages consisted of all images and uncompressed images at that. I'm talking even the text was images. At the time I told my boss that it should be done with css and this would later come to bite them in the ass with page load speed and seo. He ignored me and said it was fine. Well today my boss assigned me with going back and basically removing images with things that can be done with css because load speed was terrible and seo wasnt too hot. Maybe if he listened to me from the get go, he wouldn't have to assign me this unnecessary work and I can focus on cleaning up all the other piss poor excuse of websites they have. Seriously tired of feeling like I, the junior dev is doing the teaching to these "senior developers" who get paid like twice as much as I do when I'm the one who is always doing the cleanups /optimization and guiding them on all their problems. Is it Friday yet?-_-

Stop fooling yourself by thinking that the hurry & pressure will eventually go away if you work overtime & stretch yourself to heroics weekly. They won't, and they never will (and even shouldn't). Focus on building sustainable habits that propel you towards your goals day by day, and don't give up until you're where you want to be. Period.

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

Casual workday be like:

Project manager: It is important we deliver these features.

Me & Coworker: Sounds reasonable, here is how long we need, roughly.

Mgr: Well, the deadline is already set and the contract is signed and written.

M&C: Ummm...

Mgr: Also, while we are hosting the application, we are not paid for operational cost, so make sure to optimise the crap out of it immediatly. Preferably while developing the features.

(A wild architect appears): Also everything has to be built on cans and kubernuts, with rectangular ui and bootstyling and with these internally developed backend frameworks NOBODY tests. Coroporate policy you know.

(A wilder division CEO appears on meeting): Also we are rolling out code KPI's across the organisation. Everyone is expected to Focus on documentation, test coverage and there is now mandatory SonarQube scanning of repos. ZERO DEFECTS PEOPLE

M&C: ...

(Wildest Salesteam appears): By the way we sold the application to these other customers, they love feature XYZ and must have it.

M&C: It does not have feature XYZ

Mgr: It will have feature XYZ

M&C: Allright so with all the extra funding from the sales, we need to hire atleast one Machine learning guy, an extra frontend specialist a developer and maybe funnel some of the funding into slacking the operational budget in the start.

Animated Suit *Railing a line of coke from his gold plated ihpone 15*: What funding? Get to work. Also your havent been super sharp with your time registration.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Everything is "critical priority" all the time. Every new project is the most important project in the entire company. Every request that comes in has to be handled immediately. I have a good manager now who fights back against the deluge of critical work, but for my first year in my job I had a different manager who would bend over backwards to appease everybody, over-promising constantly.

I eventually started asking questions like "Which project are we de-prioritizing to accommodate this?" or "Is X more or less important than Y?" and then I would focus entirely on whichever project he identified as being the most important, and not touch anything else until I was done. Basically forcing him to prioritize our work.

I almost quit over a few of these issues, but I stuck it out and eventually our team came under new management, and now our manager is the one asking those questions instead of me. As she should be. Her favorite response when someone says a task is critical is "How critical? How much money will the company lose per day if this is late?"

Most of the time, the answer is somewhere in the range of "nothing" until a couple months after the deadline. So we set a much later deadline and get the work done right.

My worst choice was walking out of my first ever job.

The owner of the company was a very kind person and he really liked and appreciated my work, he even gave me a mid level salary straight away even though I was still in college and didn't have any prior experience.

But when I found myself getting so lucky I thought "oh it's so easy to get a job I can get one whenever I want" then I quit the job for college as I didn't want to do both at the same time due to stress.

The funny thing is that when I quit I didn't even focus on college, I just used the money (which was a lot) to go out and buy stuff I don't need and I even failed a course in the next semester after I was one of the top students in school.

Let me share a piece of advice to entry level devs that are getting ready for job interviews that I wish someone gave to me when I was first looking for work straight out of school. Do not focus making yourself look good to this company by trying to make your resume flashy or trying to oversell yourself. Although its important to present yourself sure, but it should not be the foundation for you to base your interview goals around. Rather focus on the company itself. Find out whether the company itself uses modern technology,practices and upholds to project management and the software development cycle, find out how they work,communicate and develop as a team. Simply put focus on whether they are worth working for instead of looking like your worth being hired. Can they collaborate,communicate and solve problems efficiently. Otherwise you may end up getting hired and hating your job. Just a thought and some advice on my own experiences. Hope it helps someone.

Rant #1:
Why everyone and their toy cars gotta be jumping on the bed when I’m trying to sleep?

Rant #2:
For months now, I get bleary eyed and tired every time I look at work. Focusing and being productive is almost impossible. I’m cheery and alert, then sit down, open my editor, and find I can’t focus. Moments later I feel like I need a nap.

Rant #3:
I get interrupted an average of every 3-5 minutes, basically every day, all day long. The more this happens, the more tired and angry I become. I often have to resort to yelling, throwing toys that appear on my desk/keyboard, and blasting loud music I don’t want to hear through noise canceling headphones.

—————

Is it any wonder I can’t focus or think or do anything but feel like I’m falling asleep? Is it any wonder I’m perpetually angry and frustrated?

I can sort of fix the interruptions by locking myself away in my monster’s room. But I’m still so tired and bleary and can’t focus. I don’t know what to do, or even what I can do. Vacation didn’t help. Another would doubtlessly be just as effective, and certainly wouldn’t improve my boss’s view of my performance.

Ugh.

So today after 5 years of working at my current company I decided that enough is enough... I called my boss (while being scared AF) and told him I quit. Now guys I know it is the middle of a pandemic going on right now but I want to focus 100% on my side project and I'm unsure if it will work or not, but it is a dream I want to be able to achieve. Damn it feels awesome to have a community where to say these things

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

*Swiches on the PC and opens VS*
Probably I should get some coffee.
*1 hour later, with 0 LOC written*
I should probably code now. Umm, I need music, else I might not focus on the code.
*another hour passes by headbanging to led zeppelin and still on 0 LOC progress*
You know what, this wont work. I should eat and will code with a fresh mind..
*has lunch*
I'll code now.. Maybe I should check up on devrant...
*time goes by with 0 LOC at the end of the day.*
I'll do it tomorrow.
*Next Day, repeats what I did on the earlier day*

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

Anybody's a father here? My 10 months kid is giving me hard times waking at 2am and not going to sleep till 4am (it is 4 now, here). That's a really repeating problem. I'm loosing my focus at work, tired after few hours of coding, couldnt mange to learn after hours. Makes me frustrated. My PM understands situation (actually he have 5 kids!), tries to help. But can't figure it out how to overcome this. Any ideas fellow dads in code? To make it clear - I really love my son, but if I'll fail to keep my level at job I could loose it one day, don't feel like beeing able to find new decent job with current exhaust level. Also I'm the only one who makes money in our lil family, loosing job for too long means loosing the roof under the head for all three of us. My wife is barely living after beeing there for son whole day, so please dont point at her. Our kid is really demanding on attention and love, and thats like a sweet poison. Love kills.

Me: develops my first android app with firebase by google.
Me: finishes app, tests it and it works.

Firebase after 3 months: we were first going to scale our servers on our own based on how many people are simultaneously using your app. But now fuck you, we will have a cap of 100000 simultaneous users.

Me: fuck this kills my app if it scales. Have to Shard everything on the db side and overhaul the entire app to work will multiple db instances. Takes a month.

Android after 6 months: dude your app is working fine without any hiccups. Let me fuck it up. We will stop all your services when your app is not running or backgrounded. Also we will make it illegal to start services in this case and we will throw exceptions.

Me: what the actual fuck. They now want me to focus on a JobScheduler, fine... But now even intent services won't work properly. So use a job scheduler to start a JobIntentService which is essentially another job scheduler for queuing. wtf android.

Ps solved it and works again.

PS: WAITING FOR ANDROID TO FML WITH ANOTHER NEW VERSION. Maybe they'll say you can't run your app at all now

Me on drugs at work: *focus as fck*
Me at work: shit, what the hell people around me talking about

Damn i love herb

I secretly wish everything at work fails because everyone is so fucking stupid every time it makes me cringe when I have to talk to someone or watch someone explaining something to me.

Everything seems to lack planning and focus, our PMS act more like clients than like managers, its a total fucking mess and I have to clean some of it this week.

It's getting so much on my nerves that I had to open my whiskey for the first time this year, damn.

I think I need to focus more on work than to spend time here.

A recruiter emailed me.
And called me (and left a voicemail).
AND texted me.

About a job opportunity in California (I live in Texas).

That requires experience writing performance critical and thread-safe code in a large multi-threaded codebase (I work primarily in JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, fat chance of that).

Responsibilities listed as: Focus on Supercharger Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) software features. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.

Opportunity is for a 3 month contract.

Why are you so desperate, lady?

Honestly remote work allowed me to stay productive but to make it more better:

* I usually isolate myself from the rest of the family so I can focus on work

* Taking breaks between sessions so I don't over-exert myself.

*Calming music (I don't know how calming Symphonic Metal is but it is to me)

Other than that, these are just my ways to keep myself efficient, aside from the additional setup my home setup needs which are a new external keyboard and a additional monitor (I use a laptop)

Additional notes: If you get burnt out too easily, try not extending your sessions for a entire day, you'd risk being devoid of motivation easily

Project Leader is explaining to teammate how their UI will call my API and it'll run asynchronously in the background. UI guy asks: about error handling? I said the callback listener will be notified if anything goes wrong. I ask the PL, what next? just log and forget about it (that's my sarcasm)? How would anyone know this has failed?

PL says: good point and can worry about this later. Lets first focus on getting things to work.

You know later never comes. Well, except when the customer reports a problem. Its like every disaster movie you've ever seen before

-GDPR
-News letter
-Ads blocker blocker
-Ads popup insite
-Ads popin in video
-Ads popin podcast
-Ads in mail
-Ads in software
-Ads in any android application
-Ads in windows
-Ads in ads
-Auto scrolling
-Slideshow
-Scroll position reset on back button
-Aria-label aria-labelledby aria-role aria-aria of game of thrones
-Order in dom for a11y different of the display order -Button :hover, :focus-visible, :focus-within :fuck-this
- SVG abandoned ware
- I make you a illustrators X version that not work with yours, i use figma. I use affinity, i use akira. I use photoshop, i use word. I use powerpoint, i use publisher, i use paint, i use all Asss (application as a service) on the web and to see what i make you need to pay you an account
-We all make frontend backend... No linter or something... Why we have always 848274 change in git ....
We not host anymore we use 62616 different cloud services to try all the fucking company everywhere
-Make a Drupal CMS to a client that's are to idiots to use it and call you each time they have something to modify

And goes on

Web tooday is fucking crap shit
People realize that you cannot make money anymore with informative website. Then everybody try to squish people at the last drop... Because of selfishness.

Another chapter in the life of a novice programmer:

I work a lot with PHP and Laravel, but I feel I'm ready for different challenges. I spent all of last week searching online and getting advice on what language I should focus on next. My two first options were Java and C... So naturally I ended up choosing Python :P

At least I'm certain now and already started studying and wow, I think I made the right choice!

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

This happened a few weeks ago at school.

The previous semester we had to work in a group to make a basic Android application. After handing it in to the teacher, we had to present it in front off the class.

During this project, one of the groups was having some problems with a member, mainly because of misunderstandings and miscommunication. He definitely has technical skills, but he really needs to work on his focus and communicational skills.
The member was removed from the group and had to do it on his own. He had 2 days to make the app, which we initially got 2 weeks for.

Skip forward to presentation day.
Every group presented their app and got feedback from the teacher and the rest of the students.

Lastly, the guy that was on his own was giving his presentation. He started his powerpoint and explained what happened during the project and what went wrong. Then he said: "This is a black page in my school career, everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong". Immediately after saying this, he proceeds to go to the next slide: His laptop crashed, Blue Screen Of Death.

This was one of the most painful moments I've ever witnessed during a presentation.
I couldn't believe the timing of Windows to fuck up.

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

I wrote an important test-case for this complicated/hard-to-understand program and i can proudly say "it doesn't work on my machine". On other machines it works as expected.

Should i really investigate this or focus on other tasks?

1. Manage my time better.
2. Find motivation to wake up and go to work.
3. Fake more smiles.
4. Kick ass hole (L)users in the throat when they piss me off...
5. Attend anger management.
6. Stop making shit lists.

In all honestly I need to dedicate more time to my personal clients and stop allowing my primary job’s frustration to drain my motivation to take care of their needs. It’s not fair to them that I chose the life I have. Find myself and attempt to love myself again. Create more time to focus on my health and goals. Surround myself with people that have goals and want to better their life. Find someone to share life with.

Then, with my luck; throw it all away and repeat these steps like a broken record.

I don't seem to understand why so many developers nowadays are focused on learning newer frameworks rather than focusing on best practices and learning how to code better.

"Hey I learnt React today, we should totally switch to it because it's so amazing"

> mfw the same guy doesn't even know how to follow coding styles, write good code that scales or document his code.

I think some people need to take a step back and focus on the more vital tasks of writing good code to begin with rather than getting so excited about every new thing that surfaces. It's annoying as fuck to deal with some of these people who you have to work alongside and be able to read their loopy shit code and all they are doing in their time is refreshing hackernews.

Does anyone else sometimes feel like quitting, selling everything, move to a small town in e.g. Texas, become a brick layer or carpenter and just start from scratch and build a honest working class day-to-day life? Or is it just me?...

In tech I always focus on what’s gonna happen next year, where will I be in 5 years etc.
I feel like by pursuing a good life I’m missing out on life 😅

Would be nice to do some honest, physical work and leave tomorrow behind for a while..

What's with all this micro-certification nonsense that seems to plague the industry? Does anyone actually give a shit that I may have passed some vendor's five day bootcamp?

Apparently I can now have a trophy (virtual, of course) if I complete X online MS courses.

Some of these courses seem to focus on stuff that has no use in day-to-day work.

And I have to actually pay because I learned your product and then pay to maintain the cert in some cases. WTF?!

I can see why the vendors do it---I like free money too---but why have we even let this become a thing.

It's like collecting baseball cards.

I despair of what our industry has become...I really do.

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

my brain buzzes more than ever, i can't get my sleep schedule under control, i can't find the motivation to do literally anything unless someone pretty much forces me to do it, i can barely focus on anything, my hands constantly refuse to work properly...

why? why must i be like this? sure, i've gotta do this and that and the other, but none of it ends up getting done because i'm too busy staring at a fucking wall, lost in my own head, and everything gets fucked up.

i can't even be fucked to go for walks or anything because i don't know the neighborhood and there's such a high crime rate here, nothing i'm not used to but still...

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

So I’m working on a project right and I don’t run it after writing 104 lines of untested code and it doesn’t work.

Which is expected but then I do some stuff and fix that, I get a new error which is great cause I’m getting closer.

Cut to tonight. I’m trying to hunt and kill this bug. And after doing nothing but copying the code to another text file so I can upload that copy and get help.

I decide to run it with a little just print statement in it to make sure it’s definitely broken and I’m not asking online for no reason.

And.. it works.. WHAT???

I uncomment the rest of the function and get rid of the print statement and scream because ITS WORKING!!

I MEAN IT HAS BUGS BUT THEYRE BUGS I CAN FIX AND FOCUS ON AFTER I FREAK OUT ABOUT IT WORKING AFTER ME CHANGING FUCKING NOTHING.

Forms with autofocus. What are your opinions on that?

My boss keeps asking us to always give autofocus to the first input of a form, without any UX study to support it, just his opinion ("I think it makes sense"). I fucking hate it. He says it's nice for keyboard users, but I'm a keyboard user myself and I say that's what the tab key is for. To fucking focus stuff.

It really annoys me to no end when things like this are requested, but it's ok to have buttons, checkboxes, etc without fucking :focus and :active styles. Just :hover is not enough ffs.

And "links" that work with "onclick". Damn how I want to kill anyone that does that.

Area of focus : get rid of noisy office mates

Why : so that I can focus on my work

not universal, but works for me:

1. start listening to long video/podcast/talkshow i'm interested in

2. (optional) think about all the physical things i should do, such as cleaning the house, running errands, etc. conclude "nah, i'd rather stay at the computer".

3. open the project i'm working on, thinking "while i listen, i might as well muck about with this for a bit". the key is for the thought to be duration-indeterminate and non-commital, so it feels like an idea for a voluntary idle activity.

4. start mucking around with the project, starting with the simplest smallest tasks, to slowly shift my focus away from what i'm listening to, so it gradually becomes the background thing as the work gets into foreground of my concentration without me even noticing. this also naturally shifts me towards the more important and complicated tasks in the project

5. naturally lose track of time, realizing i've been working for 2 to 3 hours without break only after what i'm listening to ends (sometimes not even then)

6. at that point, take a break, stretch my legs, get some food, watch some 20-30 minute thing with full attention.

7. find a new long-form mostly audio thing to listen to, and go to step 4. repeat.

8. i found i can work like this 8 to sometimes 20 hours straight in a nice atmosphere, without feeling like i spent the time working with all the mental exhaustion it brings, instead it feeling like "i was listening to interesting/entertaining things and mucking around with some stuff on the side", with all the feeling of "i've been idling the whole time" except the work is actually done, or at least i made a progress. it feels almost like procrastinating except without the guilt because i can see i've done a lot through that time. kind of a good compromise between total procrastination and working your ass off into complete anxiety/depression

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

According to my doctor and chiropracter I'm burned out right now.

But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. But my concentration and productivty have been gone for a few weeks now.

I mainly work alone and I'm currently trying to complete 4 projects. But I just can't seem to get it done anymore.

I know that when I'm in my peak I would only need 2 weeks for it. But I have been trying for 2.5 months know and getting nowhere.

Not really where the problem originated but probably with the ever changing specs and my main client that hasn't paid in 5 months. But he accounts for 80% of my profits, but the internal politics of the coperate stuff is making stuff hard.

Not really sure how to go from here yet, need to finish this but can't focus. Can't hire someone since my reseveres are gone and I can't take a holiday and relax because of the money and the voice in my head that says you have to get this done.

But the feeling of wanting to work but not getting anything done, like walking into a mental wall. Makes me wanne run into a real wall head first. Stupid body listen to reason so we can go on a holiday and relax!

Have a positive mindset. If the work in general sucks, you can almost always find some micro or nano task that you can focus on. Then you find something more fun to work with and switch job. But until then, stay positive and be happy. And use devrant to blow off steam.

AI is the future, and it's a future I want to be part of.

This week was very stressful, beside my usual depression and personal issues, I've received a lot of difficult tasks at work, to do in a very short amount of time.
Things I never did, tecnologies I've never used, and for a potential client that is critical for the company at this period in time, and if we won't be able to satisfy their requests we could go bankrupt really soon.
A lot of responsibility, almost no time and a person not competent enough to do it (me), especially on a hurry.

I couldn't sleep in these days, I couldn't think peacefully, concentrate to find the best solutions. I had really bad thoughts.

I couldn't find any useful solution online, on stackoverflow, forums, etc. and I spent hours searching them.

For who knows me here on devRant, probably knows also that I tend to work with old legacy code and dead languages as VB6 and VB.NET.
So integrate "new fancy stuff" isn't that easy and there are no documentation and examples to relay on.
I had fear to even try to understand the documentation (for other languages) and try to write code for it… I was panicking.

With no more ideas, I've decided to try to ask ChatGPT for help.

In maybe 3 or 5 seconds it was able to generate the solution, in VB.NET, with comments and all the explanation needed to understand it and integrate it correctly in my software.
With a few other requests it was able to change it to make it fit better my scenarios.

It's truely unbelivable how the tecnology advanced in the last years, how a computer on the other side is able to reply to my questions with answers that I couldn't find anywhere, because they probably never existed for my case, in VB.NET especially.

ChatGPT made my day, and allowed me to end this stressful moment and give me time to relax and focus on more important personal stuff this weekend.

Just when I was getting used to working from home, my stupid friend made my life even more hell.

I live in a 1 bhk apartment. It's just enough for 3 guys to live comfortably. Now this stupid friend has brought in 3 of his friends since lockdown started and it looks like they are here to stay unless offices start functioning again.

I'm not a smoker and I don't like drinking every other day. Ever since his friend's moved in, it smells like I'm living in a chimney and they drink evey other day.

I don't like their lifestyle or work ethics. I try to blend in but it's a hell here for me trying to focus on my work and goals.

I'm just lucky they haven't brought in any corona yet.

I'm currently interviewing for a new job and I hope it will help me get out of this shit hole as soon as possible.

I have declined their offer for me to drink because I really want this new job. Now, I'm that odd guy in the group who doesn't drink or smoke.

Smh

A guy came from another city, just to teach a little bit on how to improve productivity, and after almost 2 hours of him telling stories about his life and career, in five minutes he told us to delete games and facebook from our cellphones, and only focus on learning and work related apps... And He tried to sell us the complete series of books and videos with the full content on productivity in the end...

I feel like I need to morph into an octopus to keep efficiently doing my work.
Too few hands, too few brains...

And I just can't fucking focus on 5 things fucking simultaneously...

I was coding.
-> Customer calls
-> New ticket with higher priority
-> I get back to coding
-> Boss calls, do ticket first
(Rinse and repeat)

I don't even know if I'm able to at least get a raise as a trainee, but our company only has two (2) developers right now, including me... And since our senior left, we do a fuckton more work.

I do way more than other trainees in my class and compared to some other colleagues, seriously.

In any case, we got reviews and feedback rounds with our bosses next week, and I wrote a DIN A4 page of reasons why I want to get at least a small raise.

Not gonna read it off, of course, but gonna go along it...
Wish me luck.

How to fucking tell my fucking new employee to start working instead of texting? Dude cant survive 15min without pulling out his phone and texting. I told him to at least timebox his work, like focus on work 1 hour and then text for 5 minutes.

By 5min texting and 5min working he wont learn shit. Im not paying him for sitting and texting.

Problem is, he's a friend of a friend so for some reason he feels quite chill here since he didnt have to bust his ass to get here. Also its his first work.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.

"come work from the office! we now offer an on-site masseuse with quick massages!"
WTF? No. First of all, the office is in the wrong fucking continent. But let's focus on the bogus "masseuse" crap for now.

We are a 3000+ full-time employees company. If all were to come to the same overpriced pile of fancy rocks at the same 60 hours interval (spread over 5.5 days), it would mean 1.2 minutes per massage per person per week. So to let each person have a single 15 minute massage session per week, there would have to be at least 12.5 masseuses available at all working hours.
Let's say 10 masseuses to account of those people who would not have a weekly session.
Now, let's say each masseuse is a no-strings-attached independant contractor making USD 3000 per year on a 60hour, 5.5 days full-capacity work week without breaks, vacations, benefits or sickdays (European readers may faint, but it is not so uncommon in other parts of the globe).
So this shit costs 30k USD per year.

I would much rather have 10 more USD per year than this useless "look how young and hype we are!" startup horsecrap.

"it would actually be more like 2 USD per year" was the rebuttal to my (way more politely phrased) argument above. "there is the whole overhead costs thing, and, besides, we will only have one masseuse available at a time"
Oh. So besides all the marketing, the whole point is to let a person have like four sessions per year.

Office Perks. Are. Not. Real.

Guys, I have all symptoms of wasting time in bad work (can't stop thinking about it, anxious, can't relax, can't focus on a hobby, etc.)

But - how the hell you can know if next company won't be even worse? How can you be at least basically sure that today's "bad" isn't that bad in comparison to your next employer?

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

Hi, my name is bohr and I'm a recovering distro hopper.

It all started with Ubuntu, out of my frustrations with the unintuitive nature of DOS I gravitated to a Unix environment which Ubuntu naturally solved. But I quickly became annoyed with the laggy nature of it's daily usage. So I switched to Linux mint. Loving the HTML/css/js configuration aspect of cinnamon I thought it was the answer to all my problems. But I became annoyed with apt and it's lack of a few programs I wanted. This got me to look into an arch based distro, because pacman seemed like the answer to my problems. Unfortunately there are way too many arch distros to use. I experimented with antegros' many DE options: gnome, kde, i3, deepin, openbox... Always finding something wrong. I tried manjaro and it's many flavors, still being annoyed with minute aspects of the os. Out of frustration, with the deep configuration settings I was getting into and the need to actually focus on the work being done on the computer I crawled back to Linux mint. But now my friends, I have decided that maybe it's time to just use a more established distro? Maybe gnome isn't actually that bad? Maybe I need to give it another try? And that is why, I promise, this is the last hop for me. Arch Linux, Gnome here I come and I'm ready to commit this time!...

But have you guys seen POP!_OS? Woah, I bet it would solve all of my problems....

I want to pause my music so I can focus, but I have two co-workers right next to me who are working in a problem. I could take my laptop somewhere else, but I would rather they just shut the hell up, or go book a damn conference room.

I could just say that .. or just be lazy and post about it on dev rant. 😅

Also, fuck open workspaces. I never though I'd miss the cubical, but the open work space is a new level of hell.

my boss plays music at full volume all day long.
not only i can't focus on my work, but also i don't enjoy his music

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

I’m currently still looking for a new job after two very, very horrible jobs. My doc said I’m worked out and shouldn’t work for a while because it really has some physical negative effects.

I always feel unenthusiastic, have breathing problems, crumbly, sweaty hands all the time.

But just today the CEO of a company I know from a previous customer texted me on behalf of another company which I’ve worked for where I was extremely happy. Sadly, that company wasn’t quite the focus I had as programmer.

But I’m happy to slowly be known in the industry around me and look positive in the future.

In my previous job, the head of tech was a bully and my project manager had an affair and probably sex at work with him after I rejected her attentions. They both played against me at work. Not to talk about the call centre there.. Have you ever tried to focus on programming whilst people at call centre talk loud about how often they walk their dog to poo? I've been used there and then kicked out in a very sneaky way. They didn't fire me because I've been awesome (as far as my colleagues said) at work, they just made me want to leave after increasing my salary. I left that job with disgust and indignation. My new job now is far better but still hear the voice of the head of tech sometime as a ghost in my head. If I was another kind of person I would have probably punched his mouth until it stopped offending and harassing me because of too much bleed in the teeth.

This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).

Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.

A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.

In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.

All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.

Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon.

After years of only breaking even or low profitability BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CHEAPSKATES WHO THINK WHAT I DO IS EASY AND SHOULD BE FREE OR $5 OR WHATEVER AND FRIENDS I DID WORK FOR FOR FREE TOTALLY ABANDONED OUR FRIENDSHIP AFTERWARDS FOR STUPID MISUNDERSTANDINGS ON THEIR PART I closed down my web dev business and now focus only on full time employment. I don’t even do sites for friends anymore.

But did that stop people who before wanted to haggle prices from now BEGGING me to go back into business or to help their referral or to please-pretty-please just help them with one more problem?

Nnnnnnope!

And even now I hate disappointing people and telling them no even though I know they’ll have tiny budgets and will stall and delay and not deliver content or make decisions so I can finish and GET PAID.

WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! AND WHERE WERE ALL THESE OPPORTUNITIES WHEN FEWER PEOPLE WERE INTERESTED IN MY SERVICES?!

Being able to make THE game I've wanted to make for 4 years. I have a team of people who wants to participate (dev, artist, etc) and I even started building my engine from scratch.

But most importantly, my dream for this game is to have it published on the Nintendo Switch (also PC, OSX and Linux of course)

But right now I must focus on finishing my degree and doing contracts to make enough money to hopefully work full time on my game.

I'll see you in 2 years Albi

Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…

I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!

In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.

When I used to code I'd use the Pomodoro Technique.

It helps me get tasks done more quickly and efficiently when I know I only have to focus for 45 minutes and then I get a 15 minute break.

It also helps if you're stuck on something, because when you come back to it you have fresh eyes.

Also, music without any lyrics helps me focus better than music where someone is singing. Be it Mozart or dubstep, as long as there are no words I can work with it. 😂 (I highly recommend Instrumental Core)

Finally, my phone would be in a completely different room or in my desk drawer in DND mode. I set it up so that it only rings for certain people (parents, brother and boyfriend), so no-one can bug me while I work. It's fantastic.

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

I just overheard at the office one of my colleagues dont want to move on my side cause Im so quiet he didnt like me to be his seatmate. So tell me what's wrong on the person who just want to focus and do good work huh?

Being a programmer and addicted to porn is a challenge, thus most work is in front of the screen. It's like trying to stop drugs but you work in a drug factory...

I've realized that it highly affects my ability to focus on code.

And btw, don't come with this is a reddit nofap comment, it's applicable here thus its for developers.

somewhere in this world this happened..

Company lands huge enterprise project
manager: we have a year to get this done.
poor devs : excited and thinks about so much learning with this project it would be.
manager: Lets get work started with (spits planless jargons)...meanwhile another team is working on SRS.
poor devs: So we are doing R&D right..(excited)
manager: No we have a demo scheduled after 15days.
poor devs: What??
manager: Get on it..we need something to show on demo.
poor devs: no words spoken

...after one year of unplanned demos...
manager: we have to stablize project..UAT is nearing.
one of brave poor devs: No no..lets focus on demo...why do you need a stable product.
manager: instant rage

Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..

But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.

If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.

Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.

Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.

i found text messages of my gf cheat on me 20 minutes before i start work today and the whole day i am mentally paralyzed, stunned, confused, lost, flabbergasted, and completely at loss of words. almost couldnt focus on work at all

I just finished reading the last chapter of the DevOps Handbook, its an eye opener, but not an easy read. And still recommended.

I've been reading this book for the past year and a half, little by little. It was hard since I started understanding why my work was so frustrating (I'm in System-Cloud-Ops position). The book made sense, while the work did not, it got harder since the book provides solutions, but whenever I dicussed any solutions with management they dismissed everything.
I started to initiate improvements by myself:
Prioritizing tasks I thought were more important to improve the way of work - do now and ask questions later... I got yelled at, I got my managers angry, but afterwards more often then not they admitted I was right.
To make it possible I worked overtime and on weekends, trying to prove a better way is possible, by implementing a long term solutions to solve problems instead of workarounds, automating a lot of stuff, creating labs, preparing presentations and documentation.
Time and time again I tried to pitch more ideas related to DevOps but the managers didn't care...
I know now my burnout started 8 months ago slowly, my hairline started receding, I started clenching my teeth (the doctor said stress was the cause) which was very fainful.
I continued to work but I noticed I was also more cynical, frustrated, and tired.

In the process I neglected myself.
So finally after 2 years and a half I quit my job, to focus on myself, at least for a little while.
I hope in my next job will be better.

Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...

Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.

Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.

This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.

The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.

I miss coding already.

An annoying type of colleague: the kind that refuses to cooperate and insists on doing shit their own way because they have done it that way for years and they become little crybabies whenever someone new tries to work with them.

Somehow managers accept their baby-like behavior because they've been producing output. However, like my Business Processes professor said: "Don't focus on output".

It's just annoying trying to work with these guys.

My GOTOs are:

- Check if focus on teamwork is emphasized. Does the company state themselves? Spend a day with the team if possible, see how they work together.

- What tools do they use? Sometimes this will hint you towards whether or not you will encounter a good environment or a jumbled mess.

- Is there organized communication? I know, sometimes there are too many meetings, but that is better than too vew. How often does the team meet, even if just for 10mins? How does management communicate with the team? What ways are provided to give feedback? Are suggestions to improve practices welcome?

I left my last company and joined my current one, where these things work out the way they should. While I liked both projects with respect to development, my mental state has improved dramatically in the new environment. Stress is down, productivity is up. I love my job.

I haven't been able to work on the computer without getting a headache very soon after for almost 2 weeks straight now.

I presume I have grown a sensitivity to bright light, stemming from the time I dimmed my phone all the way about 5 months ago and never set it back until just now.

In my classes I will get random headaches that hurt like heck and make me feel groggy, making me unable to focus at all. And while doing computer work, I'll get the same thing.

I've tried getting my eyes checked again, and got new glasses about a week ago - still no help.

Prior to this incident I was working hard on a volunteer project with a small team. Since then my progress and commits have dwindled greatly, and I feel stressed out because I can't do what i want to do without hurting and feeling like absolute shit!

I'm currently trying to get my eyes used to bright lights again by setting things like my phone screen to a brighter setting, changing some dead light bulbs in different rooms of the house, and getting more involved outside.

I hope this goes away soon - I don't want to have this stupid headache every time I go to code or work in class.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

First day back from holiday.
CEO announces everyone the pandemic is over and everyone has to return to the office.
Talked about how good it is to come and crack a joke with a colleague and that they care about our wellbeing.
I have barely been able to even focus on work because of all the chaos in the company since the beginning of the year (many interviews for hiring new devs, company events, meet etc.)
Colleagues talking about the fact that nobody can work from the office given all the chaos in the projects and nobody will come because they can't fire us all.
I have to answer to an outsourcing company today for a new fully remote full stack .NET developer position for the same pay, but might be risky in terms of what I can actually deliver in terms of code.
What advice can you give me? Jump the boat or not?

My headphones 🎧 died two days ago and I can't focus on work since then. Why do they have to be so fragile?

Oh my, never was i triggered more. Of course i can only speak for my experience. I study software development as focus.

First off, the starting languages and or concepts you learn.
Why the fuck do they start with java and don't even really explain how instances actually work? Of course they don't. Because it would be way too fucken much for a semester to go over garbage collection, Instanciation of stuff, allocation in such an advanced system, etc..
How about starting with something not 50% managed by a vm?
Good ol' C. And now don't tell me thats a rough start. We all know about these subjects or exams where it's all about sorting people out. Who will be able to manage a whole bunch of shit or who should consider something else.
Yo dawg sick idea: how about sorting it via the will to achieve the skill of coding?
Nah but we make the exams around coding (by the fucking way done on paper, what the hell) such a fucking breeze, asking you how to convert hex do dec.
Meanwhile maths will make you cut yourself in a dark corner, after you nearly shot yourself because of some lame-ass business-subject.

Do you folks have a constant "culture switching" in workplace? by switching i mean things like standup time , leaving time , lunch time etc getting changed every few days?

I feel like being part of team that is run by a dictator ever since our tech lead changed.

earlier we used to have 11 am standup, now out of blue she decided it will be on 9.30.
Its weird because most of the team can't reach office before 10am on WFO days and I personally ma having my breakfast with laptop open till 11 on WFH day.
I mean it could look bad if I was a construction worker getting paid by the hour, but am a fucking developer who can write code on his own time and only my work and timelines should matter.

same thing about leaving office. there is no official time to leave but i have to travel 2 hours so i usually leave at 5. i usually compensate this with working till 8 -8.30 on a wfh day but now sudden 1.5 hour meetings are becoming so much more common.

Another thing about leaves. earlier we could take leaves if we had some of our 22+ paid leaves remaining.
We would just need to inform to our manager and 99% of time he would instantly approve.
Now it feels like giving a request to government office. TL would not approve until the very last day. and if the leave falls in a month where other people are on leave as well, it might not get approved at all .
mind you, our team is quite decent at 5 android devs, 2 ios devs and 2 backend devs. i am an androdmid dev and i couldn't het a leave even if all 4 other devs are present on a day but an ios dev is not present, which I don't understand why?

weird cultural shift from "we have a relaxing environment and only focus on achieving targets" to "you do as we say, there are no team decision and votes"

Mornings. Not just the run of the mill “I’m not a morning person” but I legitimately would be more productive if I could work night shift. It’s easier to think at night, and easier to sleep during the day. Not just a night owl, but it’s hard to breathe laying down at night sometimes. Sometimes I randomly can’t sleep. I’ve never had this trouble during the day during the occasions I get to sleep for long periods during the day. The morning is prime sleeping time IMO. Not wanting to wake up is one reason, but the changing weather helps and it just feels right.

I also don’t feel awake til the afternoon usually. Even if I get enough sleep and coffee. Code churns slow in the a.m.

I dream of night time being work time with long, restful naps durning the day. I feel more creative at night, and it’s easier to focus. There’s less thought of “oh it’s a nice day I should do x”

Just sucks that it’s not largely accepted and there’s not enough other night hawks to hang out with on my off days. And my work won’t let me do such a schedule. Everyone is an insufferable morning person.

Early to bed early to rise is a load of shit. We should be allowed to sleep at times it makes us happy.

Using eclipse after a long while on a work laptop and this fucking piece of shit console window popping the fuck up and my cursor auto switching to it is the fucking shit design of a fucking lunatic from the fourteenth circle of hell, where the eternal punishment in addition to being roasted alive, probably includes being forced to fucking use eclipse.

Did I mention fuck eclipse? Fuck, I don't even care if I did. Fuck eclipse again.

Oh and to add on, if you're thinking of making the very useful suggestion that it's very easy to turn off window focus with just two buttons, then fuck you and the guy who designed that shitty UI fucking button.

So I fix a bug and I create a PR, someone reviews it and leaves a couple of comments, I address those comments and push up my updated code thinking “great I should be ok to move onto this big story waiting for me”
Then some Expletive.random(); from a totally different team who has no context of my change comes in and starts leaving petty comments. He literally pointed out 3 different things that could be made private/package-private.
Bugger off and focus on your own team’s work instead of leaving comments about relatively trivial things on my PRs.
Apparently he is well known for this. I can tell we are gonna have some fun encounters...

I FUCKING GIVE UP!

Yep I'm pissed of :D I spend the last two months waiting like a idiot some business to answer about their job offers (more or less 3 in my area..)

Well I failed the last test of the first one, it was expected I guess. Lot of things happened but let's say I didn't use the approach that they were hoping me to use (you could have tell me you know...).

So... There is even one of the job offer, I called them already twice. Asking when they will call back. Each time it was : this week or the week after. Yeah I think that makes 5/6 weeks since the first time I called now...

But the thing which really piss me of. Is that I was waiting like a idiot, doing mostly nothing. Like if I couldn't focus on my projects before that I get a job... Well I guess when everyone is asking about when you will have a job or a girlfriend, that's not the atmosphere that I love to work with T. T

Oh yeah, no dev related. But I fall in love with a Russian girl (I'm a French guy btw). I completely messed up the relationship though xD well no way that I'm giving up anyway. And that's mostly thanks to her that I just woke up of that shitty period ^^

Sooo I started to gather people from all over the world on LinkedIn. Checking job offers on StackOverflow. And Monday I'll start writing some post on LinkedIn searching for a job in the whole fucking world. I hope there will have a business who wants a junior C++ dev :P Remote probably, I'd like to travel easily (yeah, I probably want to go to Russia a little too xP)

That's all :D I FUCKING GIVE UP ABOUT WAITING DOING NOTHING LIKE A IDIOT!!!

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

Everyday I get on my train, get off and go into the office, get some coffee, and sit down at my desk.

Everyday, all of us take a Blue Pill, and focus in on this world they give us. We don't consider this a part of our life. Brushing our teeth, flossing, making breakfast, sleeping .. those are also not our life.

Life are all the other things outside of the routine.

But we spend more time in our routine. We spend more time in our loops than outside of them.

Brushing your teeth, making coffee, coding at work, eating, sleeping: these things are your life.

All those other things, they're the escape from it.

After I took some time off from work, I decided to accept the offer for maintenance of two projects. Those are from two old clients, so I think I will not stress too much, since I know what to expect most of the time.

The issue is, sometimes I have a hard time to keep concentration. In the past, I could work for 3h straight, totally focused, would pause for 20min for stretch, and then come back to work. Now I can only focus for 30min or 1h, and after a pause, it's hard to concentrate again.

There is a lot going on in my life right now, and I know the worry is probably distracting me. I'm trying to listen instrumental music, drinking coffee... But that's not enough. Somebody has any tip?

The time at university I was kind of burned out all the time.
I was far away from being a hard-working student, I needed more than double time to finish, but I constantly had a feeling of being stressed.
My free time never felt like free time because I thought I should learn/do something for the university.
Now at work, I can spend my free time without feeling guilty. Sure, I also have to think about problems at work sometime and I still should learn something to get better, but now I can focus on stuff I'm really interested in.

Focus on projects, not tests.

If you want people to be able to code, judge them by their ability to code.

Plus that way your graduates have a portfolio as opposed to a grade list that says nothing about their usefulness in the market.

If you must do tests, at least mimic real world conditions:

- Digital, no paper
- Internet allowed (have rules on copying SO if you must)
- BYOD, let people work in their customised environment

If you could choose between:
• Waiting for an original idea to do something innovative (and maybe never get it).
• Spending an enormous amount of time to recreate one of the first projects you've worked on (and loved) as a beginner, using new technologies and the knowledge gained over the years, knowing that it could be a good product but will probably not get the interest of public and will not sell well on the app stores.
• Working on a project that could work (or not) and become popular, but that doesn't really interest you.

What would you do?
Personal satisfaction or profit?

Of course I don't want to focus on profit, but I'm still a student and my free time is very short, and sometimes I work very hard (I tend to put social life, exams, health, etc. on the second place) on projects that nobody uses. My family and friends think I'm crazy, and sometimes me too.
It's something bad, isn't it?

Do you prefer working remote or in the office?

I like to view these as equal choices. I don't think offices are as bad as some people make them up to be (of course heavily depends on the environment and company!). In opposed to working remote, offices can help you focus more on work and leave work problems "at work".

While, if you're working remote, it's not unlikely for work and personal life to become so intertwined that it's hard to tell them apart anymore. It's hard to not think about work at home if home is where you work.

I believe an ideal is somewhere inbetween - not entirely remote, but not entirely office focused either. Mixing and matching seems like the one approach where you get to have most of the benefits, but with the least negatives. It doesn't seem necessary to always be at the office but it also doesn't seem good for you to always be cooped up at home.

!rant

I have about a week of holidays left before my classes start and I'm thinking about creating a notepad with password protection and cloud sync so it can be accesed on other devices.

So this is how it will work.
Probably the same interface as windows notepad so no one notices. It can be used to write a personal diary or anything that you don't want other people to know. It will ask for a 4 digit code when you open it(at first you'll see some text, you'll just enter you pin after that text and without pressing enter if you pin is write you'll see the text changes to your previously saved text and if your pin is wrong no error will be displayed itll work as a normal text editor for intruders and probably this wrong pin will be sent to you on you emil with other info). Now even if yoy minimize the window you'll have enter the pin again or even your windows gets out of focus. So you can have it open all the with out worrying.

I'll be using C# for this which I have no experience with. But I'll get it so no problem here.

Provide your feedback on this with some suggestions.

*Sorry I didn't post it on calebs section because I don't have $10.

I've thought of the perfect analogy for people who constantly interrupt us while we are coding.

It's like you're a mechanic and you are working on a complex engine. You're focused on what you're doing, your hands are filthy, and you're just about to fit the part in that you've been trying to fit in for the past hour.

Someone comes along and asks you to help them open a pickle jar in the middle of your work. So you have to stop what you're doing, wash your hands, and then help them open the jar. By the time you're done your focus has completely shifted, you lost all momentum, and your progress comes to a complete halt.

This is what it's like for us when you come into our office or call us to ask us a question that isn't important or urgent whatsoever. It's especially frustrating when it's the same question that has already been asked 100 times.

Why is it that the tech Youtubers of this world (and tech reviewers in general) tend to completely skip development as a use case, and instead (if they do ever move off gaming) focus on things like Rendering & Modelling / CAD work? I'm sure there's *way* more devs in the world than CAD guys, surely?!

And if they *do* give it the light of day, it's always a quick benchmark based on "Firefox compile time", "Linux kernel compile time" or similar. Dude, it's 2020. Much as some would like to believe otherwise, most guys stopped compiling swathes of heavy C & C++ as part of their normal workflow over a decade ago.

Real-world tests I want to know about are things like docker performance, common IDE startup performance, compile performance of different sized applications on a bunch of langs like Kotlin, C#, Java, Clojure - or node.js performance, Tensorflow performance on NVidia's vs AMDs latest GPUs, etc. I care about how many IntelliJ instances & VMs I can have open way more than how many Chrome tabs I can forget to close.

But noooo - forget that, here's how fast Blender can render a BMW! 😬

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

Let's focus/master computer architectures, coding paradigms, datastructures. Everything comes after that...the problem with todays academics is that they are more focused on immediately deploying students to industry; theyre more focused on teaching specific frameworks and specific language instead of teaching how things work...i bet most students (at least in my country) are having troubles with endianess or encoding or even byte manipulation or what a thread is....If im going to be the teacher for example of an oop subject, ill let the student choose the language they want as long as the oop paradigm is intact ,it will be fine.. i dont friggin care whether you know vue or angular or swing if you dont even know what a callback is..

I would never listen to music while writing code because I thought it would distract me to much. I've started doing this lately and I found that I have been more productive. I've noticed I can focus on writing code for a longer (much longer) amount of time before I need to refocus or take a short break.

I've created a "coding" playlist which is growing daily.

Who here finds they are more productive at work while listening to music and what sort of music do you listen to?

I used to have time to read up on new web development tools and techniques and it helped me get a better job.

Now I have a better job I'm always busy, which I love, but it's harder to keep up to date.

I do some reading in my own time but it's more difficult to focus.

Thinking about it, I suppose I do keep learning just by being at work and solving new problems.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

The popups on websites pisses me off.

If you try to google something quickly and enter various websites you have to close all popups on each site you enter.

Some websites try to make these popups more discreet by making them small and putting them at the bottom of the screen but then your brain just ignore them and focus on the small content above them.

In the year of 2022 people visit a lot of sites during a day. The human brain is programmed to put in as little work as possible to reach a certain goal so therefor everyone ignores popups.

I know its a law to inform people about cookies etc. But isnt there a better way?

Have a question about my career:

So far my career out of uni has been like this:

8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.

12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.

3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.

Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.

In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.

I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.

Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.

I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.

Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?

My area of focus is to focus.

I get distracted way too easily, I often think I would get far more done if I could stay focused for a longer period.

Due to ramadhan, I can't focus on work. Am dearly missing my morning and afternoon coffee.

My main area of focus is consistent therapy from working with PM's.

In other news, I work on the frontend design and development of internal web applications, good times.

I've been a consultant in the area of mobile apps for five years now and have stayed at the same company since getting my degree.

In the beginning I had an immense passion and worked on a lot of side projects/pro bono stuff during my free time. Around the same time as the pandemic hit I simply lost all my interest and energy, life has been going to work, go home, find something to eat and go to bed. I can't even find joy in playing video games, working out or cooking anymore, it's always browsing youtube/netflix because I can't find it in me to commit to anything that requires focus.

The project I'm currently in no longer gives me the ability to grow technically, it's just the same old stuff over and over with no opportunity to do proper maintenance or explore new approaches/frameworks/etc.

I recently found out that I make around 25-30% less than my peers in the same field and location, this was a blow for me since I keep getting praised both from customers, management and my fellow developers.

A year ago I asked management to find me a new project with the motivation that I don't want to stall my growth, they have yet to heed this request since I'm not easily replaced.

I had a company event last Friday and the CEO announced to go back to 2 days in the office.

And a bit later, he went on a spiel that employees should disable notifications more to focus. But he wants that we go back to the office... an open office with a lot more background noise.

My closest colleague that I work the most with is 2000 km away....

Any other devs with PTSD here? Since the trauma I find it hard to focus on programming. Before the trauma I would code on the job, get home and code personal projects for fun. After the trauma I can barely focus on programming for work.
How do you focus?

For the new/aspiring developers:
1. If you are still looking to learn more, but you don't know where to go, start brainstorming. Make a list of projects you could make and sort them by difficulty. Put the ones you could do now at the top of the list, and the ones you aren't sure how to do yet, at the bottom of the list. As you go through them, if you want to do something but aren't sure how, just hop onto an irc chat and everyone will be glad to help. As you go through the projects, your logic and program design skills should improve, as well as your knowledge of programming.
2. Put comments in your code. Seriously. If you are working on a project and suddenly stop working on it for a week or more, you will go back to look at that code and be extremely confused. If you are making something open source, its even more important. If people can understand the code, they are more likely to contribute to it.
3. Try not to focus on code for too long. The longer you work, the more tired your brain gets. Eventually you get tired and make really stupid decisions in your code.
4. Don't code while tired (look at #3)
5. If you are writing code as an assignment, make sure to rename all variables to proper names before submitting it. The instructor will likely not be pleased to see variable names with the f-bomb in them.

Not sure it's so much about my vacation, but my boss' one. I look forward to uninterrupted days in the office where I can work without much small talk or having to explain my logic in great detail to a non-technical boss. So, when I heard he was away for a week, I thought, great, I'll have some time to focus...

Whoah there, not so fast. Turn up at work on Monday morning to find my boss online on Slack waiting to chat with me. He's on the other side of the world. It's the middle of the night for him. And he says I'm not allowed to work remotely...

I'm noticing that installing a new distro and making it your main distro tends to be very stressful to me.

Here's a couple of reasons why:

There's this anxiety I get that is just crazy, like I need to set this thing up perfectly, meanwhile I have work to do.
And the thing you estimated to take 2 hours at most ends up being a full week.
Work starts to pile up but can't just shake the obsession with setting this thing up.

Another reason is that usually my main distro instance tends to be VERY customized.
So much that when you switch, you need to configure those things again, and troubleshoot a lot.

Troubleshooting isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that you're trying to troubleshoot with a machine that needs troubleshooting.

the shell, the editor, the terminal, the window manager, tmux, the notifications, the custom kb layout. it was all so neatly customized that fixing problems on the machine was manageable.

but without all that I feel like an idiot.

Even something as simple as keeping having youtube music to focus is now intermittent because you need to restart the X server.

Maybe my problem is that I don't do well for bootstrapping.

Anyhow, I'm really stressed right now, but I think it'll be worth it.

*Gets tapped on shoulder

Co-worker: Why are you wearing headphones? They're not even plugged in?

Me: To indicate to people I don't want to be interrupted as I'm trying to focus.

Co-worker: Oh right. I see.

...

Co-worker: So, I have a question...

FML!

Why don't people learn to piss off and let me work!?

This fucking WHORE girl at my office that im supposed to work the project with, talks with the other girl about finding a new RICH sports basketball guy because shes looking only for RICH guys. Then talks about how women take rich guys young and marry them ASAP because they view it as an investment. She views marrying a rich guy as INVESTMENT. This is so Fucking saddening it pisses me off. Cant focus on my fucking work from this whore bragging about wanting to marry a millionaire basketball guy (shes 25 and nearing expiry date probably got ran through by the whole city and now looks for a simp to inherit massive wealth)

A girl that works as a difficult job as mine and is backend, and talks like this, has this whore mentality, is fucking SADDENING and DEGRADING. It is humiliating towards me. I find it extremely offensive and do not appreciate this at all even if it has nothing to do with her whore activities.

The sole fact that she is looking ELSEWHERE for a rich guy, a guy who throws a Fucking BALL, because everyone knows we working in tech are NOT rich, while a retard throwing a ball IS rich--this is Fucking HUMILIATING. I'll perform a ritual and hope to God that basketball guy cheats on her or leaves her. Every whore fucking deserves this. I thought she was a cool girl until i heard her talk shit where shes only looking to be with a rich guy. Who the FUCK are you? You're working a 9-5 backend job while i work devops + your job. I make more than you even though i still find it being a slave wage. She apparently wants someone who earns at least x100 more than her. Fuck you whore

"New Manager: You are good with JavaScript focus on that, you can't work on back end and front end both."

I was hired by company because of my understanding of backend, server side, database, aws etc. I worked on both in past and learned, got better with JS later. I like to learn new things and have knowledge about web development.

Worst advice I guess.

I’m officially underemployed. Got let go yesterday. Doing freelance work. Doesn’t fully pay the bills. But that’s ok. Working on a career focus shift is gonna be uncomfortable for a while. Just hope this economy doesn’t go further underwater and inflation doesn’t go even higher while I’m in the grind.

- Learn python
- Learn ML
- Move from client projects and start/finish my own project
- Find time/money to start PhD studies
- Find time to do science paper
- Get new car
Had to focus on working when I finished my master so I hope to get back to science part of work

My teamleader blabbering about how I shouldn't listen to late shows with my earbuds while I work is rubbing me the wrong way.

"How can you focus while listening to them hurr durr", as if we didn't all do 20 tasks at once on a daily basis anyway.

My best tool for avoiding procrastination and getting a lot of focus is having a job with a great work culture in which I get to work on a project that challenges me and makes me learn new stuff. When it's not like that, I tend to lose energy and that sends me straight to devRant and other sources of distraction.

Did you every have nothing to do on a regular basis?

I am really trying to show initiative and find the work but due to company focus shift my position I was hired for 4 months ago has become completely redundant. I am asking my senior dev and other (not even my project) for tasks but more frequently there are days where I finish anything they could come up with in 1-2h. I have found a side hustle I am doing in the meantime, I am learning other dev related things and my personal website gets a new style. What I though would be a dream feels terrible. I feel underappreciated and useless and I start to dread each workday. Sometimes I feel except for my team of 3 they dont even know I exist and earn good money. I am often forgotten on company events, meetings and my projects are being put in the freezer. I also hate the cringe company I am working for but I dont know if its already time to give up.

Did you ever have nothing to do at your job for more than a couple of days?

I know this is utopic, but I've been thinking for a while now about starting an open source platform for figuring out the problems of our society and finding real world, applicable, open source solutions for them.

To give you some more details, the platform should have two interfaces:
- one for people involved in researching, compiling issues into smaller, concrete chunks that can be tackled in the real world, discuss and try to find workable solutions for the issues and so on
- one for the general public to search through the database of issues, become aware of the problems and follow progress on the issues that people started working on

Of course, anyone can join the platform, both as an observer (and have the ability to follow issues they find interesting) and/or contributor (and actually work with the community to make the world a better place in any way they can).

Each area of expertise would have some people that will manage the smaller communities that would build around issues, much like people already do in the open source community, managing teams to focus on the important thins for each issue. (I haven't found a solution for big egos getting in the way yet, but it would be nice if the people involved would focus on fixing stuff in stead of debating about tabs vs spaces, if you know what I mean).

The goal of this project would be to bring together as many people from all kind of fields to actually try to fix this broken society.

It would be even better if it attracted people with money and access to resources (one example off the top of my head being people like Elon Musk) that could help implement the solutions proposed by the community without expecting to gain profit off of it (profit is also acceptable if it is made in a considerate, fair and helpful way, but would not be promoted on the platform).

The whole thing would be voluntary work; no salary, no other commitment than the personal pledge that once someone chooses to tackle something, he/she will also see it trough (or at least do his/her best).

The platform would be something like a mix of real time communication, issue tracker, project management tool and publishing platform.

I don't yet have all the details for how it should all fit together, but if there is something that I would like to start, this is definitely it!

PS: I don't think I can ever do something like this by myself, and I don't really have the time to manage a community of developers to start work on it right now. But if you guys think something like this is something worth your time, I will make time and at least start on defining the architecture and try to turn this into a real project.

If enough people are interested, I will drop any other side projects and do my best to get this into the world!

Thank you for reading :)

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

Is there any other programmer that started as an architect (building architect, not IT)?

I'm divided between two different careers and working around 15hours a day because I can't focus on one. Is this a normal thing?

I work as an architect for the past 6 years and were always interested in the technology part of it.

Soon I got to be a BIM coordinator and started using Dynamo for Revit.

After that, I got involved in learning Python and now start studying web dev (front-end)

Programming is very addictive! I get it now why IT people stay in their dorm like it's a cave

In architecture there's always a client you need to make happy, while in programming I create things the away I want them to be, without all the boring formalities that I am used to.

I can learn it for free and there's a huge community to help on it. All careers should be like this.

I'm happy, but really tired 😪 my social life is resumed to hanging out with my dogs

I've seen some posts on remote work. I believe all companies should permanently implement remote work if they cannot arrange a proper office.
I have been working for a company where programmers and project managers work in the same room, and sometimes I was trying to understand some problem in code when managers were screaming next to me at other developers or on the phone, because they couldn't hear themselves.
This happend so often that I would literally go home burned out.
Also there were people coming in the room to talk to the managers or just passing next to my screen every couple of minutes which was extremely distracting.
I bought a pair of over ear noise cancelling headphones and on top of that used ear plugs, but eventually I developed a very strange stress condition over the course of a year. Also listening to music while trying to focus for 8 hours a day while at work is very tiresome.
Also couldn't quit because it was my first job.

I got deadlines to meet at work so I cancelled all unnecessary meetings to focus on my development work. Some high manager pushes for last minute work because reasons.

I log onto my laptop this morning and see IT did an emergency patch. I expect some minor inconvenience because every time they patch something they fuck something up too.

Well they managed to lock me out of most software installed on my laptop and PC, I cannot even connect any device to it. Even debuggers get denied. They even managed to wipe all my networking configs in my lab.

I guess I will be doing jackshit today until the IT networking department wakes up from their offshore slumber, because it usually takes them forever to do anything whatsoever.

Fucking worthless fucks. I am so tired of all this.

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

I can't seem to focus on my work at all today -_- my server model isn't working and I haven't even started anything else...Any tips on helping me focus?

Sometimes I envy those people whose work is purely clock on / clock off, meaning those that can leave work and switch off to that entirely (delivery driver; mcdonalds etc). Having the time to focus on other things. I have never had that luxury, work consumes far too much of my time, even when not working i am thinking about it. I want the time to pursue my other love which is music, and playing my bass. I like my work but sometimes i fucking hate this path i'm on. Oh well FML.

What do people feel about remote work?
I got into my current work about 8 months and we all were remote working.

In 8 months, we met in person several times and worked together at one place for a week or two.

We have never overcome the feeling of a disconnect when we work remotely. There's less focus and less clarity on things to do.

Is this common? How do people be focused and productive in remote work?

Also how do people communicate effectively?

My master thesis is in ramble.
What I thought to be an achievable task in the beginning turns out to be very challenging.
My skill is not up to it.
The assistant prof I worked with is also not very helpful. I thought he's already familiar with the lib I will work with, turns out he's not so I have to study it by myself.
Me : **Asking question A**
Him : **Explaining B, C, D that's not really related to A. My question went unanswered.
Him giving me explanation on things that I already knew**
Me : "How about this code? Can we please focus on the code?!"
Him : **Finally explains the code so I can move forward a little**
Apparently I have to grow fangs and horns to scare people to give me what I want. :/

He and my prof are not in sync about how to solve the task.
They told me that even though I was behind my deadline (30% progress at 50% time), I still have some time before the deadline of the thesis.
The truth is, if I no longer believe that I can solve it, even if they gave me a time extension, it's going to be useless.
My motivation of finishing it is fading away. It's not a subject that I enjoy, the people I work with are not helpful.
I have been in depression for 2 months, and it's taking a toll on my health.
I am seriously considering dropping it and just let go of my master degree. There are many people who can work in IT even though they don't have proper formal education eh?

Isn't it fun when you are given a library or framework and that in order to debug it you have to use some hacky way of hooking the code to a special instance of the project?

Even more fun: the developers by default don't debug the project with tools, but rather with logic. Ok, that's a good way to debug but it shouldn't be the only way to debug. I don't want to go back to the age of coding on paper. At least give me a stacktrace that's halfway clear on what's happening there. Even worse is when the framework doesn't document its own problems! stacktrace.someMagicalMethodNoOneKnowsWhatItDoes(). Having to read the even more mystic and overly verbose documentation! You're just left there trying and guessing shit, even for the senior devs!

And do you know what's more fucked up?! Fucking using println() to debug!! And they take this shit seriously! I don't understand how these people call themselves programmers. No breakpoints? What the fuck, man!

Just give me Visual Studio for fuck's sake. I don't want to code in a broken IDE with a broken framework. Development on its own is already hard enough, so don't make it harder by giving me crappy frameworks and crappy IDE's that only work half the time.

Debugging without a debugger, with broken IDE's, with broken frameworks, I'm sorry but that's just not for me. And then the framework dares advertise that it 'lets the developer focus on business code!' (how many times have you heard this crap before?). Right, the only thing I focus on constantly is trying to figure out why their broken framework doesn't work.

Arghhh.

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.