Best work prank?

Get a random friend to burst into my home office during a zoom call, wearing a ski mask, gun in hand, speak foreign language, and drag me out of the room. Have another masked friend go up the camera and threaten to kill me if my coworkers go to the police. Disappear for a week, then email my boss saying I need 100k or they’ll start killing my family members one by one, take the money, then go on vacation while I fill out job applications. Get a new job and repeat the prank every few months until I retire.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

We should start with demystifying tech...
For most people, modern phones, tablets and pcs are magical rectangles...
The law of Clarke says, that every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And we have to tackle that.
In geography, we should talk about gps and glosnas
In English or foreign language lessons, we should speak about translator bots and language patters/abstractions
In physics, we have to understand the measurement devices
In politics, we have to speak about licenses of use, we have to speak about netneutrality as a political concept, we have to speak about snowden, shadow brokers, the vault, all the laws some shady imperial beauroticians pipe into our life.
Trojans used by the government and so on...
In cs concepts of operating systems, abstractions and networking should be taught, instead of using excel.
That could be done in math...
Well... No one should have to work with excel.
In maths they could use Wolfram alpha, rlang and gnupolt for example

So I've realized how socially awkward I am. I've had a goal for a few weeks now to get a few new friends online a few in 2 different categories. Programming friends, and foreign language friends but it's so hard and I dont know how to initiate it on social media or on shit like discord and reddit

Modern English is the JavaScript of natural languages:
1. Abundant, very popular
2. Influenced by god knows how many foreign concepts, historically, especially the modern / USA variant
3. The most popular second language
4. A failed attempt to replace it (and others) with more efficient Esperanto, which is a Dart of natural languages then

Rant???

Another recrutment process...

I got an IQ test to even be allowed to have a tech interview in a foreign language. After doing it, the recuruiter went back saying that my results are average and there where candidates with higher score...

Now should I be offended or happy that I'm an averagely inteligent developer?

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

I'm studying Computer Science and Engineering in Uni.

People don't understand the most fundamental principles of programming at all. Variables and functions are like a foreign language to them.

I get that not everyone knows everything but if you decide to go to uni to study programming, and you have never programmed before. Are you really in the right place?

Okay, I get it, spelling is hard, especially in a foreign language, but why in God's name don't you just install a spell check in your IDE?!

I was a foreign language student, but i didn't like the way my work-life was going (I had a lot of difficulties tryng to find a job).

So I decided to start programming... It appears i'm still studying "languages".

Is my life a joke?

Apparently Russia is getting in on the "English title and description, foreign language audio" clickbait.

You would think the YouTube team would realize they could use their auto-captioning AI to solve this problem and detect when it happens 🤔

!rant
the most popular ecommerce solution in php is a massive (cosmological scale) pile of corporate crap (magento) and the next most popular is an abomination (opencart)
after fucking around with both for a month (the client asked for the project to be using only one of the two) I'm still barely reaching any results, and most of my time is wasted with the stupid bloated spaghetti that is opencart FUCK THIS,
like seriously. who the fuck writes a single line three left joins sql querry with four or five aliases a couple concacts and a bunch sorting fuckeries just to query the categories list, then just query the details of the specific category from a different function,
also why the fuck map each language string manually. or the fucking hardcoded seo urls, or the use of myisam for all tables, and no fucking foreign keys, let that settle for a minute, no foreign keys, the delete method in the model has at least a twenty lines, and then he came with the genius idea of duplicating models, in the front and the backend, accessing the same data, as the same user, but different naming conventions

I'm going to convince him to use something sane like codeigniter/laravel/fuelphp or I'll deny the project

If you saw my last rant, you'll know how much I hate Calculus. I decided instead of trying to learn this foreign topic, I'd instead translate it into a language I DO understand: C. The irony is that we use Calculus so we can learn to code easier, but I'm using code to learn Calculus easier. Funny if you ask me.

!rant

Started learning Rust yesterday. As a web developer I like the static typing and the speed. I want to know a low-level language to complement Python but kind of dislike C and C++ and that's why I chose Rust. At the moment the syntax still feels kind of foreign but I probably need to just man up and embrace it. :)

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

Months on this project and it STILL doesn’t work. Way too many links in the communication chain and everything is getting lost in transmission and in translation because of foreign language barriers.

All of this will be my fault when it fails, even when it’s provably actually not. The joys of being the single wringable neck.

You know what really cheeses my onions? When people write their code in a foreign language, say French or Spanish, and then come to me asking why it doesn’t work. Like, mate, how you expect me to be able to make sense of your code if your variable naming is totally foreign? And it looks horridly out of place to boot.

Moral of the story: Write your code in English and save us the headache.

O Friends, It Is Great To Be Writing To You Again. Let Me Share With You A Most Amazing A Tale! I Have Spent Some Time Now In CapitalizedCamelCaseLand. It Is A Glorious Land, Where All Written Word, Language, and Culture Is Governed By The Almighty CapitalizedCamelCase. The People Are Productive And Extremely WellTyped (A Phrase They Charish And Use To Mean General WellBeing).

The Honorable Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Have But Few Fears... And I Shrink To Speak Of Them Or Even Write Them Here, As It Is A Heinous Crime To Even Mention Or Write These Words... But I Must Report, As It Is My Duty... So, Their Fears: The Horrible And Most Repellant lowerCamelCaseJavaScriptianDevils, Or Even Worse, The Grisly And Ghastly snake_case_fiends_of_pythonia!!! O My Friends How It Fears Me To Even Form Such Foreign And Strange Characters And Symbols That Remind The Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Only Of Pain And Suffering!

Many Wars Have Been Fought Upon The Lands Of Both JavaScriptia and Pythonia (The Cultural And Correct Way To Refer To These Harsh Lands In Respectable Company), But To No Avail Or Final Stop To The Fighting. While CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Is Currently In A State Of General Peace And Prosperity, There Is Surely A FlareUp Of Conflict To Occur Against The JavaScriptianDevils Or The PythonianSnakeFiends!

For In DevWorldia (The Name Of This Strange Planet I Report From), There Has Rarely Been A Time Of Peace Lasting For More Than About 5 Minutes, Which The Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCase Assure Me Is Already A Massive Length Of Time And Achievement To Be Cherished.

Alas, I Beleive In The Coming Days I Must Travel To The FarAway Lands Of JavaScriptia And Pythonia. I Can Only Hope That I Am Also Treated With Kindness And Respect In Those Lands By Attempting To Emulate Their Ways, Just As I Have Here In CaptializedCamelCaseLand. I Hope To Write To You Soon And Wish You Well.

Signed And Sincerely,

Language Traveler FullStackChris

!rant
We've got a small army of foreign contractors working with us both in the office and overseas. Syntax has become the thing that stands out to me the most. We can all speak the same language, but our partners don't quite have the syntax down, resulting in some rather amusing email exchanges. I can't fault them, if the shoe was on the other foot, I guarantee I'd be butchering any other language's conversational syntax. Overall, the experience has been a bit of an eye opener for me.

I had a technical test on Tuesday on Linux and SQL. I thought I failed. I get a call that I did pretty well and now they want me for an interview. Naturally, I get very excited.
I get a date for the interview and get ready to shine... until I accept the video call and find out that it is a technical interview! But this time instead I have to express myself in a foreign language.
(And also not with the people I was supposed to have the interview with)
No worse way to stress someone XYZ company! Totally uncool!!!

I think now I can go in a shadowy corner and whimper.

Studying human languages.

They are so much more complex than a programming language and full of irregularities and stuff you can't really learn but have to 'feel'. This helped me a lot developing methods to learn new things quite easily and knowing foreign languages are kinda useful when I have to communicate with people too.

How do polyglot programmers successfully use languages?

I write code with second languages like how I speak a foreign language (e.g German). I think of what I want to say in English, then translate it to German.

How do my fellow devRanters do it?

I’m not sure why my dev tools feels the need to change warnings to a foreign language, but thanks Chrome!

!rant but a question...

I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?

I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.

I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.

Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!

!rant Week 82

Eastern philosophy has made me better at programming. I'm not much of a metaphysics guy, but abstract space breeds creativity. I find that programming and zen are alike, wholeness enveloped by nothingness. A new programming language is being an infant to a foreign universe, without any means to make sense of things. Only through your own references can you make sense of this new stimuli. That nascent feeling, being a baby, is an amazing thing. Programming is probably the most humbling task I've ever endured. We all know the feelings of imposter syndrome, and yet they seem distant when a new solution is just burgeoning. Rehabilitation refers to social programs as programming. Criminals spend all day, "programming" in most institutions. Programming as a word becomes a meditation for change. So life and programming then, are forever in twined. And my experience of being humbled as a programmer has helped me in life. And my experiences being humbled by life, have made me a better programmer.

Trying to learn something new.
Find a library in a foreign language. It's c++.
Unable to include lib.
Copy contents
Try absolute path
Compiler gives me the finger
Abandon project

So my team started creating an in-house wiki for all information about our products, methods, scrum, documentation etc. From the beginning we had settled on doing everything in English instead of native language just in case we get a foreign student intern or simply a foreign employee... And now it looks to me that nobody but my team leader and I care about it: half of the documents are either fully native (especially from other part of the team who work on a different project, they have probably never gotten the memo of language choice to start with) or the documents are in some weird-ass combination of English-native which is even worse imo.
I really don't understand why my own team doesn't adhere to the decision though: we're all at least reasonably educated and our country focuses heavily on using English as second language so that should be no big barrier. And why would you want inconsistent documents/code?!
And this is not the first time people don't stick to what is decided for things like formats and language... Getting a bit tired of it tbh...

I get to make things others havent yet.

well, one day.

and it's the best excuse I've found so far for binging technical subjects and papers.

also because when talking with people about say, compilers and how they're made, or machine code, or a dozen other topics, people dont roll their eyes like I'm speaking a foreign language.

also the occasional math shitpost makes it worth it.

So tired of app developers localizing app information with Google Translate. Use a real person that can READ AND WRITE IN THE FUCKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE or scrap the entire translation and do marketing in English. And Google? Why the fuck do you allow people to embarrass themselves by providing machine translated SHIT in the Store Listing options?

Some gems found on Google Play Store, translated from Norwegian to English the way I as Norwegian interpret them.

Reddit: Reddit is a collection of bank interest rate society: cats, piks, politics and more.

eBay: Offer, to buy, to sell. Turn pages offering and save on clothes Sjoeping, used cars and more

Huuuge Casino: New social castls and casino a sensation! Now play FREE!

And finally, devRant 😂: Social networks to get a contact with other developers than funny qalz about tekk.

Quick question to you guys and gals,

I really want to become an iOS app developer. I know it would be long and painful way to learn Objective-C (some say it looks like alien language compared to C). Swift is rather new, much easier to learn, but I know Objective-C is a must to be considered as true iOS dev.

The question is: is there such a need of iOS developers (I mean UK/Canada/US/Germany)?. I live in Poland and there's not much to do in iOS development (few job offers, everybody is hyped by JS and frameworks changing every year, some offers are often underpayed remote work for foreign clients). I am now 20 years old, still learning at Uni and not having any responsibilities, so I may go someday to UK for a year or two, since the market for iOS devs is more diversed and bigger than in Poland. I know I am complaining (most Poles do that), but I've learned English since I was 4 and it's a pity not to use it as a resource to get a better job offer than in my mother country.

Thanks for all the responses, especially from people working as iOS devs

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

Stop thinking about it. Personally I like to take a long coffe break, go out with friends, cook something, or my fav to learn something completly different, like a new word in a foreign language or some random shit.

Pink cheese green goes.
Do you listen to music that's not in English? Do you listen to music sung in Spanish? Do you know El Cuarteto de Nos? I'm not saying you should but... it's great.
The main singer in a systems engineer, and some lyrics have another meaning if you think about that. Look at Anónimo for an example.