Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.

The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.

No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.

A man goes inside a pet shop and starts to move around the cages to scout the pets. He sees a monkey with a price of 5000$ and goes to the merchant to ask for details. Hey mister, the monkey…what does it know to worth that much money? Well, it knows Windows 95, 98, 2000, and also knows Word, C++, Visual Basic and last but not least, it knows how to play computer games. - Good monkey, it's worth the money. He goes and finds another monkey with a price of 10000$ and again he will ask the merchant. "What does this monkey know?" "It knows Linux, Unix, Corel and Autocad." "Nice, even I don't know those things." On a last scout run he finds another monkey just sitting there with a price 20000$. The story repeats, and he goes with a lack of confidence to ask the merchant for details. "And what does this monkey do for that ridiculous amount of money?" "I never saw her doing anything, but the other two call her Project Manager!"

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

HR: "We want to hire you, but we shouldn't until after we finish this migration and set up an onboarding process. That should take about two weeks; is this okay?"
Me: "Yes, of course."

... two and a half weeks later ...

Me: "Hey, it's been awhile since our last chat. How's the migration and onboarding process going?" etc.
HR:

------

Ugh.
This is the same company that had me sitting by the phone waiting for an interview an entire day, and let me know their schedule got booked for the day three minutes before they went home. gg.

I should tell them to get bent.

My programming teacher is a freaking degenerate. He spend 7 months teaching us basic stuff like if-clauses, while-loops and stuff like that over and over again - everyone was annoyed but he didn't listen to us because "some people still don't get it". (The reason for this could be their total absence during lessons but who am I to tell.)
Beginning of 2018 he realised we hadn't much time left to prepare for our final exam so he tried self-taught learning. 8 sorting algorithms, recursion, how to write classes and objects in less than a week. And of course there was a classtest about this - needless to say that like nobody passed it. He still has no clue why we are "so lazy and dumb".
One of his favourite code examples is a calculator. I don't know how many i've programmed and they've gotten more and more ridiculous. (Who the hell would want interfaces like IComparer in a calculator?)
He even wanted to convince us that for-loops can't count down (and that things like "i--" doen't exist.)
I could go on and on about this guy and his craziness.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

WhatsApp, freaking WhatsApp.
How did this thing become such a standard. How? Why does everyone EXPECT you to have it. They assume that you have it installed on your phone.

'Why don't you respond to my messages? '

'Which messages? '

'The ones I sent you'

'I didn't get any messages. Wait, how did you send them to me? '

'WhatsApp'

'Ah, yeah I don't use that. Wait, where did you even get my phone number from? '

'What? You don't have WhatsApp? Freaking weirdo. '

'bye'

How did an app(lication) become such a standard and why does everyone automatically assume that you have it? And whenever I explain them why I don't use it (Facebook = bad), they just react with 'install it again' (most ridiculous answer) or 'what is wrong with you' or they just give me a confused look and walk away.

A lot of them also act like there were no alternatives (some even better than whatsapp). One of them and probably also the best one is signal. It has all the necessary features a messaging app needs and is also very secure.

Luckily a few of my friends have installed signal and I am currently trying my best at my parents. They have threatened to 'take my phone away if I don't install WhatsApp again' or 'if you don't use WhatsApp then you also don't need a phone'.

Okay finale:

Fuck whatsapp, fuck facebook, fuck ignorance

This is just my token of appreciation for the Skype devs. Can't begin to say how much I hate it. Your android app is a joke even after a host of updates, your desktop client is an even bigger joke (atleast Linux Beta version, I know betas aren't supposed to be stable but this is ridiculous).

You have reinvented chat clients to be extremely bulky, cumbersome and very hard to sync across devices. And you have managed to make it "buffer" more than a YouTube video does on a 2G network. I for one, am blown over by how you did that. And to top it all, you can't close the client on Linux atleast! All you did is just override the close button so that it only minimises it. Brilliant piece of work right there!

Why the hell can't you just close the client and run it in the background the proper way like everyone else does? Why does it have to take 20 *** seconds to open a message? The only reason I am stuck with this is some wierdos in the office still only use this. Get your shit together 😡

Ahh.. I feel much better now.

I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

I designed a logo for a family member's business with the expectation that I would receive payment once the work was completed. I wasn't expecting a lot, I only really do freelance work for software but I know my way around Illustrator. I'm not one to charge family anywhere near full price and I felt no contract was needed. We were back and fourth for a little bit, getting the logo to his liking. Silly me during all of this didn't watermark any of the images I was sending (didn't think I'd have to, you know... Family) and a little while later he's gone and ordered shirts with the logo on it without paying or even contacting me. When I confronted him about it, he pulls out the whole "No contract was made" bullshit. It's ridiculous how arrogant people can be, I was asking for $50. I put a good 15 hours into it with all the alterations he wanted. 15 hours I could have spent on actual clients.

TLDR; Designed a logo for a family member without a contract, he decided not to pay.

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Client: We need to add a field to the model that serves as a unique identifier

Dev: You already have one, it’s the _id property

Client: We want another! This one is for a task number so we can make a connection between the database record and our ERP.

Dev: Ah I see. I can add that for you. Is this truly a unique identifier or will you be using the same ERP identifier for multiple database records?

Client: I already said it’s a unique identifier. One ERP record to one database record, end of story! To do otherwise would be absolutely ridiculous! You should think for yourself before you ask silly questions.

Dev: My apologies I just want to make sure to clarify exactly what the requirements are.

**6 months later**

Client: HOW COME I CAN’T ASSIGN THE SAME UNIQUE IDENTIFIER TO MULTIPLE DATABASE RECORDS??? CAN’T PROGRAMMERS GET ANYTHING RIGHT EVER??

Dev: …

It's fucking ridiculous how there's a great deal of websites to introduce beginners to programming and how there's not a single resource to take the beginners and teach them to do something with all the syntax they've learned.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

November 2015 - Android users: "How stupid are Apple fan boys paying $100 for a stylus?"

October 2017 - Google releases $100 Pixelpen.

September 2016 - Android users: "OMG! Apple removed the headphone jack! You will have to use a DONGLE! That is ridiculous!"

October 2017 - Google announces Pixel 2 width USB-C for charging and audio playback. Includes a USB-C to 3.5mm audio dongle.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the "brand manager" if he knew how to reset printers to their defaults before reconfiguring them, knowing full well that he did not. He assured me that he did. I smiled and let him leave.

He called me yesterday, frantic, because he didn't know how to reconfigure a printer that already had a password. After reminding him of the above, I told him how to put the printer in diagnostic mode and how to navigate the menus. Literally: "Turn the printer off, then hold down the feed paper button while turning the printer on. It will print out a bunch of diagnostics, and a menu at the bottom. Just follow the instructions at the bottom to use the menu"

Apparently following simple instructions is well outside of his abilities. After he spent five minutes fighting with it and complaining, I called him and walked him through powering the printer on while holding down the feed paper button. Terribly difficult.

The next step amounts to "hold down the feed paper button for more than 1 second." He spent ten minutes (ten!) on this unimaginably challenging step, and, frustrated at his inability to outsmart a simple button, he gave up completely.

He literally couldn't follow the instructions on the printout. I've attached a picture to show how ridiculous this is, and it saddens me terribly to report that I'm quite serious. he was literally unable to figure this out.

HE SPENT TEN MINUTES TRYING TO PUSH A BUTTON FOR >1 SECOND! TEN MINUTES!
That's what was too difficult for him! A button! With written instructions!

I can't even.

But the kicker?
Now he and the bossman want me to drive half an hour so I can push a button for ~1.2 seconds because they're utterly incapable.

I'm soo done.
So. done.

!dev

If you ever feel like having a good laugh, just watch a flat-earthers video/live-stream.

I can't understand how something like this can even happen, it's so insanely ridiculous.

HOW THE FUCK CAN A HUMAN BEING LIVING IN 2018 BELIEVE THAT THE EARTH IS A FLAT DISC WITH A GLOBE ABOVE IT.

I'm unbelievably angry. So please bear with my venting.

QA guy and I are stuck working the entire weekend. A few months ago our company decided to promote an account manager to a Product/Project management role with 0 experience and offering them 0 training. They have no experience working with devs and have been making our lives hell. I work easily 50-60hrs per week and they still budget projects according to 40hrs/week meaning they're stealing my time not to mention they're incorrectly setting the client's and company's expectations.

They now have complete control over roadmaps, client communications (this wouldn't normally be bad except that they're having technical discussions with the client with 0 tech experience), timelines, etc. and since their experience was in account management they are now working with devs but making decisions that exclusively put the client first at all costs, even if it means everyone else has to work weekends while they go on vacation!!!!

I've approached them several times to offer help on budgeting time or to propose that we do a Q4 planning so that we can improve the product instead of stay in a shitty position as we are. I'm responded with "You deal with what's in front of you. It's my job to look at the bigger picture."

They mismanaged a $500,000 project and our CEO got wind of it because the client called him while he was travelling. He in turn gave shit to our Directors who in turn chewed the QA guy and I out. "You need to be more meticulous when deploying. How could you let this happen? We're eating shit because of this. You need to work over the weekend to make up for this", etc.
I'm now directly responsible for having delivered something that wasn't up to standards even though I was already putting in the overtime.

This is honestly fucking ridiculous. How can I be blamed when I'm truly doing the best I can and putting as many hours as I can while edging toward burnout.

I love what I do but I hate feeling extremely pressured to turn down friends and family like this. Maybe I'm just too easy going and need to say no more. Who fucking knows. I know that I'm angry with the company right now.

What do you all think? If you read this rant, thank you. Feels better to write it out.

I am about to fire this client.

I can't take any more of this abject fucking stupidity.

I can't take any more sentence fragment responses to detailed questions and thorough responses.

I can't take any more expectations that I deliver consistent metadata and hundreds of pages of documentation, yet no one else has to do the same

I can't take any more rules only applying to/hamstringing me and my team

I can't take any more fucking gross incompetence and grossly undereducated shitfucks that get to send ridiculous bills and have 0 accountability while playing developer

I can't take any more obviously nepotistic and racist hiring that walks back every step of progress we've made in the last 50 years

I can't take not being able to call a spade a spade and being the villain when there's obvious graft occuring at every level

I can't take these old fucks padding their retirements while rendering everyone else contractors and cutting off opportunity for future generations

I can't take how absurdly, blisteringly stupid the business people are, or the fact that one average project managers with a recent PMI cert somehow bills what I do

I'm 100% going to drop dime on these fucks to every regulatory body they are beholden to, their investors, their corporate owners and USCIS, since I've already doxxed the shit out of all of my coworkers that don't remotely qualify for the positions they occupy.

These anti AI type news articles are ridiculous. We are decades away from anything like skynet. People have seen too much fiction. Everyone used to dream of flying cars, did that happen? No. Do not be fooled, machines can do clever things but they are no where near becoming sentient beings. You try and build something that has the same IQ of a dog and it will still require a shit ton of power and hardware. Plus as far as I'm aware dogs haven't taken over the planet with their level of intelligence.

At the end of the day machines need power to run and we control the source. If anything futuramas more realistic in how AI/robots will integrate with society than these shit piece newspapers.

Starting to wish I never got involved in this industry.

I am working for the most ridiculous, god awful place I have ever had the misfortune of working and I am having a HELL of a time getting out of it because everything wants 5 years fucking exp in some fucking specific framework that is basically the same as every other fucking framework.

Our previous cto was a closeminded totalitarian bully and when she finally left she was replaced by a lecherous fucking dinosaur who has no idea how to code in our code base. He also has barely been showing up to work for the last few months.

For some reason our fucking ceo allows this all to continue and only interjects whenever he can make himself the biggest nuisance (ie design handoffs etc where he has little to no knowledge)

I was already woefully underpaid but was recently 'promoted' to team lead and when I brought up my ridiculous salary (yes I was essentially just funneled into this role) they gave me a neglible raise and ceo told the fucking dinosaur to tell me he 'doesn't like when people ask for raises'

The only reason I am in this position is because we have such ridiculously poor employee retention and I am one of the people after only 2.5 years there that has the ability to provide any kind of knowledge transfer. Most of our dev team consists of people fresh out of school and our code base is just an absolute mess of junior dev spaghetti debauchery.

I have expressed concerns over this and was told that I'm negative and go looking for problems and that 'everywhere is like this'

The ceo has a few people he keeps close because in his words 'they're the only ones who don't disagree with me'

He also refused to hire anyone with experience because they cost too much and he doesn't like people who have opinions.

To make matters worse all the fucking dinosaur does is wander around and talk to the junior devs about video games.

His previous favorite past time was staring at my tits, ranting about his wife and telling me 'he'd offer to give me a back rub but you can't do that now a days'

I caught his fucking wife creeping me on LinkedIn a few months ago for some fucking reason.

Oh and as icing on the cake I had a fucking interview today for an intermediate angular position and a few minutes after I received an email saying that ACCTUALLY they had been informed they were now looking for a senior react dev.

Like seriously what the fuck.

Before knowing how to use git: Pff, it's ridiculous...
After knowing how to use git: *modifies 3 lines*
*git commit*

How does the new MacBook pro outsell Microsoft surface and dell XPS 😖 are there so many "sheep" out there who buy a 1300+ machine with 2 (max 4 ports) not including the 17 dongles you'll need?

Sorry if I offended anyone but I just think the new MBP is ridiculous and is definitely not "Pro"

The nightmare continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t make this stuff up.

When your primary Android app (with over 1/2 million total downloads) gets banned...

And all the email says is read these [links to] policies!

Back story: this happened to me back in 2011, no matter what I did there was no way to get in touch with a human at Google, I sure hope this process has gotten better! Having my app suspended with no way to fix and get it back is ridiculous!! This could ruin a business.

Over two years later, on a Google+ hangout with Google Android devs out of the Google London office, I said to them how silly it is that this happened....one of them asked me for the app ID, I provided, he looked it up in a system which then had a reference code which then related to SEO violation....wow I finally found the answer, how silly that an SEO violation (too many keywords in the app description) can get your app permanently suspended. What a shame. I wouldn't wish this on any solo developer trying to self learn and make something...

Sometimes I really just have to say "Fuck you, Google" out loud a few times.

Me: well guys, after the 4th attempt and a week of waiting, I’ve gotten a response from the remote backend team about the errors affecting this release. Which are the same issues affecting the last release 2 months ago. The findings are: “there is in fact some issue with the API”.

I’d like to thank everyone who put in so much effort to get us to this momentous step forward. We can expect a fix any year now.

*equally sarcastic colleague on another team listening in*:
oh wow, this months long thing has just been “some issue” all this time? Well that’s fantastic. You should mark the ticket as “done” and reply “thank you” for all their hard work.

..... I laughed so hard at how ridiculous all this is and the joke, that I nearly did, hoping someone from product/business would have to review it

Apple products are fucking trash, I don't give a shit if you have money to waste, but don't fucking brag about how superior your 3000$ excuse of a fucking laptop is the best laptop in the world when you could easily afford a desktop with 2 1080 GTX in SLI for that price.

"but mac has lyk no bugs, its so good"

NO FUCKING SHIT, THE OS IS BUILT WITH THE HARDWARE USED IN MIND. THEY DON'T BUILD 500000 MODELS OF MACBOOKS, THEY JUST HAVE TO MAKE ONE MODEL WORK, AND ALL OTHER LAPTOPS WHO HAVE THE SAME HARDWARE WILL.

This is fucking ridiculous.

That's like designing a site, but only for Firefox because that's the browser you use and you expect everybody to use that browser. Obviously it'll work fine on your machine.

I am so fucking sick of Apple fan boys.
I am fully aware some of you devranters are apple fans, but this has been something I've wanted to say for ages, albeit i'm a little late to the party.

Stop wasting money on overpriced trash.

Ever wonder how ridiculous we must sound to non-cs people? Sometimes I'm stuck wondering if someone is talking about a framework or a pokemon?

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

Near the end of a massive (1,000 user bridgeline) conference call today:

[ P = presenter, RCn = random caller n ]

P: ...so, does anyone have any other questions they'd like to---

RC1: Hey! Yeah, I'm still on this STUPID call right now... I dunno, we've been in here for like 30 minutes already - The guy came by the house to talk about it, but I couldn't get off this STUPID call - I think they said it would be around 800 dollars...

[ P, RC1, RC2, RC3, RC4 all overlapping ]

P: Um, we can hear you-

RC2: Dude, mute your phone!

RC3: As the presenter, you can mute that guy from the web UI-

P: Yeah, I can't find him in the attendee list; it's so long-

RC3: -Right-click on his name and select "mute line"-

P: I know how, but I can't find him on the list.

RC3: Find him on the attendance list on the right side-

P: [ louder and louder ] Yes, I know - but I can't find him in the list-

RC4: Should someone call an operator?

RC1: -so I figured we'll probably need to call Jerry and see what he says. I'll call him if I can ever get off this ridiculous, STUPID call - They are all talking at once on there now and no one can understand anything!

[ This went on for about 5 solid minutes, finally ending with... ]

RC1: I'm just going to drop this STUPID call and call Jerry for us. This thing was a total waste of time. [ boop-beep ]

[ long pause ]

P: OK, so now that is over, does anyone have any questions they'd like to discuss?

[ At least 10 people un-mute and overlap questions ]

#ConferenceCallProblems

Above everything else, the funniest part to me was his repeated, over-the-top insistence on how "STUPID" the call was.

#TellUsHowYouReallyFeel

Well now, I wouldn't want to mention anyone specific since talking about someone behind their back and calling them 'weird' isn't very nice. 🙄 But absolutely HYPOTHETICALLY speaking, if I HAD a weird coworker, they would probably...
- ... strut about the office, telling all how great yet underpaid their work is
- ... write lots of 'concepts' because coding is for lowly programmers
- ... insist that the code they have to do when boss is looking is simply too complicated for unit testing, and 'that's great!'
- ... brag about their/wear to work a ridiculous array of ties in every colour imaginable, when everyone else shows up casual

- ... trap people into listening to them talk for hours about...
-- ... ties
-- ... their misspent youth
-- ... how awesome they are/were/will be
-- ... why it's a good idea to eat cheese

- ... never let me forget I'm female, coz *insert BS reasons why all devs must by nature be male here*
- ... send me little unsolicited notes and mails with funny (sexist) jokes *har har*

- ... be let go, at which point everyone else discovers why they had so much time that they could spend chatting away at the watering hole
- ... earn the eternal hatred of anyone picking up the pieces of their 'work'
- ... try to steal our customers away who will laugh in their bloody face

Just my theory, of course..

Just give me a link to the web font man. Oh, there isn't one? You used a font that we can't legally use? Do you understand how that works? I don't want your 300MB photoshop document. I don't want to comb through your ridiculous stack of insane layers and artboards and deal with the images you didn't bundle into the project or try and make sense out of your arbitrary spacing and random font sizes. You're not an artist, you're just a crappy visual designer handing off an unthoughtful glorified wire-frame - and now I have to sort out all the things that you were paid to do. It's really easy. 1. Pick a color, 2. Pick 2 fonts that are legal and available to use on the web, 3. build a few patterns for font sizes and weights - write them down. 4. Pick your images. Make them double the size you expect them to be on the site + put them in a folder, 5. add readme and list the font patterns and the link to the webfont, 6. quickly scribble the wire-frame out, 7. take a photo of it, 8. put it all in a folder and send it to me.

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

How do you call a ridiculous protocol?

Protolol!

GDPR: great law, except for those who use technology (JS blockers, tracking protection, etc etc) to fight other technology (cookies, trackers, etc etc). Welcomed by the general public, but for content publishers it is a royal pain in the ass. Because did the EU provide non-legalese explanations as to how to become compliant? Of course they didn't. Why would they? But of course lawyers jumped on it like it's the best thing in the world. "GDPR-experts".

Now, article 11 and 13 again. Copyright law taken to ridiculous levels, impossible to implement, except for maybe Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Anyone else? Of course not. Again, a lot of money has to be involved with it. Does anyone want this thing? Of course not. And why the fuck is this still a thing even?! Did direct lobbying to the EU Parliament members a few months ago not teach them anything?! Senile pieces of shit. Should those old fucks really be able to decide about the future of the internet?

Interviewee was googling the answers to the technical questions on a Skype interview. Their CV said they had 2 years experience.

Us: "How does X work?"
Them: "Uhh...what's X?"
[clack clack clack of interviewees keyboard]
Them: "Oh.....X! [reads verbatim from the tutorial]"

We had some fun asking ridiculous questions for a while, seeing how big a hole they could dig for themselves. Once we got bored of making fun of them we ended the interview early. Much less awkward on Skype than IRL.

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

It has been bugging the shit out of me lately... the sheer number of shit-tier "programmers" that have been climbing out of the woodwork the last few years.

I'm not trying to come across as elitist or "holier than thou", but it's getting ridiculous and annoying. Even on here, you have people who "only do frontend development" or some other lame ass shit-stain of an excuse.

When I first started learning programming (PHP was my first language), it wasn't because I wanted to be a programmer. I used to be a member (my account is still there, in fact) of "HackThisSite", back when I was about 12 years old. After hanging out long enough, I got the hint that the best hackers are, in essence, programmers.

Want to learn how to do SQL injection? Learn SQL - write a program that uses an SQL database, and ask yourself how you would exploit your own software.

Want to reverse engineer the network protocol of some proprietary software? Learn TCP/IP - write a TCP/IP packet filter.

Back then, a programmer and a hacker were very much one in the same. Nowadays, some kid can download Python, write a "hello, world" program and they're halfway to freelancing or whatever.

It's rare to find a programmer - a REAL programmer, one who knows how the systems he develops for better than the back of his hand.

These days, I find people want the instant gratification that these simpler languages provide. You don't need to understand how virtual memory works, hell many people don't even really understand C/C++ pointers - and that's BASIC SHIT right there.

Put another way, would you want to take your car to a brake mechanic that doesn't understand how brakes work? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Watching these "programmers" out there who don't have a fucking clue how the code they write does what it does, is like watching a grown man walk around with a kid's toolbox full or plastic toys calling himself a mechanic. (I like cars, ok?!)

*sigh*

Python, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc. They're all tools and they have their merits. But god fucking dammit, they're not the ONLY damn tools that matter. Stop making excuses *not* to learn something, Mr."IOnlyDoFrontEnd".

Coding ain't Lego's, fuckers.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

I really need to learn to think through how many stitches I’m putting into the first row of a project.

- Takes over an hour to do one row
- Already used more than 2k yards on it and it’s not even short blanket length yet (though width is ridiculous)

How are these EU-Upload Filters even practical for anyone except google? This seems like the most unrealistic specification by non-tech bosses in history to me 😭 What do these people expect the upload filters should compare the uploads to? How the fuck should, say a blog website, ensure that none of the uploads are copyright inflicting? Are quotes copyright inflicting? Or only when I copy paste an entire book and write my name under that? How will that get detected? Do we have a database with all the copyrighted works somewhere, that every company has access to? This shit can basically only work for companies like google which have enough data to implement such filters and thats why they already had an upload filter on youtube anyways. This entire amendment is so fucking ridiculous that it basically has to fail, no doubt. In a few months still nobody is going to have upload filters, watch...

My female coworkers ranting about "how can their partners be so stupid" on "never buying what they where asked for".

I explain to them some actions they might be doing that if done to me has the same effect like :
- asking for something and then start a non stop conversation about something else...

They look at me with a "how can you men be so ridiculous" face and say something like that...
I answer: well, try not doing those things next time and see if it helps.

They are gonna ignore me and keep living their lives without realising that men and women are fucking different...

Go girls.

This feature I'm building requires crossing over to a second application for some actions (fair, this reduces repetition), but the method used for it is kind of ridiculous.

To keep with the existing patterns, I followed suit, and added two PATCH and a DELETE routes, wrappers, and calls. (Typical CRUD + de/reactivate).

But. This freaking halfassed HTTP model doesn't support anything but POST and PUT! wtf. (Also, the various IDs, naming schemes, and required json data/formats differ across view, controller, and endpoints. but whatever?)

Two and a half hours later, and the feature is done and works wonderfully. Four times the functionality of the previous incarnation, and the code is only about 25% longer! haha.

Ahh, I'm complimenting myself again. (but somebody has to, right? 😅)

but really, when i want to get something done i'm actually surprised at how quickly it all comes together. Even when I need to patch API Guy's madness.

(and this time I actually found someone else's code in the mess! It was actually worse!)

I suppose taking a day off yesterday did me some good.

Do recruiters realize how ridiculous they sound saying they're looking for a "rockstar/ninja/big mover?"

give me an actual job title.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

Seriously? How hard is it for people to do one simple thing. You spell it out for them, and they still find the inability to do their job. This is RIDICULOUS!! 😡

Bash is a ridiculous language.

Imagine if a the default shell language was quick and easy (like Python) how much quicker you'd be able to whip up a script - or even debug it.

And to all the bash lovers, no I don’t care about the history of the stupid language and don't try and convince me you whip up a quick script in 2 minutes.

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

Today, at the Minnesota Developers Conference, has proven to me how big of a gap there is in gender diversity with technology. This realization came to me when I visited the men's bathroom to be greeted by a ridiculous line, and witnessed the lack of a line to the woman's restroom.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

I swear upon the gods of the internet! Any time I am trying to read an article/blog post/anything and the site puts a god damn pop-up form asking me to sign up for something, I leave the site. ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE WHEN YOU CANT CLOSE THE DAMN WINDOW WITHOUT