Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

Part 2... I just bought Amazon Prime (with the free shipping)... spent all night watching a movie and then adding Recommendations too my Watchlist.

I think I added at least 10 movies and 30+ seasons...

Productivity --

Expenses/Purchases++

Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.

I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.

I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.

I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.

Holy fucking crap, think I actually got some productive, positive output from this whole generative AI debacle.
Rather because I skipped the whole Prompt step and used FOMO blabber against itself.

Some context: at my last gig we had a whole "humanware procurement department" (A.K.A. "hiring managers", those fucks who think that javascript and java are the same thing). It was during the pandemic tech hiring boom. At this new joint I'm at, a MUCH smaller company, I gotta do it myself. Boring as fuck but at least I can get some good karma by not making an ass of myself for candidates, and trying to make this whole process a tad less abusive.
I got my reading up to date, and surprisingly enough, "yankee dandy" (HBR) has actually been saying one or two things that are not complete hogwash. For a start, they say that companies have been making their hiring processes overly complex and even after hours of interviews they hardly measure half the skills they actually need, and spend too long talking about many skills that are not actually required for the positions.
"Huh. That sounds like the inneficiencies that the stupid 'AI will make meetings more efficient' industry is overpromising to overturn"

So I tried a new thing. Instead of your off-the-shelf "solve this NP-Hard problem in O(1) then draw this bird using only your nose then invert a binary tree in COBOL then tell me what type of sitcom character are you" crap, I tried grasping how it would be like to work with the candidates. One at a time. Not too long, but not too short talks. I'm not trying to check if a kid really knows how to implement a solution for the TSP in apache spark, or if they know every cipher in TLS 1.3. I just want to know if they can understand a technical request and come to me with a plan on how to solve it without handholding or "just use a really big VM, like, 32Tb of RAM!"
Thus, if I can work with them. That's all. The rest are specific skills that can be trained in time, if the person is willing to learn new stuff.
But that is not good enough for HR, ooooh, no. You "need" an "objective way of measuring their skills", otherwise its "just biased opinions."

But that gave me an idea.
See, our HR VP is someone deep in the whole AI pyramid scheme, who drank the kool-aid and swallowed up even the cup. FOMO is their name. Hype is their business.
I posh'd up my bullshit'ish jargon and went whole "In the advent of new disruptive technologies, strategic skills can be acquired with grit and proper AI prompting. Thus, leveraging our collaborative intelligence capabilities we can hack our challenges and optimize our resources to offer more innovative opportunities and bolster our employer branding" - translation: "shut up and lemme hire someone good and reasonably priced instead of a sleazy smooth talker who wants 100M just to show up and play with chatgpt all day". The whole point is to make it sound like "we're using AI, so it's good" instead of "im doing the work I'm being paid for, so it's old-fashioned"

It seems like the HR troll swallowed it, bait and hook. Maybe all we really needed this whole time is to say the magic word "AI," especially if it makes absolutely no sense in the context. Now I want to get them to sign off on a "AI mindfulness bolstering platform" (a massage chair). Fingers crossed.