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

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

So, continuing the story, in reverse order, on the warship and its domain setup...
One day, the CO told me that we needed to set up a proper "network". Until now, the "network" was just an old Telcom switch, and an online HDD. No DHCP, no nothing. The computers dropped to the default 169.254.0.0/16 link local block of addresses, the HDD was open to all, cute stuff. I do some research and present to him a few options. To start things off, and to show them that a proper setup is better and more functional, I set up a linux server on one old PC.
The CO is reluctant to approve of the money needed (as I have written before, budget constraints in the military is the stuff of nightmares, people there expect proper setups with two toothpicks and a rubber band). So, I employ the very principles I learned from the holy book Bastard Operator From Hell: terrorizing with intimidating-looking things. I show him the linux server, green letters over black font, ngrep -x running (it spooks many people to be shown that). After some techno-babble I got approval for a proper rack server and new PCs. Then came the hard part: convincing him to ditch the old Telcom switch in favour of a new CISCO Catalyst one.
Three hours of non-stop barrage. Long papers of NATO specifications on security standards. Subliminal threats on security compromises. God, I never knew I would have to stoop so low. How little did I know that after that...
Came the horrors of user support.
Moral of the story: an old greek saying says "even a saint needs terrorizing". Keep that in mind.

"You claim you are a developer and don't know what firebase is? Pfft"

Words uttered by one of my classmates flexing on some 4th semester college inmates. I don't know what's more annoying his squeaky voice, the pretentiousness of using headphones as a necklace during class or that I was just like him when I was a freshman (minus the low hanging fruit flexing).

God fucking damn, I'm not even mad at his obnoxious pampered kid semblance, it's the irony of this enlightened fago falling into the god forsaken rat race. Why?

Because he hasn't been magnanimously disappointed by one of the most corrupt systems I've ever been witness of, yeah keep talking about firebase to the teacher who just nods pretending she knows what you are talking about.

I've had this same teacher before and your nice asynchronous ES6 express nosql solution will come last compared to all the WordPress templates she'll approve because they are pretty and all the time you invested, yeah, right into the crapper, seriously it would've been more satisfying to just masturbate everyday until Christmas break. I'm not pissed at him, annoyed by his semblance maybe, but I actually pitty him because the system will take a big shit on his face and he's just smiling.

Damn it, all these careers ruined by lazy ass professors who think leaving a shitload of diagrams as homework counts as teaching. And before any quirky brother interjects with "oh maybe your University is shit", "muh University verry gut u suk", you shut the fuck up! I know my university sucks even tho is "one of the best ones" by the corrupt media's standards, I'm here to vent about issues, real fucking issues happening in real corrupt systems, I'm taking about professors sexually abusing students, not going to classes, no centralized teaching systems, fucking chaos.

I'm happy for you if you feel good about the piece of paper you hang on your wall that certifies you as Bobby the guy who not only learned a shit load about computers, he also bent his ass so far for us and payed us so much money for it, it's funny he thinks himself as smart.

I know, I know, you went to an ivy league college, have a wonderful job and owe some money, good for you, some are not so lucky and I'll make sure those lazy asses who take advantage of the system lose their jobs.

I'm so sick of this shit we call "moodern educashion"

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

Your standards are getting low, Google.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

!dev

My boss told me that I should improve my posture since I was slouching. He said girls really dig good posture.

1. Highly doubt that
2. Is that why his wife married him?
2.5 If so, that’s low standards
3. I’m a programmer anyway so I’m afraid I’ll need more than good posture to get a girlfriend🤷‍♂️

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

So this just happened. Some background before I begin: We're understaffed, my desk is in the back of the building, and there's no one really at the front to greet people. No security either...

Guy walks in wearing a flannel jacket (no shirt under it), pajama pants, and sandals. He looks like hell. Explains he was just released from a hospital and his apartment is locked. I let him use my phone to call his sister.

When I talk to his sister, she barely wants to speak with him. Tells me his apartment is locked for a reason and he's not allowed back. I'm just like: "So... what would you have us do for him?" At this point if his sister won't help, I was going to ask him to leave. Oh, and that hospital was a drug rehab.

So it ends with him waiting for a ride, but he ends up napping on the couch in the front of our office. CEO/Owner and his business partner walk right past and say nothing. They go into a meeting. I'm trying to figure out if I ask him to leave, wait outside for his ride... I'm a developer, this isn't my job.

A good 45-60 minutes later, after the guy walked outside and then came back in and laid back down on the couch, he leaves with his ride. Shortly after the owner walks out of his meeting, so I ask him what to do in this situation - more hoping he'd realize the need for more security.

If this story isn't crazy enough, the business partner pipes up - absolutely serious - and says he didn't say anything because he thought the guy was a developer.

So I've learned that we've got extremely low hygiene standards for developers here, with a relaxed dress code and are allowed nap times on the front couch.

Thankfully our CYBER security is better than our PHYSICAL security. :|

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

I hate the feeling you get when you do a lengthy, drooling task that once finished got you nowhere.

My day was mostly productive for a Sunday, woke up late as all Sundays, spent the afternoon writing a proposal and exercising when I saw a notification for a homework for tonight at 12.

A research paper about Dijkstra's philosopher problem, 8 pages minimum. To be honest I've seen the problem a long time ago while studying C++ and I had the theory down and that is my issue, it becomes inherently boring and useless in my head. Is in this situations that my mind gets lazy.

I wrote the first 3 pages in half an hour but I was done, I started revising the proposal and fixed a calculation error, checked Rust's take on the philosophers issue and decided to save it for winter break along with learning Rust (although got some basics down), made rough budget approximations for the next 3 months, lost myself a little bit on deep house music (notable tracks tadow from masego, nevermind - Dennis Lloyd and gold - Chet faker), etc...all in all it took me 3 hours more to finish the assignment, including breaks and dinner.

I am working on a lot of stuff lately and my main project's sprint ends this Tuesday and it pisses me off, after all that I learnt nothing new, got nowhere with my project and will probably get 80 because Google docs has no margin setting. Worse than being lazy for fun is inevitably being lazy for being compelled to do low priority tasks by your head's standards.

My first ever dev project was a website I setup with my dad, it was for my uncle's company. 😃

You can barely call it a dev project because we did it in WordPress and the only thing we touched was a bit of HTML and a bunch of CSS 😅,
but it was really fun working together with my (programmer) dad and it motivated me to study programming as well.

The site turned out ugly as fuck, but the standards for websites are very low where my uncle is from so that wasn't a problem. 😊

I earned 90€ and bought myself a new mouse (Logitech G502), which I still use now 4/5 years later. 😎

I studied computer game development at a university that had pretty low standards. It was perfect for a slacker like me. I enjoyed it. Maybe it was implied that you'd have to study on your own and that completing the courses wasn't enough to make you a competent developer, but maybe I'm a bit slow or something because that never occurred to me until after we were finished.

I was taught enough programming and database stuff to land me an entry position job at a consulting firm before I was able to complete my thesis. Technically I dropped out, I guess, since I don't have a diploma.

I built a portfolio consisting of different projects/essays I'd completed/wrote for different courses. That, together with my charm and boyish good lucks made me get the job.

Anyways, even though I learned more practical stuff my first year on the job than I did my 3 years of uni it was a very good experience. It helped me understand what I was interested in so that I could pursue that later and some of the people I got to know would help my career later.

I mean, if education wasn't free (except living expenses, books, etc) I'd might say that I had been better off just taking a year of egghead/udemy/Indian Guy On YouTube classes to learn what I needed to land myself a job. But I'd need to know which courses to take so I'd probably find a group of courses that someone else put together. I guess it would be nice to take those classes with other people so that you can work together, learn from each other, and make some friends and connections as well. Oh, that sounds kinda like uni ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After years of working at a place where you are as good it gets in terms of domain knowledge, it can be refreshing to work with someone who has way more experience than you.

The previous company I was with wanted to have me as one of their primary engineers, and everyone else who came in would have to learn from me (most of them were low-skilled contractors). This should have been great in theory, but it was actually quite frustrating since I did not relish being the mentor figure while just being two years into my career. Despite it getting to my head at times, I was aware that I still lack a lot of skills, but with no one to teach me, I hardly progressed in terms of growth, even though the leadership treated me well and listened to me.

Took a leap of faith and quit, to join a start-up where I would be the most inexperienced (and the youngest) person. Has been a few months, and I have stumbled and goofed up more times than I like to admit, but taken with the right mindset, it is nice to see how a team of professionals goes about it. It is a learning curve to get back into the mindset of the novice (after more than a year of being the undisputed "go-to" person), and to make effort knowing that you'll fall short in multiple places by the standards here, but at the same time, it's nowhere like the frustration I felt previously when my head was pushing against the shallow ceiling.

Fun part is, the learning is almost not at all about the code, but about how to be a proactive team member and all the things to think through and finalize BEFORE getting down to code. Some of it is bureaucracy, yes, but given the chaotic place I come from, I don't really mind it as long as it only goes as far as what is required.

The most amusing part of it all to me is how I try to be humble and listen to people (everyone's got a lot more experience than me), but I'm often asked to be critical of what others say and poke holes instead of just taking what they say at face value, which has been one of the most challenging things to adapt to for me (for similar organisation cultural reasons mentioned previously)/

Who actually started the reign of mixed character passwords? because seriously it sucks to have an unnecessarily complex password! Like websites and apps requesting passwords to contain Upper/Lower case letter, numeric characters and symbols without considering the average user with low memory threshold (i.e; Me).

Let's push the complaint aside and return back to the actual reason a complex password is required.

Like we already know; Passwords are made complex so it can't be easily guessed by password crackers used by hackers and the primary reason behind adding symbols and numbers in a password is simply to create a stretch for possible outcome of guesses.

Now let's take a look into the logic behind a password cracker.

To hack a password,
1) The Password Cracker will usually lookup a dictionary of passwords (This point is very necessary for any possible outcome).
2) Attempts to login multiple times with list of passwords found (In most cases successful entries are found for passwords less than 8 chars).
3) If none was successful after the end of the dictionary, the cracker formulates each password on the dictionary to match popular standards of most website (i.e; First letter uppercase, a number at the end followed by a symbol. Thanks to those websites!)
4) If any password was successful, the cracker adds them to a new dictionary called a "pattern builder list" (This gives the cracker an upper edge on that specific platform because most websites forces a specific password pattern anyway)

In comparison:
>> Mygirlfriend98##
would be cracked faster compared to
>> iloveburberryihatepeanuts

Why?
Because the former is short and follows a popular pattern.

In reality, password crackers don't specifically care about Upper-Lowercase-Number-Symbol bullshit! They care more about the length of the password, the pattern of the password and formerly used entries (either from keyloggers or from previously hacked passwords).

So the need for requesting a humanly complex password is totally unnecessary because it's a bot that is being dealt with not another human.

My devrant password is a short story of *how I met first girlfriend* Goodluck to a password cracker!

Laravel being easy to use is far from a strong point. "Easy to use" is a cool thing for pro developers who know what's going on under the hood and don't wanna write the same thing a hundred times.
It should translate into good developers being able to work immediately, not in bad developers getting away with whatever without getting even a slight warning just because the framework itself accepts whatever weird crap you can come up with while you're training.
But that's what it became: a free for all for every noob out there. You find yourself working with a slow application (and by "slow" I mean "slow even by Laravel's standards", which are fairly low), and as soon as you look what's going on you find someone decided to load a hundred thousand middlewares, queries optimized like ass on top of Eloquent, and the whole application breaks as soon as you just run config:cache to try speeding it up a little bit, because env-ing your way out of whatever problem is so quick. Easy to use needs to be there for pro developers; give such a tool to a newbie, you end up with a maintenance nightmare

everytime i see posts of code humor of doing ordinary things (for example while hungry eat) i wished i was dead.

they are too lazy and beginner. and they exist because the internet gives everyone some chance of exposure.

while this may seem like a positive and democratic thing, it results in too much low quality and everyone's standards getting lowered.

i don't mind people telling bad jokes to friends and family, because at least then even though sometimes people laugh, a frown will surely happen.

while in the internet, you don't get that reaction. In fact, the shittier the thing you post, the more points you get!

this is my version expressing how i feel about the matter:

while !is_dead()
eat_excrement_from(corpse)
bile_and_shit = vomit()
eat(bile_and_shit)

while it is true that most things online are garbage, that also means that some isn't.

for example, code-poetry.com has very clever code poems that actually does run and has some interesting STDOUT. and those do are worthwhile.

let me also do a preemptive comment to the first fucking idiot that posts a "you must be fun at parties". fuck parties and fuck you too.

South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2

In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.

In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.

The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.

The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.

Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet

Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system

Interlnal lib documentation:

'This is a short description: Lorem ipsum...'

Don't know why I expected more...

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

I feel like i am being forced to own a shitty module in our codebase.
It was developed by previous owners and they made a frankenstien monster out of it: Its one part of codebase that is very huge, does not follow the code standards, is making complex kinds of api calls and using very niche components. It gets bugs once in a while BUT IT WORKS.

It fuckin works and is one of the important steps before customer purchases a company product, so kinda part of revenue generation flow.

But this module was never a part of our codebase which we would usually touch. it was owned by another team, they would add enhancements , new features to it and fix the bugs .

When i joined the team, i was once asked to help those guys as a "resource" because they wanted to get something shipped and were low on bandwidth. So i just worked on one of the screens, added a small bugifx and voila, task is done and am back to other part of the app.

But now out of random, they decided to pass on the ownership to ur team, gave a small KT which didn't really explained a lot of actual codebase, but rather the business functionality of it(and that too poorly). And my TL is saying that i should own it because "I worked on that module before"

I don't know how to deal with this frankenstien monster. Earlier a bug came and i was out of my wits to understand why this bug came. their logging is weird and not explaining a lot, their backend devs help provide aws logs but those aren't very helpful either .

the best i could do was declare that their technical approach is wrong and we should modify it, but that idea was quickly squashed.

ITs quite possible that company isn't going to change this module or add any new features further. but everytime a bug would come, i would be getitngfrustrated looking at their frankenstien monster

Getting sick of Amazon Interview Process in germany really... HR types do not read emails at all, do not answer questions, send duplicate mails... I already picked possible interview slots and still asked again to fill slot on another form...

Is Amazon Europe standards this low or is it shitty in the States also?

Whenever I go out for a walk now, I get a monologue in my head about everything wrong with my team... But using managerial terms like man-month, velocity, chaotic, context switching costs, lack of processes and standards, need for more slack, too much low value busy work, technical debt, scope creep, (violation of) the two-pizza rule... by a lot

At what point do you say a junior dev is no longer a junior? What metrics do you use? Like scope of knowledge, impact on team / code decisions, years experience, management skills, etc.?

I feel I'm qualified as a mid level developer now despite only being a junior for a little over a year. I had tons of internships in college and was kind of placed in a role where growing fast was required.

I broke a sweat for most of that ~1 year I worked as a junior and my contributions to my project aren't insignificant

I don't say that to toot my own horn here, I really do want to ground myself in reality. But I don't know if my standards are too low or my organizations standards are too high. FWIW, other devs on my team have commented privately / informally that the junior title isn't super fitting.

I'm still pretty dependent on my boss but that's more for final say of things. He'll often have some input to my work but I'll also be involved with design discussion and take up a large chunk of work without question. On light sprints I'm knocking out 20+ taskhours of work, going closer to 30/40 when things pick up. Not uncommon to kill 10 user stories in a sprint.

I don't know, what do you guys think?

Literally every single professional breakthrough I've had is because of being better at coding than my peers. Internship, and potentially even my PhD. Granted, scientists have low standards for code...

Ok so I'm working at this bank that hired me as a lead dev to do something about the quality of the software. Now we have CI builds with front end and back end unit tests, sonarqube, coding standards and much more. First release.of our software had only 1 low impact defect! All other software they released in the past always has dozens of bugs.

Now I have this front end guy in my team. He thinks he is really good and actually said my front end skills suck. What?? Wtf you saying? I'm truly full stack and doing front end way longer than he does and already did many many successful projects for awesome well known companies. So he refactores some JS component I wrote. Now this component is very simple but needed to look and behave different on different devices and screen sizes. It was working perfectly. Our tester did extensive tests on all sorts of devices and browsers: worked perfectly.

So, this 'front end king' is now already in the 3rd week of making changes to this component. And still it is not working properly. And he doubts my front end skills?!

Hahahaha go fuck yourself you god damn piece of fucking front end retard!! Everything you make doesn't worl right away and needs at least 4 revisions. Fuck you!

Anyone else get told their rates are too high (by potential clients)? Too low (by fellow freelancers)? How does one put a value to their time and still stay market competitive?

Details: USA only. Not on any platforms such as freelancer, upwork, or fiver. Cost of living is Portland Oregon standards. Ask for any other details.

Looking for thoughts, recommended readings, any helpful input would be awesome.

Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.

When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.

I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.

Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.

My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.

For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.

None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..

These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.

Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.

We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.

The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.

With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.

I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.

Would you leave and get a new job?

Most developers are morons.

Because the field of software development has a relatively low barrier of entry, we naturally have a large and steady supply of under-trained and clueless keyboard monkeys, hereby referred to as zombies.

The reason the industry is set up this way is because companies need a steady supply of new talent. Big Tech is so greedy, they snatch most good talent and bench them, leaving the scraps for everyone else. Other companies lower their standards and hire anybody that can copy and paste. Most entry-level software work at smaller companies is usually low risk and high churn and that's where the low barrier of entry comes in.

I have nothing against zombie developers, so long as they know their place.

I've seen too many zombies think they're CTO material after 2 years of fixing javascript bugs, or think that if they watch just enough egghead.io videos, they'll be promoted to senior.

Typically a zombie developer will go down one of two paths: 1) they either burn out and realize that software isn't what they're meant for (most common scenario) or 2) they actually get good and decide to stick around.

The ones who stick around though usually do so because it hits a sweet spot for them. To them, software is:
- Interesting enough to do it for a full-time job
- Good enough at it to secure a steady job at a two-bit company
- Pays enough to pay the bills

These people don't have a deep passion for software. It's basically just a full-time hobby for them.

And I have nothing against that. The market is satisfied, they're satisfied and I'm satisfied so long as they don't start thinking that they and I are on the same level.

Know your place, zombie devs.

EY and ConsenSys announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol with Microsoft which is an open source initiative that combines cryptography, messaging and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project.

Past approaches to blockchain technology have had difficulty meeting the highest standards of privacy, security and performance required by corporate IT departments. Overcoming these issues is the goal of the Baseline Protocol.

John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet added, “A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”

Source : ConsenSys