To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Pseudo-rant:

I'm worn out from working a full-time job, working on my app, and having a family.

My app has potential, I launched it in July (iOS only so far) and am already well over 1000 active users. It's first week in the app store, it was in the top 100 for it's category.

It has some bugs that I'm working out, and some features that are in high demand.

I'm currently completely refactoring the API because I let it become spaghetti as I went from concept to v1.

That refactor means a rewrite of the website, and a major refactor of the iOS app, which is all fine and dandy.

On to the question: I am an engineer/architect, not a business major. I know I could really use help, and I know the perfect people to try to bring on, but also know I have nothing real to offer them other than a stake in the company.

As a developer, does a stake in a promising, but unproven company have enough prospect to sacrifice your time for?

Am I just being impatient, and should I continue nibbling at it myself until I get there, even if it takes a long time?

How do you determine the stake to give up, when you know that you COULD do it all yourself and keep all the monies?

I should have taken some business classes.

Work out the major requirements,

Identify platform(s) and environment best suited to project,

Design and develop around core features,

Allow 6-12 weeks for scope creep and the additional BS features,

Build, test and deploy in a week or two to meet unattainable deadlines.

Spend new couple of months refactoring and fixing everything.

When you get back to the office and remember the mess you were tackling on Friday 😅

when u feel that u wrote some godlike code. 2 months later client wants to add new features. then u realize ur code needs major refactoring. "what was i thinking, far from godlike"

Pair programming a major refactoring, colleague tries to change _everything_ simultaneously. Spent hours fixing compiler errors, now it's not linking. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Couple of the senior devs were reviewing some legacy service code, vilifying everything that was done. Too many files, not enough files, too many lines of code, etc. Standard Monday-Morning-Quarterback nonsense. Then they came across Thread.Sleep() in various exception handlers. The passive-aggressive -bleep- hit the fan. 'Idiot', 'Moron', "People don't know how to code..", etc. dog-pile rants for a good 5 minutes.
I thought "Code is only a couple of years old and had very little changes..I'll bet the original developer is still here."
So I look at the change history and sure enough the original developer was one of the dog-pilers, and the other dev changed the code just last year. Comments like "Major refactoring", "Increased Performance", etc and the changes were only removing comment blocks, and other stylecop suggestions. Oh...there was one change was Thread.Sleep(6000) to Thread.Sleep(1000). I guess that did technically "increase performance"
Would I get fired if I said "Shut the -bleep- up you -bleep-ing -bleep- heads" ? Hmm...probably. Better keep my opinions on devrant.

I hate working with sh*tty Devs

I used that term specifically.. No it's not about juniors, it's about those who pretend to be seniors.
In a major company project, one of us has to take a week or two to refactor that one "senior" dev work. When tested it performs poorly, when checked, it violates every SE principle and the business people are wondering why we keep seeing `refactoring User Stories/Tasks` and why we still don't have a working project yet. Yes, we will never have, that mess that `senior` dev created is almost impossible to refactor without major rework.
Now, major rework coming, we need to give something to that Senior so he doesn't feel left behind. Argue to never let him get anything in core or this company will go under...

In short, I hate working with sh*tty devs.

Is it just me or do people sometimes do major refactoring not because it needs to, but purely because they are inheriting old code and can't be bothered to understand it

I just picked up a hobby project which I hadn't worked on in a while and started doing some major refactoring. However, I forgot to pull before I started and didn't realize that I made some updates on a different pc. Then as I wanted to push a ton of changes I noticed... I didn't even attempt to merge because it was one giant pile of shit conflicts - and I didn't remember what changes I had made earlier. So I decided to say fuck it and
$ git force --push

Feels *so* much better than pulling my hair out over conflicts :P

I have kind of been put in charge of software development in one department of the company I work at. Only myself and a developer in the IT department have ever done programming as our main jobs and follow formal processes. The issue I am having is I don't know how to approach some co-workers assisting me part time with programming to tell them the code they wrote needs major refactoring. Just after a short review there are hundreds of lines of duplicated code and code that is duplicating features built into the framework etc. I just hate conflict and don't know how to tell them we have a lot of work to do. Any advice?

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.