Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.

*Intern asks for help*

JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.

Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.

2 hours Later. Check in meeting

PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?

JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?

PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?

JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.

Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*

PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.

Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.

PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?

Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.

PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.

Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?

PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.

Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.

PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.

You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.

Root ain't givin' no fucks no mo'

My boss just demanded that I join a conference call. So, I call in, and there's three other people there.

He starts chewing me out for talking with some vendor directly (their VP emailed me directly and asked for a few things, and i was instructed to make him happy). Apparently I used "confusing wording" and "did not talk his language." Bossman was really getting into gear for a ten-minute berating.

It turns out that the guy in question only read half of my first email, and totally ignored the second email where I told him everything was finished and live and working. I told my boss quite bluntly that the guy should have read what I had written, and that he was an idiot. The boss's defense of the guy? "Well, he's a sales guy." I just laughed at him.

Later, bossman started in on me (once again) for not making enough progress on this ridiculous shared-spreadsheet sales tool he wants, saying "We discussed this a week ago!"

I casually reminded him that we had talked about it for the first time ever on Friday night (today is Tuesday), and he had said it wasn't going to be a priority for the next three weeks(!). Again he stopped in his tracks. Again, I laughed at him.

Guy's a tool and I'm so done with caring.

Root's going to be flippant and angry. Root's going to have fun (:

What's he gonna do, fire me? 😂

My manager started a company and I was his first employee, he literally started it because he wanted to make use of my talent.

So one day I finished my project on Friday and took in advance Monday and Tuesday off. Went back Wednesday to find my manager angry like "you didn't finish your project, you costed us money with our client company (a big ass famous one) I am putting you on probation and you could probably get fired if you don't get yourself together" and he said that my colleague had to do my whole work that I supposedly didn't do.
So I went to the code and checked. And I found that what my colleague did was re write my code in a different structure and pretended like he did everything and did do anything.
Got passed off so I wrote an email to my manager with the commits and links to them and their builds and made sure it's well explained, and titled the email "resignation letter" with me expressing at the end how angry I am and informing about my resignation.
Later on he replied saying it was a misunderstanding and there was lack of communication and he could give me I raise.
I insisted.
One week later I got hired by the client company and suddenly I was sitting on the other side of the meeting table. And it felt so damn good.

ON MONDAY

TL: Why the hell you require a month to integrate this engine?

Me: It will take that much time, can't help it.

TL: it can be done within a week.

Me: Then you do it.

TL: Ok I will show how it's done in a week.

ON FRIDAY

Me: What's the status on that integration?

TL: Oh yeah about that, you have to carry it ahead, I have some monitoring to do.

Me: Ok, give me the repository access, I will carry it ahead.

ME OPENS REPOSITORY.

There's only a new controller file with nothing it.

1 week ago my boss forced me to ship a new feature on friday afternoon. The feature broke our application for about 2 hours. After this I bought him this cup.

Today at school I borrowed an oscilloscope and a few capacitors and used a circuit I made at home to just demonstrate the discharge of a capacitor, since my physics teacher asked me to teach the class about this on Friday
So it's one of those old analogue scopes, so to get a nice line I turned the speed right down and did a long exposure shot with my phone and it turned out brilliantly!

The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

[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.

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

When someone asks me to fix a production bug on Friday.

My employer keeps sending booze to our houses.

Officially meant for coronaproof zoom social meetings where they play stupid bingo games and quizzes on Friday afternoons.

Why they're sending 2 liter bottles of Rum, 3 bottles of rosé wine and 12 cans of craft beer for the 6th week in a row... I really don't know... I don't even attend the zoom meetings.

All I know is that during breakfast, rum is better mixed into coffee than through cornflakes.

Anyway... Why was this a rant again? Oh right. Can I sue my employer for baiting me into an addiction? 🤔

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

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?

Thursday
PM: Hey why is A delayed? It should be top priority.
me: I just completed B, and C which were also top priority but got scheduled earlier, so I thought they..
PM: Agh, yes. But can you then finish A by the end of week? it would be very important!
me: No, I unfortunately don't think I'd have enough time by the end of wee..
PM: Why? This should be *the* top priority task. You should not start other tickets before A is done.
me: Exactly. But I *just* started. And. I. don't. have. enough. free. hours. left. this. week.
PM: But why?!
me: So just on Friday I have these 5 meetings here..
*shows calendar*
PM: Ok... OK! Then don't attend those before you are done. This should be more important.
me: Ugh, oh-key...are you sure?
PM: Yea, just let who invited you know that you can't attend and feel free to cc me in, I'll explain A is most important atm.
me: Ok, thanks, but that won't be necessary.
PM: What? Why?
me: You invited me to the Friday meetings.

Obviously I had to attend all 5 meetings today and A is pushed back to next week. :)

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

My boss pissed me off so much yesterday I totally ditched work today. I had some spiced rum for breakfast (and dinner) and spent the day playing minecraft and browsing Black Friday specials.

I did a little bit of work that (oversimplified) involved paying a Clover contractor for doing basically nothing. Totes cool with that as the guy is really nice and a decent dev. Annoyingly, though, he started hitting on me and asked me out on a date at the end of the call. He's like 65 and has a daughter (grand daughter?) my age, so that's like totally creepy. Ugh.

Getting hit on by random old men is still better than talking to Mr. Asshole the Sales Fetishizer, though.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

Last Friday, because of a stupid ass shitty engineer who constructed a footpath in the most shitty way I Sprained my ankle in one of the dents in it. But the story about this pizza picture is that my friend and I had planned a trek on a Saturday which obviously got cancelled. He saw how pissed I was he went online on Domino's website, changed input in a JSON file on one of Domino's wheel spinner which got me the maximum discount available there and I bought the pizza. He did that multiple times. Some Relief there. 🥂🍕
#Pizza_makes_everything_better

!rant

So my employer just offered me a 57% raise out of the blue!
Last Friday, I got a meeting invite from the CEO (its a small 15 person company, so he looks after most of the management stuff) titled "{{myname}} - Salary Review". No agenda there. I was fuckin scared that maybe my salary will be chopped short due to the virus and shit. They recently let go of one guy in my team, and are about to hire two new guys. Also, my last raise was this January. So I didn't think any good could come out of this meeting.

I joined the zoom and he asked if I was happy with the current salary. I said "yes" like an idiot, but added that the prices in my country are rising a lot. He made smalltalk on costs of groceries and Corona and my family, and that was it. 57%.

I was smiling like a dumbass at the end of the meeting. This guy is like the Hyman Roth of this business.

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

tl;dr stupid clients with their stupid requirements.

Client: (on Monday) hypothetically could you implement "A"?
Me: (on Monday) yeah I could do that by Friday, let me know if you want me to start it.
Client: (on Thursday) hey remember we talked about "A" well do "B" instead and I'll need it by Friday still.
Me: "B" is completely different than "A" and will take probably twice as long.
Client: but you told me you could do it by Friday.
Me: ............ I want to smash your face.

Gooooood morning devRant! Fucking friday, fuck yeah.

Hereby a rant which @dfox asked to make to test if a possible bug is fixed.

Have a great day everybody and thanks to dfox for keeping me in the loop on this!

Friday morning, taking a sip of coffee reading mails. (nb: I started the job on Monday, and this is my very first job excepted internship)
*wild manager appears* : come with with me a second.
Me: wtf is that
Him: close the door
Me: shit what did I do
Him: so we're closing this really big deal with a big client/investor
Me: ok cool, what is the point to tell me that ?
Him: remember when we discussed your salary and we couldn't afford to hire you as high as you wanted ?
Me:... Yes ?
Him: well now we can
Me, starting to understand: ... And ?
Him: well your new salary is higher than what you asked in interview

And that's how I got a 8% raise after 4 days at my first job :')

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

Just going to come out and say it.

If you wait until 4pm on a Friday to hit me up to fix your problems, you're a fucking gangrene twat.

I won't be taking care of your shit until Tuesday you dumb bitch.

Whoever is responsible for the responsible for the refund process on airbnb can eat a bunch of dicks, watch me spill all of the fluids over his keyboard and then watch me break every single one of his/her fingers.
How the fuck do you dare to keep all of my money in some kind of internal wallet while I clearly need it to get a hotel after your starrated host left me hanging, autoaccepting but then telling me via phone that he using vacation till Friday... Half a goddamned fucking hour after I tried to call him. I want to report the shit out of this asshole, but no I can't because I cancelled my stay.
For the love of God and his creation is it this hard to punish assholes for ruining my new year and making me freeze my hand and ears of?

To improve our user's "experience" I suggested to my boss to add a status page showing...well, the current status of our services. Everybody was up for it, so I go off and implement a basic version + automated monitoring backend, get lots of positive feedback, all seems fine.

Then it starts:

Boss: "Can you get it all set up by this Saturday?"
Me: "Uh, today is Wednesday and I've never set up all the stuff needed on a proper server before"
Boss: "Well, you still have a few days. Please also contact your coworker to get it all hooked up in our launcher"
Me: "I'll try, can't make any promises though"

Contact my coworker and tell him what the plan is. I had already given him access to the repo and he is positive to get it all hooked up (I doubt he ever cloned my repo, let alone ran my code)

Spend all Friday getting my stuff set up on the production server, feeling pretty good thanks to the many tutorials.

Contact the boss Friday evening:
Me: "All up and running"
Boss: "Thanks, but we decided to go with a basic HTML page instead. We can just manually edit that, should be enough.
Me: "..."

In the end my stuff was never used, the server I set up was finally taken down a month ago. The gratitude you get when not hacking together some absolute shit that causes problems when you don't add <br/> tags at the correct places to prevent an ugly overflow, cause the coworker was too lazy to implement some form of line wrap in the launcher. I'm not saying my stuff is the best of the best, but at least it was professional looking to a certain extent.

This is actually an advice given to me:

"Only ever release your code on a Friday, preferably after 6pm. If you're not confident enough to do that, your code is not ready."

Who says dev doesn't require courage.

So where to start... Let me preface this by saying I am a Software Architect for C# and do 99% dotnet development.

I just received a phone call from our Director of Development asking me to look at adding a feature for SSO with our companies main development project, which is written in PHP. I hope I made the correct changes but since I am not a PHP dev... I am not 100% confident in my code.

Now I am writing this as we are making the deployment Friday, December 29, 2017 at 5:00 pm. I should add that I am going on vacation for the next week.

So let me summarize... I am not a PHP developer, the non-PHP developer is making PHP changes on a Friday Night, and before a long weekend and before going on vacation.

I would like to point out that I said I was not 100% comfortable with this... but well this is what they wanted. I am not even sure what really to say about this though.

Got laid off on Friday because of a workforce reduction. When I was in the office with my boss, someone went into my cubicle and confiscated my laptop. My badge was immediately revoked as was my access to network resources such as email and file storage. I then had to pack up my cubicle, which filled up the entire bed of my pickup truck, with a chaperone from Human Resources looking suspiciously over my shoulder the whole time. They promised to get me a thumb drive of my personal data. This all happens before the Holidays are over. I feel like I was speed-raped by the Flash and am only just now starting to feel less sick to the stomach. I wanted to stay with this company for the long haul, but I guess in the software engineering world, there is no such thing as job security and things are constantly shifting. Anyone have stories/tips to make me feel better? Perhaps how you have gotten through it? 😔😑😐

micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"

ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"

slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"

prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"

Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."

Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.

Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."

asdfjkagel.

This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.

At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/

*production is down*
Ops: At 5pm? On a Friday? *checks deploy history* God! Who did the deploy
Dev: It was a small patch, a tiny patch. It shouldn't have....
Ops: Deploy on a Friday evening?
Colleague: I didn't think it would...

Ops (on the outside) : *takes a deep breath* Its okay Dev, we can fix this. Don't worry

Me(in my mind) : for fuck sakes! Are you fucking kidding me?*** **** *** god damn it! *****

Boss: Here's the next project that I would you to start immediately.
Me: So the client wants <Application Name>
Boss: Yes and it's due on Friday after 2 weeks.
Me: Yes can be done. By what time today you can give me the requirements.
Boss: Not today, I will give you the requirements next week Friday.
Me: So I should start the project next week Friday.
Boss: You have to start the project today
Me: Start with what? There is no requirement. Excuse me, I need a break.

I'm a bad influence.

It's been a tradition for me to keep a bottle of 'desk whiskey' buried in a drawer at work. A couple weeks ago, I started inviting cube mates over for a drink on Fridays as five pm rolled around.

Soon one of them brought in a bottle of scotch. Then another.
Started observing the afternoon drink on days other than Friday, more folks got involved...

Now the CTO talks about "Whiskey O' Clock" daily.

🍺

Messaging me at 4:30pm on a Friday about a high priority issue currently in production.

My reply: a link to the code review from 2 months ago that literally explained the problem and what to do to fix it. That got implemented. Then removed. For some reason...

Feels good.

Friday 6pm to Sunday 6pm, with toilet breaks, snack breaks and a three hour nap on Sunday morning. Roughly 44 hours. It was a hackathon, Nov 2016. My team came in fourth place and the first three teams went to Germany!

Well, I got a well paying attachment from it so it didn't go all to waste.

Me and my laptop then...

My last special snowflakes teacher story. This happend last Friday.

Background: we had to do a "little" project in less than 2 weeks (i ranted about that) and got our degree on Friday. I did a perfectly fine meal suggester, with in my opinion one of the best codes i've ever written.

After getting my degree (which is totally fine and qualifies me as IT technician/ "staatlich geprüfte Informationstechnische Assistentin") i asked him what my grade for the project was.
Me: what was my grade for the project again?
Him: i left it at 90%
Me: why exactly? You seemed to be really excited and liked it obviously. And there was no critique from you after my presentation.
Him: yadda yadda. I can't give you more. Yadda yadda be happy i didn't lower your grade.
Me: why would you lower my grade? This doesn't make sense at all. I matched all your criteria. You wanted a program everyone loved, everyone wanted to buy. There you go. I made exactly that.
Him: i can't give you a 1 (equals an A)
Me: why not?
Him: you wrote to much. I didn't want so much (he never specified a maximum). And you used to advanced code. And there were so many lists and ref - methods. The class couldn't benefit from it.
Me: Excuse me!? The only "advanced code" i used was a sqlite library. And i explained what i did with that. What do you mean by "so many lists" and ref-menthodes. In which methodes am i using ref?
Him: I don't know, i just skimmed through the code.
Me, internal: WHAT THE FUCKING HELL!?
Me: so you are telling me, you didn't even read my code fully and think it is too advanced for the class? And because of that you give a 2 (equals a B)?
Him: yes
I just gave him a deathstare and left after that. What the hell. Yes, i used encapsulation - which is something we hadn't done much in class. But the code is still not more advanced because i use more files -.-

Friend: I just love the adrenaline rush caused by bungee jumping
Me: I just love the adrenaline rush caused by deploying untested code to production server on a Friday night

Client: "Dear Mr. I still have not received the final version yet. I had planned to send it out to my customers at the end of the week."
-------

Me (1st answer I did not give):
"Ok. I accept your statement as true, since I did not send you anything. Furthermore I respect your wish."

Me (2nd answer I did not give):
"Well I am sorry. Before today you did not once mention that there was a deadline. ASAP is not how I do things. Please do your project management."

Me (answer I gave): "Dear Client, due to a huge demand for our services we are forced to prioritise. We are doing our best to complete the project as fast as possible. Please understand however that we can not reschedule with 3 days notice. Because of technical requirements the product can be send on Friday next week. Please let us know if this works out for you. - Kind regards. Me. "

-__-""""

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

My cat is looking at me like he's doing an untested deployment on a friday at 5.

End of second week at a new job. Found what I thought was a bug and wanting to impress I fixed it. The dev reviewing my code had just started a week before me so he also had no idea what was going on. It went live Friday afternoon.

Come back Monday morning and turns out I completely broke everything and nobody could use the site all weekend. I thought I was done for sure. Was shitting myself all day waiting for the call.

TURNS OUT NOBODY EVEN NOTICED

CEO - So... We'll have a new side project, it's a small thing, I spoke with a guy, he needs just a small thing...
Me - Ok....... So, what do you need me for?
CEO - Not much, this guy started a project but wants your help on a small part, and you already did something similar for us, so it should be fast, just copy and paste and change a little bit. You probably know better than me.
Me - *Sigh* ... So `friend`, what do you need from me?
Friend - So, I made a crawler that is storing some information on a local file, I just need to add multiprocessing and multithreading, a producer-consumer system with a queue so I can automatically add new links every now and then, a failback system, so when a process doesn't finish, it should be re-queued and crawled later, store all the information on a database cluster (that is not set up), [......]
Me - And when is this supposed to be up and running?
Friend - Your CEO told me you could do this by the weekend. Can we finish this by Friday?
Me - *facepalm* FML

Today's highlights include:

The offshore team has put code gems in production featuring the example code generated on project startup that you're supposed to delete or overwrite, an API endpoint that just returns the value 5, and various debugging console.logs. it's a delight reading their code.

My boss also forgot the meeting he called me in for so I've been sitting here waiting for 20 minutes when I could have gone home. I'm glad it's friday

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

Pm: "so how long should this take?"

Me: "well, I see at LEAST 8 hours of work here for me, some of which can't be done without graphics, but let's assume graphics are done by designers by the time I get to hour 6 and I just have to plug the images in without much editing or tweaking."

Pm: "So you'll have this by tomorrow?"

Me: "Do you think I just sit on my hands all day waiting for one of you trolls to give me something to do? I said AT LEAST 8 FULL HOURS OF MY TIME, that would be assuming I could get 8 consecutive hours to work on this, and let's face it that's not gonna happen."

Pm: "So Friday...?"

Me: "Tell the client that so long as there aren't any unforseen issues it could be done as early as Thursday. I'll put it on my schedule, but it is not a priority until at least Monday. There's only one of me and 5 other active projects on my desk."

Pm: "I'm gonna tell them Wednesday morning we'll show it to them for approval."

What in the hell is wrong with people?

A couple weeks ago, my coworkers built a site where 90% of pages consisted of all images and uncompressed images at that. I'm talking even the text was images. At the time I told my boss that it should be done with css and this would later come to bite them in the ass with page load speed and seo. He ignored me and said it was fine. Well today my boss assigned me with going back and basically removing images with things that can be done with css because load speed was terrible and seo wasnt too hot. Maybe if he listened to me from the get go, he wouldn't have to assign me this unnecessary work and I can focus on cleaning up all the other piss poor excuse of websites they have. Seriously tired of feeling like I, the junior dev is doing the teaching to these "senior developers" who get paid like twice as much as I do when I'm the one who is always doing the cleanups /optimization and guiding them on all their problems. Is it Friday yet?-_-

So a good friend of mine calls me up on Friday night, and he tells me about his close friend abroad who messed up and, without going into details, needs me to do his C# project for a course. The deadline was on Monday. I said I couldn't promise anything, but send me the requirments and I'll look into it.

Now, the pay was good and I felt that the guy's reasons were valid (and that the prof was being a dick), also the project was doable in a day and a half, so I said ok. I spent my entire Saturday working on it till I had most of it done: I just needed to refine the code and do the report.

I sent the app to him so that he can check it out, to which he responds by freaking out and explaining that he has missed most of the classes and has a barely passing average (huh maybe the prof isn't so much of a dick). If I get him a high grade, the gig will be up and his prof will fail him. He wants a 60-70/100, no more.

Feeling obliged by our agreement, I spent my Sunday complicating trivial code, breaking standards, and adding minor bugs. Had I know this was what it was going to lead to, I would have never accepted.

It's just so much harder to break good code than to write it.

Me leaving my office on a Friday. 😂

It was friday evening and almost everyone in office had left. I was assigned a bug related to some of my code changes. I called my senior to help me debug (has three years of experience, whereas me having only one year exp, who is also a very good friend of mine *always helps in debugging*).
So the code goes

switch (someEnum) {
case One:
doSomething()
// no break
case Two:
t.x = someEnum
break
case Three:
.....
}

I had recently added new enun One and was reciting the code logic to him as we were looking through code.
Him: Hey you haven't set t.x in case One. How did you miss that?
Me: No look, I haven't but a break on it. It will go ahead and set it in next case.
Him: What are you talking about? if the someEnun is One why would it execute Two case. Lets copy that line up there and try it locally.
Me: No no no wait. Are you saying that groovy doesn't need breaks in switch (Me being new to groovy but good with Java).
Him: Why would you need break in switch case even in Java?
Me: *stares at him*
Him: I'm going to execute a psvm right freaking now.
Me: *while he writes the psvm* Why did you think there were breaks in switch in any code?
Him: Shut up. *writes psvm code cursing me everywhere*
*executes code*
No way. Really??
Me: Tell me why do you think are there breaks in switch.
Him: I though they were to get you out of switch block and not execute the default block.
Me: So were you coding switch until now without breaks?
Him: I don't know man. I'm starting to doubt all the switches I have ever written.
Me: Anyway that's not the problem, so moving on.
*a while later*
Him: If a interviewer would ask me how would you rate yourself in Java. I would be like "Well I worked on various projects for 3 years in Java, but didnt know why we put breaks in switch. So you figure it out yourself."

One of the best moments in office.

3:30 on a Friday, random PM: our Argentina devs just sent out a merge request. We need to release before the weekend.
me: We try not to release on Friday afternoon unless it's for a high priority bug fix.
PM: This is urgent
me: why?
PM: We're two weeks behind schedule and the dev for this it's going on vacation in an hour.
me: so, you want to release when there's no one around if something goes wrong and the person who knows anything about it isn't contactable?
PM: yes
me: no.

Friday night and still coding. sometimes I force myself to go sit on the balcony for a minute to make me not forget about outside...

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

! Rant

I'm getting married on Friday.
I proposed half a year ago.

What have we done since the proposal?

- Adopted a Cnaani dog with a lot of issues and recovered her from most of them.
- went every Saturday to skydive for the whole day (almost finish the license!)
- moved apartment
- Plan and execute the wedding
- build wedding RSVP and teaser sites
- work full time as developers (me full-stack and she's an automation expert)
- go abroad twice
- I have work on a new startup with a friend (in version two right now)
- I hade my driver license classes
- went to salsa courses twice a week
- built our salsa wedding dance
- I studied Clojure, ruby on rails, Angular 2 and a little bit of React.
And more...

So why does it feel I haven't done enough?

Big project this week. Lots of fires to put out. Deadlines approaching.

Monday: I can get by on just four hours sleep. No problem. Will be just like college.

Wednesday: I'm going to just close my eyes while this file uploads. Maybe I will backup the server while I'm at it; Just take a nap while that processes.

Friday: Sorry if my office smells like vomit. It's because I am so tired I vomited.

Sunday: I'm not getting out of this bed tomorrow. Let them fire me. I think I will just will myself into a coma. That will be nice.

So
I wrote a song
About devRant
Don't judge me

To the tune of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"

dfox and trogus
Had a very good idea
They worked on it
And out popped devRant
Then one foggy Friday night
They published it
It was an instant hit
Devs everywhere rejoyced

Now the devs love them
As they type out their rants
dfox and trogus
You'll go down in dev history!
(Like Linus Torvalds!)

A recruiter rang me up on my birthday (Friday)

Had an interview (Tuesday)

Started work (Wednesday)

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

!dev

Why are people such idiots?
This guy is so oblivious he reminds me of a client or PM.

Here’s the email conversation (since he refuses to answer his cell):

Me: Hey; I haven’t been able to reach you for several days. You must be busy! Let me know what time works best for you, and I’ll call you then. Alternatively, you can reach me at <number> any day this week (except Wednesday) from 11am PST (2pm EST) onward.

Him: I will call you at 2:30pm your time on Wednesday.

Me: As I stated in my email, Wednesday is the only day that doesn’t work for me.

Him: Are you free on Thursday?

Me (to audience): YOU FOOLISH, ILLITERATE TOAD!

Me: I am free Thursday (and Friday) from 11am PST and onward.

We have a pretty simple rule in our team:

Do not deploy to production on Friday.

Well thanks to the client being very slow to reply to me, they only signed off on launching the app at 15:30 on Friday, for a big campaign the app was built to facilitate starting Saturday.

Guess who had to bite the bullet and launch a new app into production at 15:30 on Friday.

Guess who got a text from his boss at 19:30 that there was a critical change required tonight.

Guess who was making code changes and deploying to production at 21:15 on Friday night while drinking Gin and tonic...

Nb This was a project only i was assigned to and came in as a rush job at the last minute.

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

So we send a quote out to a client to update his website to make it compliant with the new privacy guidelines: SSL encryption, removing external libraries, removing Facebook Plug-ins, all that stuff. We didn't get a response.

On Monday, he called in a panic. "The website does not work, fix immediately!"

I check out the server, what do I see? An SSL cert installed the Friday before... Client decided to do it himself, on a Friday, without testing. He broke something, but cannot tell me exactly what he did.

And somehow he thinks all that is my fault :D

So... Facebook canceled our plugin since we did not update it to newer version.
Fine.. I'm fine with that. There was no time for that since there's was some very very very fucking important projects, tasks and side requests requested by administration for customers that are actually not real customers since they don't pay or have a contract yet (or ever will!)
Administration... Wtf our plugin is not
working?! We are receiving complaints from (paying) customers!!
Me. Since you assumed the team leading and revoked my rights on leading the team we are doing shittttt work for non paying customer...
Administration... Resolve FB issue then do non paing customer work. Hum! bether otherwise.. No, otherwise. No. Do both ASAP
Me. Sure! It's Friday, I'm overtime already by 10h at lunch time,. So I'm fuck off outa here and pick up on whatever I'm keen to on Monday morning after guide the other colleagues on the crapp you dropped on them with your seagull managent!
This means I might start on Wednesday!
Xau

Soo much fun working for a cunt as a boss:

B: We getting soo close now, the plane is coming in to land.
Me: Yes, but the engine is busy falling off
B: Well, if we miss the deadline, its only us to blame.

NO YOU INSIGNIFICANT LITTLE CUNT, ITS YOU, ONLY YOU, 100% ENTIRELY YOU YOU SHIT FACED DUCK DICK.

Context:

We are on version 8 of our deadline, which was initially March, our next and final extension ends next Friday, we are this fucked ebcause all he fucking does is make bad descisions and pointless changes, we been telling hims once October to stop making changes if we ever want ot make the deadline.

Directly after he vommited that poes out of his mount he goes on to detail the massive change to the data structure that only needs to be changed as he refused ot listen to the developer when they told him not to do it that way 3 months ago.

How is it even possible that someone this moronic and incompitent can actualyl exist on planet earth. He is not even a flat earther.

Why do people have to lie? I am seriously getting tired of it.

Context: While I was on vacation the company hired some guy we’ll call Bob.
Bob is a senior with 10+ years of experience. 5 of those years in React (supposedly).
I got back from vacation and was told I’d be working on a project with Bob.
I’ve worked in teams before so I thought no problem.

Now I am aware that different people have different styles, so that’s why we agreed on a lint config with some fancy git hooks.

I was excited at first because the project actually seems nice, but my excitement soon turned into terror.

First of all, Bob doesn’t seem to understand Git…fair enough, I’ll give him a quick guide…

Mf calls me at 11pm on a Friday because he can’t push because the tests are failling.

Now tests. Bob doesn’t write those. Great.

We had created a few components to use throughout the project.

Bob seems to consistently forget what components are and why you write them and just imports the defaults from the UI library we’re using.

Bob also has a kink for hardcoding values for some reason.

I talked to Bob multiple times about this and he just tells me he’ll change it but in the end the PR stays open for 5 days, before it’s actually me who goes in and fixes it. Oh and yeah this shit keeps happening over and over again.

Now I know some of us devs hate meetings but for the love of God Bob just show up. You don’t even have to speak. Or at least answer a message that corresponds to the working hours and not in the middle of the night.

I am getting tired of this behavior and am seriously holding back from reporting this to the management. It’s been a month and I am seriously worried about the project. I have my own stuff to do but it takes time for me to clean up his absolute mess that doesn’t even pass the CI.

Call me an asshole I don’t care. It’s been a month and I’m legit worried about the future of the project.

Thank you sooooo much for giving me a list of six tutorial videos you expect me to record by tomorrow, before I leave the company. It shouldn't be too hard, you say, having never ever gone through any of the processes before. Oh, and this is in addition to the big video tutorial which you asked for this afternoon that you expect by Friday morning. Not to mention the eight separate projects I still need to write documentation for. Oh, and this all would have been much smoother if this company would have given me time to work out all this documentation earlier instead of waiting until after I turned in my two weeks to take documentation seriously.

I guess I'll be lucky if I only have to deal with these things tomorrow. But given your penchant for pulling me off my main projects to deal with bullshit tangents, I bet that ain't going to happen. And I bet you're still going to flood me with calls on Monday morning, as I start my brand new job.

TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern

Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.

Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.

Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.

An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.

After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.

The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.

It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”

At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”

Facepalm.

So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.

Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.

The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.

In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).

THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.

I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!

On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???

The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!

Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!

Got an email earlier this week. It went something like this:

"It looks like your team still hasn't delivered the logging and monitoring solution that we asked for. Can you get it done in time for our production deployment next Friday?"

Um, wait, excuse me, WHAT?

1. You never actually asked for the thing you claim we didn't deliver. In fact, when we brought up the fact that you should probably have some monitoring set up for your servers, you said it would be handled entirely by your own team.
2. I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON THIS PROJECT FOR SIX MONTHS WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME YOUR DEADLINE UNTIL NOW
3. I won't even have time to start working on this until the Monday after your prod deployment date. Sorrynotsorry.

I really shouldn't be surprised though. This project has been a clusterfuck from the very beginning so this is just par for the course.

I have just started out on Linux (Ubuntu because I don't know anything (please don't judge me (you're not judging me right?))) and I don't know anything aside from Linux relies on Terminal a lot. The tools are already installed (VSCode, git, etc.) and everything dark-themed. Is there anything I should have in your opinion, and where should I start?

!rant
I've just lost my grandfather last Friday from liver and gallbladder failure. Him being a composer and a musician impacted me a lot as a pianist try-hard. I regret I prioritized my studying for college over him and only visited him twice. But he saw my performance from my parents (they recorded it) and he complimented it, so it's more than enough for me. Rest in peace gramp, and thank you.

Boss: You have one month to finish the program.
Me: It will be complicated but lets see how it goes.
To be cleared the end date is 2 of July.

Boss on the last friday: You have to finish on the 20th of June
Me: Yeah sure....

Boss yesterday: You have to finish on the 15th of June.
Me: You said one month.

Boss today: you have to finish by the end of this week
Me: No problem Boss you will have it tomorrow!!!
Boss: You have to. There are more projects waiting...
Me: -.-

This is what I have to deal with. But hey... don't forget... tomorrow is a new day so ... fuck it.

I GOT MY FIRST CLIENT!! I'm not charging too much since it's my first client and I'm just focusing on the experience rather than pay. Were having a meeting Friday so he can tell me what he wants cause he didnt have all the info at the time. It's just a simple website and if he requests more when I present it I'll ask for more muns

Boss : Fancy doing a live deployment on a Friday?

Me:

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

Debugging a system error with a good team of fellow developers/devops people is fun.

We had an issue on Friday where we were getting a pretty cryptic error in our error reporting system. A couple of developers and I got together with a couple of devops people and we worked it out well as a team and figured out a pretty complex issue in a reasonable amount of time with everyone playing a solid role.

Nobody tried to steal the show and everyone listened to each other's ideas on what the problem might be. Through and through a great debugging session and made me think about bad ones and good ones I've had in the past.

My company just migrated our mail servers over to office365. My boss has been excited and could barely contain himself when the migration was done he was having the best day ever after he got a good deal on some new toys...Then I ruined it.

Me (setting up) > WTF!? um...well I guess I don't have email on my phone anymore. These permissions are fucked.
Him > Oh why?
Me > They are ridiculous, I won't give away this much control just to read email.
Him (panicking) > and if buy you a company phone?
Me > Not a fuck it's still a personal device. I'll just sandbox the web version.
Him > Your over reacting, they obviously need them for security blah blah...
Me (sends him the pic) > The minimum system requirement is internet.
(...silence...)

I feel kinda bad for killing his vibe - he's a nice guy and he's only trying to do right by us but now he seems down like his toy isn't shiny anymore because he respects me. I wasn't beating on the stack or his choice (mines running on thunderbird). I just can't support this trend of GOD mode permissions for email / calculator and other single feature apps. I'll use the web app instead. You have to draw the line somewhere...

On the other hand I can't deny that I'm loving the irony that Microsoft just made my life easier and have a deep sense of satisfaction that for the first time ever I got fuck up his Friday :/

The management brought some devs from another outsourcing company into our project to overcome the fact that we, the existing developers, are retarded. We are retarded because they change the scope continously (aka daily) and we can’t keep track with their requests. They want something and after we implement it, they want it changed. Completely.

Instead of getting the project and deep dive into it using the materials (setup, architecture etc.) I prepared along the way, their PM said that we have to make some low level knowledge transfer. This knowledge transfer session happened on Friday.

The presenters were me and one of my colleagues. After 2 hours of training, we found out that the supposed senior devs don’t know how to use GIT, they don’t have a clue about Spring nor Angular (nor any SPA framework), their only questions were ‘why didn’t you use X?’ (where X = bootstrap, jQuery etc.) etc.

What is even funnier: during the presentation we were asked to keep a screen sharing opened during working hours for a couple of days just so the new devs could see how we are working.

Guess what happened with the scope on Friday evening: it changed again because ‘you got new devs so there will be multiple resources to handle tasks’.

2 more weeks and i’m out of there...

Friday 4:59pm
PM: hey, we need to add this new feature to the project.
Me: no problem, I'll take a look on Monday.

Monday 8:01am
PM: how's that new task coming along?
Me: 😩

Freelance client fired me on Friday, with literally a couple of minor issues to take care of left before launch. When I inquired, he said they're going in a different direction. I immediately smelled bullshit. When I asked who to turn over the files and DB to, it was their idea to allow me to broker the deal to switch things over and hand the keys over. I asked the new dev what framework or installed CMS and he thought I was crazy for asking. He told me they're taking by build of the site and finishing it. That's fucking low.

Yuppie clients are utter cancer. You treat me like garbage, stress me the fuck out with constant calls and changes, and force me to deploy manually on a f*cking friday. Your site deserves to be broken. You deserve to be angry. I enjoy your business suffering, you yuppie ass money brabbing retardotron.

I am a people people pleaser.

Especially when it comes to deadlines. I struggle heavily with them. For example:

My boss: 'Will the app be done by Friday?'

Me: 'well some features won't be ready but overall yes.'

The truth: "No even if I work on it 24/7 there are just so many things in the background that are too technical to explain to my boss that it will be impossible for me to hit that deadline. It will most likely take over a month to be ready for beta testing...."

I just don't know how to deal with those kinds of questions. I don't want to say 'most likely over a month' because it makes me look like a bad dev but at the same time I know that that is way more realistic than 'it will be done by Friday'

The truth is: even if it just looks like 3 buttons to you, in reality I need to change thousands of lines of code to accomplish the expected goals...

P.S:

I wanted to write this rant for a long time. Now I am drunk. There will be a sober more ordered version of this rant.

I'm a founder of a small startup. We had a board meeting on a Friday, and Thursday night I sent a strongly worded email to the chairman and point investor, both of whom are worth well over $100 million, expressing my concern that we were undercapitalized and they were taking advantage of our youth and inexperience in order to make a quick return on their investment. The board meeting the next day was 2 hours of me getting railed.

😡😡😡 Who here thinks that great software can be build in a few hours?!?! My silly ass boss does. He haven't programmed in decades and think we're supposed to be able to build software that doesn't break, has the best security, no flaws, feature rich in VERY, VERY short amount of time!! 😡😡😡 Fuck out of here!! It pisses me off to my core.

Me: Just finished the required software. In a short amount of time with new stuff I've never worked with before.

Him: Well, it took u a week to do. I heard it should've only have taken u a few hours.

Then u build the shit then!!! Fuck out of here.

The Sr. Dev and I was talking about this on Friday. U won't good product...leave us the fuck alone and let us work!!! He don't think that there will be small issues that come up. He thinks we're supposed to already know those issues are gonna exists, like really u fuck tart!?

FUUUUUUCK!!!!

So I was talking with a coworker about a difficult situation I had with a manager years ago. It came down to how to interpret the company rules. The issue was about schedules and not being allowed to modify those schedules permanently. Say always leaving at 3pm on Friday every week kind of thing.

It came up because I wanted to work through my lunch to make up an hour. So my manager went pouring through the company rules and found this one phrase "you are not to modify your work schedule on a continuous basis". I was like what does that have to do with me working through lunch. He then told me that would make my work schedule during the day without a break to be a continuous day. Which to him was not allowed. I was flabbergasted at how insane the interpretation was on his part. It was not worth fighting it at the time.

Back to my current coworker. We keep talking for a while and he says to me: Was that manager an adversity hire?

I have been chuckling about this all day.

WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! I almost deployed a website code update on a Friday.

One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).

Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'

This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"

Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best.

When your week has been so busy and exhausting you remember at 1PM Friday you have a deadline for Monday morning and force yourself to do a weeks worth of work in 4 hours and deploy it on a Friday without QA testing!

To future me - I apologise for Monday’s headaches.

My last day before vacation, Friday after hours,
Me as a Junior dev, not that experienced with bash.
An unfortunately with root on a prod machine.
I wrote a script and wanted it to stop at a specific point, but couldn’t remember which of those cmd it was so I wrote all of them.
Quit
Close
Stop
Halt
Exit

Ran the script.
Wanted to kill myself.
I haven’t had the privs to turn on the VM again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🤦🏽‍♂️
I definitely learned a lot!

So I fucked up.. I assigned a small wordpress/woocommerce project to myself to avoid my team members from wasting their time on it. I had a two month deadline, which was insane, so I kept postponing it until I forgot about it. Today my client contacted me by email to ask if she could preview the site before our meeting in two weeks..
QUE BULLSHIT EXCUSE:

- “I had to migrate to another server because of some access/permission issues with my current host. They gave me their word that they would be done with the migration thursday or friday, then I have to correct some permissions and database settings, and the DNS update may take up to 24 hours to finish. I will personally make sure that you know as soon as the migration has finished.”

- “Thank you so much! I feel so safe having assigned your company the job! I am really looking forward to our meeting and seeing the site!”

Oh and did I mention that deadline was around 65 days ago? And that I haven’t even started yet? I know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 days..

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

The IT guy at client made a spaghetti code website to replace their time entry software. I come in to “finish it up in a week to two” (just me). I start by removing 1200+ lines of convoluted data access code that doesn’t work, SQL injection prone too. I quickly gave up and started from scratch; just copyied some of his actually decent HTML.

Friday, he proceeded to try to install node on the server and run main.JS. Now he’s all concerned my repo is too complex because he can’t deploy a static website 🙁

He didn’t ask me how it gets deployed nor did he listen when I said “node is NOT THE BACKEND we have .NET core for that”.🤦‍♂️

I’m gonna spend a week writing documentation at 5th grade level and hand holding him so he understands how this code works because he’s going to be the one maintaining it.

-Friday
Me: *pushes fix for an issue in app*

-Tuesday, the next week
Colleague: "Hey, dude, fid you fix that issue?"
Me: "Yeah, it's available since Friday morning"
Colleague: *e-mails me screenshot with the issue still present*
Me: "That's odd, let me check that on your machine"
Me: *opens the app on his machine, the issue really is there, starting to freak out that I messed up the repo*
Me: "Why the hell would that not work... wait a sec, lemme check something.."
Me: *checks the app version and discovers that it's from 2 months ago*
Me (turns on colleague): "I guess, you should update it to see the newest functionality"
Me: *goes to the toilet, locks himself up, cries*

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

I got the task to set up an NAS, because "server has too high maintenance costs".
I built two databases for this company and the big boss loved my work. (spoiler:not because my work was outstanding but because I, as a student, am cheap and willing to learn).
And now? Reality hit me for good. I looked for a enterprise worthy NAS solution, sent them the details, they bought it and now it's 00:00 in Germany and I'm sitting in the empty hall, trying to configure the storage to work like they want it. On a friday. Alone. As the only member of the IT-team. With way to much responsibility.

So... Yea, fuck you for good. I hope your backup gets an disk error at the same moment i quit. (but first gimme mah monney)

!dev sucks++
Soo, my GF who I moved to Germany for wrote that we needed to talk on Friday (today is Monday).
I was away for the weekend, and yester I asked what I could expect when I got home.
She wrote that we could hug, but not kiss...
One short phonecall later, she had broken up...

So now I will have to figure out what I will do... I don't have a home anymore (moved into her apartment), my job sucks, so nothing left...

Hold me

So, I'm the only iOS developer in the company working on this stupid app which is never going to succeed because the client idea is just plain stupid. Anyway, 6 months developing this crap, countless iterations, trillions of so-called retard "features", and now that we are almost there to go into production my PM decides it's a great moment to document every aspect of what was done and asks me to do it. Now I have 3 documents to write and around 80 bugs to review before Friday. Stupid me for thinking he didn't waste 6 months doing absolutely nothing while I was working 12 hrs a day to meet deadlines.

Finally finished the screwdriver followup ticket. I think.

I spent almost two full days (14 hours) on a seemingly simple bug on Friday, and then another four hours yesterday. Worse yet: I can’t test this locally due to how Apple notifications work, so I can only debug this on one particular server that lives outside of our VPN — which is ofc in high demand. And the servers are unreliable, often have incorrect configuration, missing data, random 504s, and ssh likes to disconnect. Especially while running setup scripts, hence the above. So it’s difficult to know if things are failing because there’s a bug or the server is just a piece of shit, or just doesn’t like you that day.

But the worst fucking part of all? The bug appeared different on Monday than it did on Friday. Like, significantly different.

On Friday, a particular event killed all notifications for all subsequent events thereafter, even unrelated ones, and nothing would cause them to work again. This had me diving through the bowels of several systems, scouring the application logs, replicating the issue across multiple devices, etc. I verified the exact same behavior several times over, and it made absolutely no sense. I wrote specs to verify the screwdriver code worked as expected, and it always did. But an integration test that used consumer-facing controller actions exhibited the behavior, so it wasn’t in my code.

On Monday while someone else was watching: That particular event killed all notifications but ONLY FOR RELATED EVENTS, AND THEY RESUMED AFTER ANOTHER EVENT. All other events and their notifications worked perfectly.

AKL;SJF;LSF

I think I fixed it — waiting on verification — and if it is indeed fixed, it was because two fucking push event records were treated as unique and silently failing to save, run callbacks, etc.

BUT THIS DOESN’T MATCH WHAT I VERIFIED MULTIPLE TIMES! ASDFJ;AKLSDF

I’m so fucking done with this bs.

*My friend was piling up her food in a bbq place*

Me: What are you doing?
Her: I'm trying to beat my old stacking record.
Me: Be careful not to get a stack overflow!

. . .I'll see myself out.

* Yesterday:*
PM: Yes, so, could you please do those changes on this page tomorrow by 3 pm and push to prod?
Me: Yeah sure! Noted :) (task is to "untick" a checkbox in a page's settings on our CMS)

* the next day -- 11 am *
PM: erm yes so please can you do the changes I told you about, it's getting urgent and you didn't start it already and it stresses the hell out of me because today is friday and it needs to be up and running fine for Monday 12pm and you don't work on weekend so I'd like yo-
Me:

So this is what happened!
It was a rainy Friday, I was asked to add a quick bug fix to a js application, I spent my Friday coding, testing ..., baam the patch is ready ... I wrote a nice commit message explains the problem and the fix but I didn't push the code.

On Monday the fuckin code disappeared, no commit no code no nothing no trace ... To be honest I don't know what happened. I rewrote everything on that Money morning (you can only imagine how pest I was)

I use vim with tmux.
I have done everything I could to figure out what happened to that commit, I even doubted If had did wrote the fix that Friday, but it's not possible to forget few hours of a day
I checked my commit history on the different branches i did everything

No trace ...
Conclusion
My machine is hunted ...
Or I have multiple personalities and one of them is a programmer and he is fucking with me

Microsoft sent me this on Friday... So i keep reading people complaining about the update and visual studio sucking dick... Me? Ahhaha I don't give a Shiiiiii-et!!! Bring me moar swaaagggggg!!! Hahaha whoooo

potential client, wondering why i don't answer any of his messages or calls: "I hope I haven't done anything wrong!?"

yeah dude, continually calling me MULTIPLE times after 5PM on friday (second friday in a row) is one way to "do something wrong"

these "business" types know no bounds

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Had to program an entire ecommerce site for both a city soccer league and baseball league. Around 50 teams each. No planning or anything beforehand. They gave me around 4 days to complete the project. Once everything was squared away, of course they complained and said that half of the teams were wrong. So I had to stay until around 11 pm in the office fixing everything that Friday night. Of course everyone said it was my fault. I blame it on the lack of planning.

A coworker asked me to give him a hand on a project last thursday at around 8:00pm, by Friday noon I had most of it complete. Then turn the code back to him. Then somehow , it got placed on me during the weekend....20 mins before leaving to San antonio to be with my sister while my niece was born. Yeah...no..sorry...guess who enjoyed SA this weekend? This guy. Past experiences have shown me that one should not sacrifice personal time for company bs. Specially here in south texas where the majority of employers are from Mexico. In Mexico, there is no worker appreciation culture, going above and beyond the line of duty to accomplish tasks is not met with any sort of consideration. So nope nope nope nope.

So I need to let off some steam, let me know if you think I need to calm down. Personally I'm just having a hard time understanding my team lead.

So I've been trying to update our codebase for the past two months so we run tests against the latest versions of each respective major browser. I've also been trying to cleanup our code and split it into logical modules.

Need I add, according to Bitbucket, I've written over 80% of our code on our 4 projects with 4 team members including myself.

He's out for a week, so I decide it's fine time to get some work done -- which is ridiculous in itself. I finish, add unit tests for crap I missed because he kept shutting down my PRs for shit he couldn't understand.

He tells me on Friday, when he got back, that he'll be declining my pull requests because my code is too complex -- my team lead -- thinks list comprehension and OOP in Python is too complex. Doesn't understand why we need to have pep8 lint tests, or why we can't just export one giant monolithic client package with over 3k lines of code.

Is it worth arguing or should I just let my department head know I can't work on this team anymore? He won't get talked to or fired, he's been at my company for 6 years and he's in the inner circle.

Had a miserable evening yesterday. Me and my gf planned going out around 9pm to this movie with 2 other couples. Movie was kinda okay and we finished around midnight and went over to our apartment for drinks. We had lots of snacks and drinks ready, other couples brought some drinks.

Evening was kinda weird, guests were mainly just ranting about their work and household life and 2 hours in they started asking each other wether they should go home. In the end they left around 3am. I felt kinda defeated: some effort went into planning everything, and in the end I didnt feel much of a connection to them.

Maybe everyone was tired after a workday + late movie + drinks after the movie. But idk I expected more from people in late 20s. When planning we had two options: meeting on saturday or friday and they chose friday.

Anyways I guess either we are getting older or we just need to meet less often and more early in order not to run out of energy and stuff to talk about.

Well i was between jobs at the time, looking for something, anything to fill in the black hole being created in my wallet.

I applied online though this company’s website and within 20 minutes was on a phone interview setting up a face to face, this was Monday afternoon.

I went in on the Wednesday morning with the manager, no cv, no resume, no examples of work, we talked, did a couple of brain teaser questions and Friday morning I had the job 😂

I have never put so little effort into getting a job before but it was all a sham, the workload and requirements this job constantly sets out to kill me with are godly.

3 years later I’m still alive ( somehow ), and no blood has been shed.... yet.

Agreed on an offer from company X... Told them I'd sign the contract on my first working day, still a week away.

The offer had a lower salary than my previous job, I needed to relocate, and travel costs were not covered. It was a step back for me but I really needed a new job.

After the weekend I got an invitation for another interview... All went well and the perks were better than the offer made by company X.

Next day I had the second interview and they were very excited and offered me a contract.

Contract came in on friday, signed it and called company X that I'd like to reject the position after reconsidering my options...

Boy were they pissed off 😂

The story of how I got my dream job.

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

--A few weeks pass--

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

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

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

--D-day--

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

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

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

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

--Two days later--

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

--A few months later--

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

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

PM: "Please try to prioritize this request that we made last Friday at 5pm over all your other high priority stuff we know you're busy and we should have requested this 3 months ago... but now we need to deliver next week and well we need it"

5 minutes later "When can you deliver that?"
Another 5 minutes later "Sorry can you give me that delivery date? We REALLY need it"

Well maybe if you leave me in peace and I can concentrate on my job rather than answering silly requests I can make up an idea of how much time I need to deliver... but of course I'm just a code monkey, I press some randome keys and the magic happens.

As usual, Friday is boring day. I made a React component to show an exclamation mark base on absolute value from a list. Took me 15 mins. The rest of 1 hour we discussed where and what color should I use. 🤦‍♂️ Someone nearly flip the table...

I just made a quick throwaway business card to give with my resume during a job fair Friday at my college. Hopefully it helps me stand out a little bit more.

Sorry for the blurry photo. Took it on phone. I’m fixing spacing before I export and print

Not exactly a dev related rant but housing contract expired on 10th, booked a hotel for 2 days as flight to Bangkok on 12th.
I reach there to find it's been cancelled god knows why and didn't think it'd be nice to fuckin mail me about it.
Ended up in a shared room thing coz outside is -8c. Last time I ate was Friday night (today is Sunday evening) last time I had water was yesterday noon, and I've slept without a break for 27 hours.
Wifi they provided doesn't work btw so thank you netgear-ap for your unprotected WiFi.
Flight in 17 hours now. I can bear with it. Wish me luck~

I never ever give out my cell # to ppl at work. If they need to speak with me, I provide them my work # only.

Two weeks ago, went to a customer site. For ONE minute, I had an email on the screen that had my personal cell #.

Last Tuesday - out walking dog: call from customer to personal cell.

Last Thursday - getting ready for work, brushing teeth: call from customer to personal cell.

Last Friday - grabbing lunch: call from customer to personal cell.

Yesterday - in a meeting: call from customer to personal cell.

I'm gonna cry 😢

First company I worked for, overall it was a good experience, but at one point they promoted a consultant to project manager, and their planning skills were about as good as their people skills, which is to say, appalling.

We had a project update for a huge client, that required, for political BS reasons, that most of the team spend several weeks on-site, 300km away from home.
Go-live was approaching, and the plan was: migration starts Friday night, shortly after midnight (so actually, Saturday) once the client’s IT confirms DB is backed up. Expected duration: 5 hours.

- So, you expect me to work from midnight to 5am on Saturday? And when do we start working on Friday?

- 9am, of course.

- 9am!? So you actually planned a 20 hour work day? (Note: legal maximum here is 10 hours in a day, 40 a week)

- And we have to be there on Saturday 1pm to recheck everything is running smooth.

wtaf were they thinking?

Something is really fucking wrong with people in my company. They fucking calling me after 5PM on Friday when the server is down. What part of my role you fuckers don't understand. I'm not a Network Engineer and I don't have fucking access to the fucking server.

Call the fucking Network Engineer. If his not picking up his phone then that's his fucking problem not mine.

(Bang the Table) Fuck this shit

As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.

So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.

I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.

What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.

So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.

We are all good now :)

Men in plaid: Look like programmers.

Me in plaid: Look like farmer.

I hate fashion. I hate picking out clothing. Where is my easy uniform-thats-not-actually-a-uniform? The men folk don't have to spend brain cells devoted to clothing, if they don't want, and still look sufficiently appropriate. Whereas I'm sitting here on a Friday night, wondering what precautions need to be made before washing a professional shirt which is for some reason bedecked with rhinestones.

Got demoted, got a pay raise and don't know how to feel about it. A story of how not to drink with your coworkers?

The story begins roughly 8-9 months ago. Me and this coworker (let's name him Tim) go out drinking after a Friday party at the office. We do some rounds and we're both smashed. Tim starts telling me how he's happy with life and that he's earning a nice salary right now. He told me his salary. It was the same as mine. Which was weird - He codes in a more hardcore languages than me and has almost double the time in the company as me. I think after some more drinking I've confessed that I make the same as him. This part is sort of a blur (drinking). I've gotten a pay raise(+30-40%) roughly a few months ago from that point backwards because another company gave be a much higher offer. The company I work for matched to keep me. Anyway, 3 months or so after the drinking,Tim is promoted to team lead, and me and a few other people are added to his team. Conversation slips and he told me his new salary - quite a bit more than me.I think it's safe to assume what happened.

The problem with that is that I was a team lead of 1 person (me) at that time, and I was managing my own time and my own tasks, was working with people individually. I was part of the weekly meetings with the CEO and other team leads. Being stripped of this title wasn't a problem at the beginning, as people still contacted me because of their problems, suggestions, whatever. A few more months pass (to now) and less and less people are contacting me - instead they are talking with Tim, and are asking of his opinion on tasks I should do, where he has no experience and roughly 0 lines in the programming language I code in. This is starting to piss me off.

There are a couple other things to take into consideration as well - The company is hiring a lot of people right now. The whole structure for team leads changed a bit, more team leads then ever right now and new roles added pretty fast.

I've gotten a pay raise a few weeks ago though(10%~).

I'm not sure on how to react to this. Should I comply and just keep on working on these tasks? Or should I still keep contacting people directly on their requests and talk to them directly, take credit for the projects I complete publicly and the stuff I do as I was previously doing? Part of me wants to reroute all of the stupids questions people have to Tim, as he is now responsible for these tasks and get this weight off my shoulders.

I'm starting to shift to learning a new programming language and thinking of jumping ship. Thoughts?

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

!rant

My love for Clojure is so deep that I have invested the whole company. Over the past months just everyone came up to me and asked me, if I may teach them some Clojure programming. With everyone I mean literally everyone working in this company - fellow programmers, the ladies from HR, the Sales Team and even the CEO.

So today I gave a two hour introduction to the whole team on how to Clojure (in absolute basic terms).

The team has just voted that we will do that every friday starting next week for the rest of the year.

If you have passion, show it.

Director of the company asked me to design an app that's near impossible on Tuesday. Explained to him the constraints of what he wanted, he told me to give him a low down of all the constrains by the end of the week. Gave him a a full report yesterday.

Calls me in today and tells me head office's CSO is coming next week Friday and he wants the app ready by then so he can show it to the CSO.

What the fuck. Guess I'll be spending nights late coding the impossible. (because my actual job at the company has nothing to do with his bloody app).

Communication is key, but when the communicator is flat out fucking ignored, what's the point.

This is what happened today in our dayli:

Lead: We need to profile our software

Me: You can use the chrome devtools as remote profiler, even on prod, or make HAR files for later inspection.

Lead: Yeah but no that’s just collecting data on every tick, we need something like “has been called x times”

Me: Yeah but you can filt -

Lead: Yeah no, so back when I wrote code in Delphi...

Me: *oh god no not this again*

Lead: ... We could have clicked a button in our IDE and it would wrap the function call with the API call to profile that function ...

Me, to the secret dev group in slack: doesn’t a simple method decorator and node performance api help with that?

The people in the group: We had this topic last Friday all day...

Me: oh well *get’s coffee and ignores lead*

We were forced to do a Friday deploy of a new project. I, smartly, decided to bring my laptop with me on a "couples date". I spent the entire evening trying to fix a screwed up deploy from a restaurant.

Wife was NOT happy.

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

New here, don't know the format, etc

Let me describe my Friday:
8:45 standup
By 9:30 I'm done following up with 3rd party platform vendor's jira, and curiously look into an issue related to app camera not working in development build (we aren't in production), fix it in 5 minutes and talk to the team of two other devs. Tell them I've submitted a fix, and QA is unblocked.

"Senior" software dev starts complaining about how "I've wasted my whole morning" because "I mean, come on" and is generally offended because "I've done their work."

After a real puzzling argument, I worked from home the rest of the day.

Where did I go wrong?

TLDR: Just had a "I am god" moment because something worked on the first try.

Been working on hooking into and modifying a plugin's central function and related output for almost two weeks now. The documentation is garbage and the source code is ... fine, I guess.

I had been working on getting the filter & display working on a form with sample data I'd put together. I finally got the desired result before I left on Friday, but had the sample selectors hardcoded in.

Within a couple of hours this morning, after fiddling around with pulling the needed data dynamically, I navigated to and checked out the function on the intended page for the very first time since starting the project and IT FUCKING WORKED RIGHT AWAY.

I let out a forceful "yussss" under my breath and stood up with my fists in the air. Nobody noticed. But at least I get to show my manager the fully functioning thing this afternoon instead of the hard-coded sample-only I had when he checked in with me this morning.

I loved my previous job. It paid shit but I learned so much. Starting from prototyping to production. DevOps, Development etc. I started a new job 1 year ago. It pays great but man, I only do “if-else” nothing else.

My old boss contacted me for some contract job because the dev that he hired after me, not only he didn’t do anything, but broke production and all other systems on a Friday before going on vacation. So the company went old school with excel spreadsheet to keep track of orders.

I accepted the contract job and man. I’ve learned so much these past 2 weeks, working only ~ 10 hrs / week.

*Assigns coworker as reviewer for a PR*
*Reviewer comments on something he thinks should be changed*
*Reviewer realizes I went home as it is Friday afternoon*
*Reviewer is super impatient, and chooses to push the change himself. He then accepts the PR (his own code) , merges, and makes a release*
*Team lead starts yelling since an obvious bug made it to prod - Literally white frontpage*
*Reviewer blames me, since the bug comes from my PR*

... Thanks, former employee. F*cking thanks. I know you got fired for being a d*ck, but I hope karma kicks you in the butt for the rest of your life..
And ps. to you: Don't blame coworkers when you can check the history.

F*ck some people..

So i just saw a post about not pushing to production on Friday's and that reminded me of something.

A team we are working with (we needed help on something so we got another company to send us a team and do it for us) recently push to production on a Friday at around 5pm.

We didn't know that they had done it until a shit ton of errors started happening and we had no idea why (it was working so far, none of us did anything, so what the fuck is going on).

To make things better, one of my colleagues tried calling them and they wouldn't answer the phone. They knew what they did, so they went home before we could notice it and we had to correct their mistake.

We had everyone calling us saying they had gotten an error, and they needed to get home but couldn't because of it (it messed up a process that only happens at the end of the day before people go home. I can explain more in the comments if anyone is confused, or just wants to know).

Eventually everything was solved, but that was a very stressful ending of the week.

So yeah, don't deploy on Friday's please and thank you

I am about to do the unthinkable.
I am going to a place no dev wants to go.
I am about to take an unhinged decision everyone would warn me against.
I am about to cause a change to my future, whether good or bad I guess I'll find out.

But what I do know, is YOLO.

I'm deploying to production on Friday just half an hour before I log off for the day and come back on Monday.

Wish me luck. I'm gonna need it.

I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.

This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.

However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.

I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.

Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.

My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.

From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.

To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.

There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.

Ganbarimasu.

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

Finished writing a microservice in NodeJS. Wrote tests, had clever optimisations, did profiling, the works. Lead dev says to me on a Friday evening to port my code to Java in 2 days. (Reason: to standardize everything) #FML

Is it weird that I avoid forced socializing in my office? On mondays in the mornings we have a breakfast where essentially people gather (its a small gathering with 3 founders 1 cto and 3 employees), they have some pastries and juice.

And then they are talking about some bullshit for one hour.

For me personally monday mornings are for coffee and contemplation. I dont want to listen how boring their weekend was and try to impress them with my boring weekend. All that interaction feels so fake shallow and politically correct.

Dont get me wrong I care about my colleagues and what goes on in their life, but this forced monday morning and forced friday afternoon 1 hour gatherings are sooo draining and useless for me. I feel that only couple people are actually open during them and others are never sharing about their life, so esentially that gathering becomes an interrogation of 2-3ppl and topic revolves about them.

Gosh its draining. Gonna “be late” tomorrow again bcs I dont care. I would rather come in and go straight to work.

Having a beer after working means 100 times for me than that shallow and pretentious forced socializing that these guys are pushing so hard. Almost feels like micromanagement on personal level.

(1st week Monday)
Went to a game programmer job interview, job description says most of unity related stuffs; create games in Unity, code in c#, work within Unity to build robust game systems etc.

Interviewer asked for my experience and portfolios, showed him. Then he asked me some questions about making interactable objects in a VR scene, then asked if I'm able to do a demo (on oculus rift) to prove him I can do it.
I don't have oculus rift, I'm allowed to go their office and use their rift for testing though.
Dateline = 2nd week Friday.

(2nd week Monday)
Showed him a demo scene in GearVR, he seems pretty satisfied.
He: I will get back to you next Monday. I'll wait for client's reply first.
Me: (smile and jokingly said) so...... If the client doesn't get back to you or doesn't want the project anymore, means I don't get the job?
He instantly replied: no (with a serious face)
Then said: You shouldn't reply with that "attitude", you should instead think of "is there any reason to hire you if client doesn't get back to me"
*backfired, but wtf?*
*insert meme here*
(Please comment, am I too rude? Or *unprofessional*, but it's just a joke ffs)

He also asked if I'm able to do it on rift since I made it on GearVR already.
I said yes, depends on the controller used.
(Any dev with common logic should understand it'll work too, with given SDK, even without, some hacks should do it, just a matter of time)
(He even told me he's a dev himself)
(Should I insert the meme here again?)

But he doesn't accept the answer. He wants me to give him a text (through WhatsApp), telling him *in a professional way* that I can do it.
*wtf*
*insert meme here*

(Last day of third week)
Needless to say, he didn't get back to me. Thought he promised he would.

Things to note:
Job description doesn't say anything about VR.
Spend a week of my time to do his demo without obligations.
Didn't get to ask much about his role and job scope either.

Well today I feel like shit so I called in sick. Found out the lead developer called in sick as well.

The thing is, there was something really important to be done today that he fucking new that if he was not to be there I was going to get shit from everyone. He is going through some shit right now and I get it, so I would normally cut him some slack.

But fuck man, at some point you got to man the fuck up and deal with your job, if anything do it for your fucking coworkers/friends. He fucking new that I was going to get a fuckload of bullshit over something that he takes care of.

Nevermind that there are only 2 fucking developers for the entire fucking campus(2 campuses actually) and we were told last friday that we were needed. Normally, one would put up with the bullshit and make a presence, but that one of us is always me. Today I said fuck it, its too cold, don't feel good and I don't want to take my daughter to the daycare.

Today I sit at home, go over my OS books, play Skyward Sword with my daughter, watch movies with her and I don't think about work for one second.

On another note, the reason why I need to go through my OS books is that a good portion of my masters degree(which I am to start on August) covers OS development, it seems that the entire curriculum will be C/C++ galore which makes me FUCKING STOKED! finally a break form web development that I can probably use to get me out of web development professionally as well.