TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.

<rant>
*Rules For Work*

1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.

2. If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.

3. Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.

4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.

5. If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.

6. Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.

7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.

8. If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.

9. If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.

10. Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.

11. Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.

12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.

13. Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.

</rant>

‎The mediocre internship starter pack

I was mediocre in school, you could say my average grade was C++.

VP: We're going to have HR join the call.
Me: Okay. *Shrug*
(HR Joins)
VP: I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go. I'll need you to return your laptop.
Me: Okay. *Shrug*
VP: ...
HR: ...
HR: Do you want to know why we're letting you go?
Me: Nah. Bye.

After five years of working in terrible conditions for terrible to mediocre people, I accepted losing my job without worry. In a way, I was thankful.

I wanted to quit so many times.

I'm much happier these days.

Everyone knows that coworker who just defies anything you say for no reason.

Me: "Ah, nice day today isn't it?"
CW: "Actually, today is historically mediocre compared to the rest of the days that have ever occurred."

Imagine trying to solve real problems with this dude.

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

Got a 2 level promotion today.. I am now an architect!

I worked in a BPO, throughout my engineering degree(yes I'm Indian), only to end up with mediocre grades. To think of it I gave up on this industry even before my first interview.. My friends forced me to the interview and made sure I sit through each round. Now I'm the fastest growing individual in an organization of 45000 people. Fuck!

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

A kid that went to my daughter's preschool class died (they are in the 3-4 years old range)

The parents still don't know what their kid died from some virus.

They said the kid became braindead so I'm guessing meningitis?

Meanwhile we're pretty scared, and unsure if we should keep sending our kid.

I'm very disappointed in the way the school handled this, like no quarantine, no fucking notice on our kid's book about how they're going to deal with this.

Fucking piece of shit school.

Everyone on the whatsapp group is sad, saying religious shit. Hello!!!! Can I know what this kid died from so my kids don't die too????

I feel sad for the parents and the kid but... everyone is reacting in a very stupid way to this.

Like no one's gonna even fucking ask if this kid went to class this week and potentially passed it to other kids?

Fuck this dumbass mediocre country.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

My company grows like crazy. We have more money than we could ever spend, no deadlines, super smart people (some coming from Google, Apple, FB etc), and all the perks one could wish for.

I'm sometimes feeling like I don't belong here, because I'm mediocre at best with everything I do. 😥

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

A guy who was supposedly my teacher , out of 3 hours every class wasted 2.5 hours talking and watching videos on YouTube, it was impossible that I depended on him to learn the web , if I had I would not be on Devrant today.

That shithead who is supposed the best spent a whole year teaching me less but sending me templates and links to study at home. The fact is I had already visited most of the content and was way more ahead in time than him. This dumbfuck was one of those morons who wasted my time more than his. His way of teaching included sending content and not really putting the effort to touch the details. For everything he used w3schools.

Now when I submitted projects and had developed them on material design, he said it's mediocre , you know why ?

Because apparently this moron likes to do everything custom and he doesn't like simple design. He wants 15 types of animations and movements on the screen for branded websites. And I am fucking sure has no idea about the importance of material design.

Arrogant dumbfuck is understatement. He needs to be fucked by a peacock to understand what simplicity is.

Rant=True

My sister who is quite a bit older finally realized that I can develop actually develop since releasing a phone game.

Obviously, she had to pitch her idea for an app. The idea was to be able to take a picture of food and have the program automatically recognize the food and ingredients and tell the amount of calories.

Does she think because I can develop on a mediocre level that I can make recognition software better than google?

Having to explain why I couldn't bc I sucked in comparison to large companies confused her.

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

Sometimes I really fucking hate this company

The code is an absolute shitshow filled with static classes, untestable and duplicate code, on top of that my boss doesn’t like open source

Yeah so i’m not allowed to use a mapping library or something because “Uhhh like uhh we don’t have a contract with the company so who knows what’ll happen when the maintainers leave the project”
I understand his reasoning but it’s an absolutely retarded reasoning especially considering most of the .NET platform is open source nowadays

Writing a webapp from scratch now as well and I HAVE to use vanilla javascript and AngularJS 1.5 even though all the developers here told me they would like to upgrade to Typescript and Angular 2+ but it’s never gonna happen I suppose

Oh and he doesn’t like TDD and our only product is SAAS so imagine the amount of bugs being pushed simply because we don’t have time to write tests or even manually test, let alone refactor our horseshit codebase

AND i have to pay for gas myself which takes 200€ out of my bank account a month just for driving to work whilst I’m only getting a mediocre pay

Have a job interview tomorrow and another one on tuesday

Story time!

I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.

We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.

No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...

One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.

So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.

So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.

This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:

"This space intentionally left blank."

When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.

Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.

It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...

So having gotten my hands on the books I need for the next semester I decided to go take a look at what's in them.

Now the first is mostly web stuff and the second is just about software design. It starts off with an introduction to HTML5, where they didn't really teach HTML5, more like they taught HTML3/4 but not in a way that was too dangerous. I can tolerate not having my semantic tags tbh. They also used spaces on both sides of the = for some reason.

Then a CSS chapter which was also surprisingly mediocre. They didn't use a dedicated CSS file, but I can live with that, for starters.

Then there were some surprisingly decent JS chapters. Although they did use newlines before their { kinda miffed me. There has also been a few developments since this books release, but tbh this isn't the worst case of outdatedness. (And at least they didn't use jquery when teaching JS)

Then a chapter on SQL which I ignored.

Then a chapter about PHP, and, uhm, when did this book get released? Well the ISBN is 978-0-13-215100-9 and using the power of Google we can reveal it was published in.. 2011..

I'm quite happy that I already know how to program

I've actually had mostly good instructors for CS. Or at least mediocre. The worst teacher I had was actually my Algebra II teacher in high school. She taught by reading, word for word, from our textbook. She would copy the example problems from that chapter onto the whiteboard. And then give us the rest of class to work on homework. She was basically a Text-to-Speech program for our textbook.

We all joked that she was drunk and the one locked cabinet in her classroom contained liquor. A year after I had her class she was fired. For drinking on the job. The joke turned out to be 100% true and they actually did find alcohol in the locked cabinet.

!dev
monthly mediocre life crisis checklist:

✅ boring job, no learning, taking away 8 hrs/ day

✅ wasting 4-5 hours doomscrolling

✅ being a mediocre Android developer in a shitty company not upgrading his skills

✅ trying to learn webdev from a paid course but not getting any progress there

✅ having 15 paid leaves but a shitty friend cicrle which isn't nterested in going out

✅ 0 solo travel with no knowledge in driving any vehicle

✅ no girlfriend/ lady friends to talk to

✅ porn and boring nature killing any signs of being interesting

✅ gaining fat and ugly body

✅ simping at the gym

✅ hateful parents quarreling with each other everyday

✅ having sad life with no mental peace

things going correct in life

⬜ getting salary on time, able to afford bread

⬜ still try to workout 5d/week

⬜ still try to make small web projects

For frigging fucks sake, I wanna smash some plates, trash the furniture, break some walls, get a tank and shoot stuff.

I'm so fucking angry.

And I dunno why.

Maybe I'm pregnant, dunno, but being emotional and angry isn't my forte.

Where's the shitty motherfugging off button and who wrote the manual for this mediocre piece of shit called soul?

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

Why is it that mediocre people are so loud mouthed.
some stupid wannabe fuck buys a sports car ranging around 100k, he will 3 stories of a week of that car.
Meanwhile the guy who has his own yatch and 12 properties doesn't say a word about it and appears lowkey
i find this fascinating af

Want to be likeable or get your way through people?

No need to sell ice cream, just validate those insecure souls.

Wide majority does not want their fragile bubble to be broken even if they are suffocating within.

All they seek is validation. That's fucking it. That's the secret.

If someone asks you for some opinion or support, most of the time they are just want to hear how great their mediocre thought process is.

Someone's lack of ability accept criticism and grow is the sole reason they are stuck in quicksand situation and only drowning further.

An unethical social skill but this will take you a long way and also help you stay sane from the insecure narcissistic scums by avoiding toxic interaction.

JUST VALIDATE THEM.

Their intent is great but if they are over saturating the market with mediocre developers then that is a bad thing.

The reason i say that is because they are often cheaper and more eager than skilled individuals that want the job done properly.

I feel like resigning from a company that i joined 3 weeks back.

I don't like to code in PHP and the manager wants to stick on to that , no new developers joining the company and php is one of the reason. The code is a mess. Every now and then some other team come running for a change like one button to do some shit and then for a fix after 15mins of release.

So many database operations are happening manually. No innovation in the team. Developers are very boring , women being senior developers and team leads brings stability but there is no innovation , excitement or any enthusiasm. All my team members are very happy doing mediocre shit. Manager talks about agile development and they are following that at a level where every half a day some requirement changes.

I m tired of being a developer that fixes the same mediocre shit.

Its too boring.

At 20 I thought my life would be an adventure. At 30 it seems like it's a rerun.

The reality is that life is full of grey areas, "good guys and bad guys" on all sides of most issues, and the story and excitement eventually end.

sometimes getting old feels like becoming comfortable with being numb and mediocre.

you are not the star at the center of your own story.

there is no story. there is only today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that for as long as they happen to go on.

I can see no greater meaning or purpose behind this circus.

people think in months, seasons, years. maybe some of you even have five year plans.

but for me, rome was yesterday. and every rome to come. thats how near it is. It is so close, it and so many times before and after it, I cannot explain the sensation.

and in the vast gulfs of time, I see the wars, the conflicts, the narratives, and they unfold like dust or scum swirling on a pond, mechanistic, telling stories about nothing, algae struggling over territory on a rock.

as clearly as day, I see it all.

I saw your birth, and I saw your death. Your pain, and your greatest joy. How is it possible to love a total stranger and know them intimately because of their shared humanity? And still.

And from afar, in the stillness, I can't help being detached from the world and its problems.
And when we die, it is as if the world dies with us. Because it is not the end of the world, but the death of our own.

Softly go mortals, gently to their gods, like flowers in the fading summer. Never grasping that the permanence of the true identity and the temporality of the spirit are as fundementally distinct as the permanence of say "the G note", against the brief sound it makes when touched.

Eh. forget it. Sentimentality is a curse sometimes.

The tale of the asinine Typescript framework guy continues:

>guy makes a framework
>promotes it
>people don't wanna use it because it's mediocre
>doesn't care, he still promotes it
>people started criticizing his framework
>won't listen
>calls his critics haters
>thinks PH tech guys are way behind the world
>says a lot of bad takes in tech himself
>such as NodeJS used as a front-end
>people tryna correct his bad takes
>calls them haters too
>people start complaining
>gets banned in many PH tech communities
>except one
>total windbag in there
>somebody calls him out, explains why they hate him
>he says his framework will be famous and we will all be eating dust
>heckler tells him he is not only the person in the open source community and tells him a famous Filipino open source contributor
>says he doesn't know this famous contributor and he doesn't care
>challenges heckler to confront him face to face
>heckler calls his bluff and gives a place and time to meet
>big guy agrees to meet
>people are clamoring for him to shut up
>admin tells him and the heckler to shut up
>big guy pushes it
>calls the admin (female) a puta (whore)
>gets banned
>goes on Facebook saying that his heckler will not show up in that place despite it being the favorite hangout place of the heckler since 2017
>that he is being banned because of haters
>people call him out on his Facebook posts and he takes them down
>people in the tech community started thrashing his Github with prank forks and PRs
>guy tries to shame them on Facebook
>gets rekt by tech people
>goes on Twitter saying that backward PH devs are oppressing him
>even tagging the famous devs

@marcusignacius I have lost total sympathy for this guy and his framework. Arrogant, petulant, childish, and uncharitable. honestly he brought this on himself.

Somebody honestly slap him this rant on Twitter pretty please.

Cheap fucks

The worst thing I've seen a developer do would be becoming a university teacher while not being able to understand simple OOP or good programming practices.

I can't think of a most harmful one, just mediocrity cultivating unknowingly mediocre devs.

The TA for my computing lab in uni consistently shows up 45 minutes late. I'm usually done in 20 because I use the rest of the time to work on the next lab.

He walks through the door, lets out the biggest sigh, sits down, sighs again, opens up his laptop, and sighs once more. When someone asks for help, he sighs so hard you can see his lungs shrivel up as he exhales, and then provides them with a pointless answer.

The best part about the cs department here is that when you join cs, you are given an account to use with the ubuntu machines in the computer labs. They send you the password over school email, and you can't change it on any system they provide.

React is just a mediocre ORM for DOM.

So part of my job is to watch movies.

Unreleased movies. Premier special movies. Restricted access movies. Special screening movies.

Fun part about being in a media tech company is you get amazing perks.

One of the product verticals we have, competes with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

So, we have to determine which movies to license and resell on our platform.

For which we have volunteer program where they assign us movies to watch. A couple of movies everyday. Folks have to submit their feedback on certain parameters and then the team evaluates and makes the decision.

As of last few weeks, Cannes 2022 was on and we had a lot of movies lined up. Got to watch some real good ones while some were mediocre.

Surely fun, don't get paid for it. Good perks. Loving it so far.

That the most important thing in any project is to first make sure YOU have understood what the customer/management wants and that THEY have understood what you are going to do.

Seen so many projects (other people's and my own) go down the drain because people had false expectations.

Also, good management is enormously important for any medium-sized endeavour. I cannot count how often I have seen mediocre to bad middle management screw things up, and devs pull off overnighters and 60+hours work weeks for this super-important project that then goes to the bin because "it turned out to be not so important in the end, sorry."

You’re not overly shy.
You’re not overly aggressive.
You’re not overly anything.

You’re just perfectly mediocre.

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

I want to be the laziest person in the world. So, I'm always creating automation scripts to make my work easier. But after 2+ years of doing automation, they seem mediocre. Anyone here can make ADVANCED automation scripts? (Using python or any other language)
If you have any open source automation project, please comment the link here. Want to take some inspiration. Thanks

The Cup Saga
My cause is valiant. My warrior's hearts were true... And quite frankly we are sorry if we have offended you.

Background: been missing my favourite cup at the office. I brought said cup from home like many of the devs do, we have our preferences you know? For 3 weeks I have been drinking mediocre coffee and the endless quest for my cup perused... I couldn't find it.. It was just missing.... Where could my trusty cup have gone... Its been with me since my second job in 2014, and its gotten me through so many late nights and early mornings, the reward of the perfect ratio... Turns out... Someone took it because... Well they liked it and habe been holding on to it ever since.... Why? No one really knows.. But I have my cup... And I intend to guard it... Since unlike the other cups it cannot be left in the cupboard.. It has to be defended.... Valiantly we recovered the cup... And tirelessly we will guard it now.. Sweet cup of mine...

You may be familiar with work philosophy known as "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work."

Or a favorite of mine "in this together" and passove aggressive work place signs about safety, inbetween being told to operate machines that have faulty safety mechanisms and almost took a guys forearm off last week, when the machine was supposed to be locked out.

Also dont let them blather on about being a "family", or any of the worse horseshit they spew.

I knew a women who would take those "hang in their" and other inspirational posters and burn cigarette holes in the eyes.

I didn't understand what her motive was then but now I know she was a revolultionary, a visionary even.

It's all lies. It's all "Human resources" department brand managament by neurotic executives and glorified coffee secretaries with 100k student debts for degrees in "humanities"--while lacking any humanity themselves, let alone brains or a soul.

And in between an army of overpaid middle and district managers, checking for the fifth time that day, if you have finished that tps report, or that ONE task you just started or finished. As if a little internal robot timer has told them, not that a task needs managed, but that the task, having been started and done, awaits their preternatural ability to know, and arrive 'just so', and justify (barely) the continued existence of their mediocre job and their mediocre lives.

And out of the woodwork of generations, like a horde of oblivious fuckwit melonheads, comes a tidal wave of these brush-mustached fucks, speaking in aphorisms and happy turns of phrase, while people increasingly dont show up to work be cause inflation has all but destroyed the future so many saved and worked for.

And the shelves gradually empty.

And the wheels grind slowly to a halt.

Because we will not accept the bullshit anymore about being in it together.

Not when a floor guy makes 15k a year, and a district manager makes 120k.

Raise your wages, or say good by.

We were never in this together.

PM: I’m not asking what you were doing, I’m asking what was done
me: losers are asking, champions go and do it. This is what I did. The only thing I hear from you is questions. Meanwhile leaders are always a part of the answer. With that loser mentality, you’re never gonna be an MVP.

I’m a neural network powered parrot with a supercar brain. No matter the business guru speak BS you throw my way, I’m gonna wipe the floor with you in your own game. You have no chance. You’re that mediocre type of person who buys a rolex, the same one Gary V has, with the hope it would fix your self-confidence. The only thing I see in your eyes is your shattered ego.

Rants about PHP being mediocre are based on version 5.6 and below. PHP 7 is different beast.

If you're finding your paid work boring & mediocre, then utilise the stability of your current job to be fussy over choosing your next one.

Shoot high, do research, apply only for places you think you'd genuinely enjoy working, and demand a good offer with any reasonable perks you choose.

You might take a few months to find somewhere, but you'll eventually land yourself somewhere where you really want to be.

I think the ship has sailed on starting learning JavaScript. There are just so many frameworks/tools/preprocessors/libraries. I wouldn't know where to start and it'll be years before I'll be better than mediocre.

I’m one of maybe the 10% of dev boot camp graduates that had a successful outcome. Most people think it’s as easy as just showing up, write mediocre code, get a certificate then you’re automatically an “engineer” with job offers being thrown at you. It’s not. I already had experience writing code throughout high school and took 2 years of cs classes at university before dropping out. TLDR; only worth it if you already have some technical knowledge or experience otherwise your just pissing away your money.

As a mediocre, how do you understand complex systems? How do you effectively read internal documents and designs so you can take out information for your particular use case?

I feel like my intelligence is less than average and I either deep dive too much or too shallow. I am slow and coming on to a decision about my use case after reading through is next to impossible for me but my teammates are fine with these.

o and btw, yesterday was my birthday lol.

realtalk: if you want me to feel special, dont fucking force me to be more social than on all the other days together, or i will rewrite the year without eightteenth february.

you fucking corksuckers, i dont want to go to that place my grandma (same bd as i) goes to to celebrate. fucking mediocre pizzaria isnt fucking worth it, so atleast give me a choose.
and on the very Least, could you please quiet up? its not by telling me ten times per hour to be more proactive at school that you will help me like school.

o and also FFS WHEN IM FUCKING SICK AND EVEN OFFERING TO GO TO THE DOC TO SEE, FUCKING DONH SEND ME TO SCHOOL ANYWAY, ESPECIALLY IF IT IS JUST BEFORE MY BIRTHDAY

(you just got an insight into my life. wanna see more? i dont think so)

"Most of the mediocre design today comes from designers who are faithfully doing as they were taught in school: they worship at the altar of the visual." - Michael Bierut

give mediocre server capacity... put multiple webapps and db on that.....exepct to run properly all the time......awesome expectations

When you have extensive hardware and software experience and thus end up with two totally disjoint mediocre resumes

Some projects are mediocre, and then some are stuxnet.

The company that I work for just opted for PHP in favor of Elixir, Node and Scala(Akka really) for building a high-concurrency system, because we have more people who work with PHP (mediocre skill really). How do we convince our team leads and higher-order beings by the hierarchy to try newer (or at least better suited) technologies? Good luck popening and pthreading stuff on this project I guess.

Damn, nespresso! As if your fucking webshop wasn't bad enough, don't bug me (haha) with useless mails AND JUST TEST YOUR SHIT BEFORE PRODUCTION!!! Seriously, thousands of customers pay lots and lots of money for mediocre coffee in aluminum capsules, so JUST HAVE THE DECENCY TO INVEST SOME BUCKS INTO THE CUSTOMER FACING APPS!!!

Let it be known that the smell of mediocre pizza and döner at the same time is something to marvel at. It really smells very good

Not a coworker, but at my college there's this 40+ year old dude that's trying to Get Back In the Industry and he's the most dual Condescending/Incompetent person in the entire Computer Science department. I appreciate his wanting to stay relevant, but he stops lectures every few minutes to try and explain something (usually inaccurately) before the professor does, and loudly critizes things that don't matter, and likes to try and give impromptu speeches in the library and talk to people when they're working. I've never met someone so mediocre and self-centered in my life.

Also, he spends a lot of time trying to talk with some of the younger women in the class and it's super Creepy. So there's the tea on that.

In a mediocre job since last 4 years with just a developer designation, but we simply use Java based tools and products to do most of our job. Need to study for a change in job.

Literally every morning:
"Let me see what to focus on: JavaScript/Java/C++/Python/Data science/ML/AI/NodeJS/...." The list goes on.

Every Evening:
"I need to focus on Data Structures and Algorithms. So let me stick to Java for now."

Next Day:
Back to the same routine.

2 months have passed and I have not seriously studied or concentrated on anything :(

Depressed.

Yesterday my friend called me programming Jesus for getting her code to work properly

She's started learning python. All I did was fix the indentation issues and explain that whitespace is finicky in python and send her a couple of article links about it. pretty boring of an issue

I'm kinda bored I wish someone had a more substantial issue for me to look at and have to actually learn something new to fix it

Considering finding a project on github to try and contribute to as a side project when I need a brake from my projects. But as a worse-than-mediocre college coder I'm intimidated to even try

I messed up . My testicle problem isn't going anywhere soon, and one ultrasound report already says could be a tumor. 2nd test will be done in 10 days, but if its a cancer, then my life just got officially reduced by 20 years and practically reduced to this year, coz fuck this life if I can't be normal.

I already
- haven't ever got love or chance to kiss a loved one,
-have a super beta personality and never got enough respect from anyone
- am not having any friends at current stage
- shifted from my native location and living in a new isolated place
- got ugly ass looks, height and weight to never feel happy

and now with a probable tumor coming which would lead to hair lossing chemo sesssions, ball removal surgery and followed by lifelong of infertility, I would prefer death over a meaningless loveless life

I am so devastated as to why i got into this state. nothing has been going good for lalst 2 years.
- i left my previous company which had a great culture, less work but asked for relocation . i joined this current company with horrible work culture, 3 days working and overload of stress
- I had fights with my friends and don't have any friends anymore
- i broke my arm this year.
- i caught terrible cough last year which took time but got better
- there have been constant bickering and fights among parents for 100s of reason . no more than 2 days goes by when any 2/3 people of our nucleolus family is not fighting
- and countless more shitty stuff

I was on a path to become a mediocre okayish guy. i was having a decent salary , learning new stuff everyday, fighting new task battles, becoming a beeter dev amd aiming to go for senior dev/TL role, buying car l, new home and planning for marriage, ...

but nope. God has some other plans.. some ugly and cruel plans, for the guys who don't even had the chance to live a villionous life.

I wonder how that guy from my scchool who used to date so many girls is doing now. God must be very angry with his Casanova behaviour. Oh wait, that asshole is earning 160k and married her gf from last 8 years!

i wonder how that gu from my homies is doing who used to hookup with random girls every weekend. Oh wait, he got promoted to TL and bought a new home!

I wonder how my friend who smokes 4 cigs a day and drinks beer every night is doing. Oh, he's going on international trips every month , earning 600k and have a clean medical record!

yepp such a great decision maker that guy on the top is . Let me connect with him soon and ask these questions , will let you know what he says. :/

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

God I can't wait to get a new phone.

Going from a shit phone to a mediocre phone to an older flagship and back to mediocre really shows how bad the mediocre one was.

Since my first one was shit, the mediocre was like "wow this is nice!"

Mediocre to (an older) flag ship was amazing, because it kinda felt like I was still using a relevant device and getting a nice experience.

Now I'm back to a mediocre phone and I must say, all the faults I didn't notice before the flagship are basically screaming at me now and every day I'm forced to use this phone makes me hate it even more.

"To attempt mastery of everything inevitably makes us mediocre in many areas. " - Simon Collison

Context: This team has been constantly behind on deliveries, ignoring advice from other teams or more experienced colleague, making mistake after mistake and now, just revealed they have major performance issues, as warned...

So, in the most recent Sprint review they were, once again, criticized for their bad approach and inability as a team to receive feedback and work on that feedback, resulting in mediocre development...

As I left the room I heard one of them say:
"We make this huge rocket that most wouldn't be capable of doing and they cry that it's blue and not green... Others make a ls on a command line and everybody applauds"

Now, this is for everyone to whom the shoe fits...

Listen here you little entitled snotty prick, where do you think you are!? Yes most should not make a rocket when the requirement was a bike! That's overengineering and besides that most of your decisions were arguably wrong!

I will never applaud you or anyone else for doing your fucking job and being mediocre about it... What we applaud is value added! Value to the project, to the process or to the team... Bring value and I will applaud, do your job and you get a salary. Be a snotty childish dipshit and you might find yourself forcefully searching for new professional challenge!

So a minute ago I deleted all my Spotify songs, because Spotify now calls them Favourites instead of just Songs. Fucking morons. I thought I had loads of mediocre music in my favourites, and because I don't use favourites, I thought: let me just remove all songs from it so I can start over.

Turns out: that's all the songs I've ever added to Spotify.

Once I realised what I had done, I quickly turned off internet to see if it hadn't synced yet, but of course: FML, it was published. I quickly turned off internet on my phone and opened Spotify: gone already (the bastard was open) before I could turn internet off.

So, my last hope: turn off internet at home, fire up my old Windows PC, open Spotify, put all songs in a playlist, turn on internet, let it sync (au revoir songs or 'favourites', hello new playlist), restore all the things!

Luckily, I booted that old PC (and Spotify boots automatically in the background) last week, so it should have all my songs (I didn't add any this week). I'll let you know if it worked.

And heads up: your songs are now gone, you now have 'favourites'. 🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️

Fuck you, UX ruiners at Spotifuck!

I absolutely love it when C# programmers who never learnt any language outside of their bubble discover C# is not the most feature up-to-date programming language. I am honestly annoyed by people who can read Java syntax but can't read ML syntax (because it is too 'clever' to be used in production). What a bunch of mediocre COBOL programmers!

rant or !rant
Hey ranters have you checked podcast of devRant on Youtube. It's great.
All dev of this great community please subscribe to devRantApp on YouTube and increase it's views. While I'm ranting about it has only 1.2k views and 51 likes. Please check that out.

@dfox and @trogus Just listened to a podcast of devRant featuring Andy Hunt "Author of the Pragmatic Programmer".
My favorite line he said is " In effort to evaluate betn mediocre programmer from great programmer certification available is pathetic, this is why Alien don't come to visit us anymore".
He also talks about RubberDuck and many more.

7th approved pull request in a few months as an intern :) I'm not sure if that's actually good but it feels good so fuck yeah

Good morning! Feeling mediocre today. Though I'd share.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

URG!

I cannot think about a title, so just story:
in my position as multi headed chimera one of my ongoing task is it to dedust old excel sheets, processes and other super inefficient relics that steal time. Mostly i solve those with some tiny vba scripts, bigger vba scripts or a tiny java applications. usually that takes a few hours or maybe two days, depending on what i think is necessary.

the current task at hand is for our (physical) production, work time is noted on a sheet of paper and later given to the production head. Who then proceeds to type it all in excel to do his thing. The guy is starved of time by a huuge margin.

So, crafty kangaroo that i am i think: a barcode scanner, some raspberry pis with touchscreens and some mediocre php/mysql/javascript will make our worries go away. of course this will be a longer task but there is no need to have it done immidiatly. So crafted a working prototype, presented it in the weekly company meeting and got it "greenlighted".

The other day our CEO-like guy was ranting that nothing in this company gets ever done and that people wasting their time with useless projects and named my project among them.

I dont get humans. First he gives thumbs up for this, knowing that it will probably take me 100 hours or so to create in a working manner but later he calls it "a waste of time?" I presented the use (reducing expensive mantime, paper waste and room for fudgery) and yet he calls it useless? (well, his point was that there are other problems (which are out of my reach anyway))

they guy normally is pretty nice and has an ear for problems, but when it comes to higher computer stuff (>excel) he really struggles.

:/

i really like my side project, gives me room to flex some muscles and test stuff. Also playing with raspberry pis on worktime.

On a sidenote, anyone ever tried raspi mesh networks and knows where i get working >10 inch capacitive touch screens?

So in the school we had to do the “court hearing” performance for the Civicis class.
Of course no one would write the script, so I sat down with my dad and wrote it (it was inspired by A War movie from 2016 [I think it was named also Krigen], really good movie). I actually still got the script on my Google Drive. Anyway, I wrote it, printed it 5 times and the next day I showed up. I gave them it, and one said “it sucks”. So I’ve replied “maybe you’ve should have done something instead of complaining now?”. He didn’t replied.

So anyway, the class began, our group was the last one. The others had really mediocre stories, so I was pretty confident. We sat down, I was the judge, we had a defender, accused, accuser and the witness.

I hope everyone knows how real court hearing looks like? There is lengthy beginning, overall it’s boring, and remember - the defender, accuser and judge read most part from their notes? Okay, note that.

So as we started, I started to speak the introduction monologue, and then all of the sudden, the teacher in the middle of me saying said “why is it so long?”. I’ve ignored that and continued. After like 50 seconds, she again stopped (not me this time) and said “why are you reading all of this?! You should have remember all of it!”. First of all, she didn’t said ANYTHING like that to other groups, second how come you remember such a long script (even tho we had a week to prepare it). At this point I have tighten my fist.
Anyway, we’ve continued. After like a minute or so this fucking bitch AGAIN stopped us and guess what she said...

“It bores me”

Well FUCK YOU then! Most of the court hearings are BORING. It’s not a fucking Hollywood!
Anyway, we’ve finished our performance, she gave us “3” grade (that is like in the middle). I was super pissed, and yeah...

tl;dr

Have this iOS maniac/UI guy/hustler at my office. (Refers to my first Rant,he's the fucker who always try to shove his iPhone to my face.) Hats off to him for knowing how to generate passive income and his hustling skill. But I hate that fucker. He always like to start a debate. He's always doing his sidejobs all the time. He sells staff online(even fidget spinner). He also does wedding photo shoots. Heard from a friend, he's a mediocre photographer but gets client by giving his potential clients lower prices than his competitors. He got a few connections and somehow always doing websites for his own client by going to codepen and copy pasting JavaScript from here and there. He doesn't know shit about programming. That fucker doesn't even know about closures. He literally doesn't know shit. Yet try to debate about with us regarding programming (wtf?) Always trying to get us to help him with his side paid jobs -when he encountered an error,he will immediately bug us- sometimes would interrupt us while we are busy with the company's stuff. If we don't help, he would slightly mock by saying things like "it's ok...I understand you guys are not that experienced yet..etc". The senior dev was pissed off the other day and emailed a super detailed complaint to the HR.
Note : He gets paid more by his photoshooting jobs on the weekend, he's only at this job for his future citizenship application. That fucker. He's the type of fucker that will definitely gets rich but gets hated by everyone.

Would you go back to a previous corp where the work is mediocre (but handleable) and the people/ benefits are awesome, or keep looking for a new job where you need to learn the climate again?

You are very unhappy at the current place.

Serious question guys.

How do you deal with stress of f-ing up at work?

I had to upgrade a whole postgresql stack today. Most of the upgrade went fine, but... Restoring a backup by pg_basebackup lead to an unusable database (would not replicate), had to apologize to the client and make last second modifications as disaster recovery, and all the while, ever since the DB didn't start up, to when I eventually went back to work and was no longer alone on the task, I was going through a crippling anxiety...

I... Love the job, but incidents like this... Make me doubt my future as anything more than a mediocre sysadmin...

Not entirely sure if it counts, but Postman.

Used to be a simple, yet efficient tool for integration testing. And nothing more. Now it's a bloated, convoluted resource eating piece of bling-bling that tries to do a shitload of stuff, but only does them in a mediocre way.

Meh, while I was typing this I realized what a comfortable life I lead if I complain about something like this. Oh, the perks of being a middle class white man working in the tech sector...

"I swear I'm not a potato! I'm actually a capable dev.." I just have some serious self doubt and much less self confidence after this past year and feeling super mediocre due to lack of experience... And now that someone stepped up to help, my brain is just mush and I'm not doing half of what I know I can.... This sucks... 😞. Hope I get over myself soon...

The only thing left worth chasing is money for me
I just don't fucking care about anything else
I used to feel lonely cause i've never had a girlfriend and i am turning 19 this week.

But something flipped in me yesterday and i was like fuck all this shit. I'll just get the money and end up dating the hottest girl in town 10 years from now after getting the money instead of chasing mediocre pussy or even mediocre friendships too where the friends end up betraying you eventually after using you

I worked at my previous job about 8 years (hired out of school) and wasn't actively looking for a new one; I had a lot of freedom and liked my boss and colleagues, but the pay was mediocre and I was under a lot of pressure because I was the sole architect, engineer, and programmer for a good number of important applications.

Anyway, my brother-in-law told me that his employer was looking for a developer and that previous candidates fell through, and that the pay was a lot more and they're good about raises (which was like pulling teeth at my then-current job) so I applied and went for an interview.

They basically gave me an offer on the spot and wanted me to start in 2 weeks. I told them that it would be hard since I'd basically be cutting my boss's Achilles by leaving so soon and suddenly (just hiring someone would take at least a month, not counting getting applicants), but they were adamant, as the position had been vacant for a few months at that point. I got them to agree to 3 weeks and pulled the trigger, but offered to help out in my old position for a few months cause we had a big project in progress I was leading.

So the new job is great: it's a much younger office and I'm having more fun and there's a lot less pressure. Meanwhile, at the old job, the project I was leading got scrapped and the asked me to do other odds and ends until, after screwing something up I basically told them I'm done. They got a new guy quickly due to a lucky turn of events, but he couldn't pick up where I left off on a lot of projects: they're going to rewrite one because of it. My one colleague still likes to point out that I left without them having knowledge of my code (besides that I always said I'd answer questions, plus it's been 6 months now and my code is all on a TFS instance they all have access to).

I still feel a bit guilty even though I have no reason to.

I'm thinking about what language to dive into next.
I already have a pretty good knowledge of Go and mediocre knowledge of C and Java.

So far I thought about...
1. CPP, as I need it for school and it runs on literally anything.
2. Rust, as is seems to spread and the combination of low-level, memory-safety and abstraction seems pretty appealing to me.
3. Kotlin, specifically kotlin-native, is it combines java-like high-level programming with native speed.
4. Nim, as it combines high-level techniques with c-like freedom.

What do you people recommended, or something completely else?

I was just thinking; Since now I am closer to graduating and I'll be joining the corporate industry. Which company is most preferable as a junior developer; What I mean is, would it be better to start working for a start-up company or go for a well known and established company?

because what I am thinking, with the start-up company there is more room for growth (position and experience), unlike the well-established company where you are given mediocre work (I think that's what they do anyway) since you are still new and coming straight out of university. I'd appreciate some advice and maybe some other people can benefit as well.

I was always somewhere in the range of not athletic enough to be a jock and not smart enough to be a geek during high school so it left me in a fun little purgatory between social groups. Ever since I was a kid though I saw my cousin make flash games for fun and thats where my interest in programming started but I never really did anything with it.

It wasn’t until I broke a bone during a football game and couldn’t play or workout for 8 months that I started jumping head first into programming and IT WENT DEEP. After tearing through and intro to java book I started reading and watching courses about data structures and learning how to make mediocre apps and games. It was terrible as any beginner usually is but god was it fun.

Then college came around and I decided to major in computer science, got myself a nice starting job at a typical big tech company with an actually decent team to work with and I still have the same love for it all since I started with it.

Terrible, bad, mediocre, good, great:

so, 60% of the people in the workforce aren’t even “good” at their job.

If you just better than the bottom 20%, you should be fine. Chin up!

I know I am merely a mediocre Programmer, but do you really have to sit right next to me, commenting on every single line I types?

I didn't realize how mediocre autocompletion for python on vscode was until I started writing typescript on it. I think I'm gonna give PyCharm a try

I wanna change my job. But since i am frigging underpaid ( almost 2 years exp in web dev) i need an increment before leaving the current mediocre company inorder to increase my Expected CTC for the new company. I need a plan for approaching the CEO.

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.

I will use whatever gets the most hate, religiously. You all hate Apple? I will use Apple everything. You hate JavaScript? I will write everything in JavaScript. You hate Safari? I will use Safari as my main browser.

As long as I'm the unique antithesis to your mediocre thesis, we get healthy synthesis, and the world remains balanced.

effin management always commiting something they didnt think through and now the team suffers the consequences of their stupid actions, one of them is that they fucking commited a night of development phase for a major code revision fuck that shit cause that major revision also came for their fucking lack of analysis and mediocre mindset during the requirements gathering phase fuck that

I think it would be nice to see less contracts with those companies which only have in mind barebones training and profit. That kind of relationship between institutions drops the standards and it's expensive af. Those who sells cheap computers and bad software and charges more than ten time their value, those with enough power and influence to bend every single rule...

That kind of companies shapes the industry according to their needs, and will never give a shit about anything but the next semester. They teach you to be just a bit more than a user, they charge you like if they were really teaching science.
You end up full of debt, self taught on the technologies that matters, and accepting jobs on projects as outdated and mediocre as the "educational plans" you paid thousands for. And all that just to get a piece of paper signed by a stranger who doesn't care about you, and enjoyed by a corporation which wouldn't even consider to hire you because they know what they sold to the education department.
Fuck this, today I hate it all.

You get my best work with snarky, asshole broseph, or you get whatever I can shit out with medicated, socially-acceptable broseph. I could probably give them a better choice, but I have no interest in trying. My absence is their loss. I'm no Steve Jobs. I'm mediocre as fuck, but I'm willing to learn new things and I dive into that shit as hardcore as I can... I don't fucking know anymore.. 😔 It'll probably be better when I sober up I guess

To ship a package of two USB cables from one US city to another. What could be easier for a large company? Well, hold on a little.

I ordered two fucking cables from fucking Nomad at 15TH OF FUCKING JULY, and they are still not shipped. Here's how their customer support works: you send them an email, they reply in like a day or two, and that's it, that email thread is abandoned. They won't visit it again. You should write a whole new message where you say "hey, the previous time you said me X, so I want you to do Y then", and the message title should be different, otherwise they'll ignore it.

My roof is under construction now. When it was raining and there was a rain both inside and outside my apartment, I filmed it and an article about the situation was in my local newspaper in like 20 minutes. Russian government organizations are notorious for ignoring people's requests, shutting down their telephones and doing other shit like that, but in one day I managed to collect the foundation of overhaul, my utilities provider, the foreman of the organization responsible for roof repair, his supervisor and the actual guy that did that job. That same day, they all was at my doorstep, collecting the evidence, signing papers, apologizing, threatening to sue each other and collectively signing a document that states that they owe me either a full financial compensation or an overhaul. I managed to do it in the country where you throw an empty plastic cup at a cop and go to jail for it for five years.

Nomad, tell me, what exactly is stopping me from going full Jackson Pollock with a .45 on your company all over the social media (props to @SortOfTested)? You think I can't handle a mediocre iPhone case manufacturer?

Think again.

That I learned Java.
Got lots of work but nothing to be proud of.
Always has to clean up after mediocre fdevelopers.

Seems like there's no perfect balance at work, good at what you're doing? Take that promotion, also now you handle this and that!

Mediocre little shit? uhhh we won't promote him/her but whatever they do something at least.

Man I love my job and my company but fucking hell it seems like people never stop demanding shit from you and when you tell them no they judge you and call you names, like seriously wtf? is there no fucking thing called balance?

It's been a good month where honestly I had nothing to rant about. Pretty much doing my own project setting up ELK.

But last few days I had to return to the reality called teammates....

It where it ok... I mentored one of them, then did the code review yesterday

And that's when the shit hit the fan.

I told them to do X but then they did Y instead thinking that they were smart.

In hindsight they seem to have no idea wtf they were doing, inexperienced and couldn't even use console.log and JSON.stringify to debug object states...

Which course now reminded what's wrong with this team, you got people jumping around stacks and projects so they're all mediocre on all of them. Rather than having specific people being good at one of them (aka more experienced than a noob).

And if course this morning, manager asked me to look into something on a program I haven't support in a while (there are a free people that are more experienced and know the current state better). And he said this is quick and urgent... And actually when he said that I'm like uh.... don't think so....

And last thing is we had to rerun a report in production so needed the shipper ten to do it. Asked them look yesterday, users were waiting.

Today... Still not done. And well I actually can run the report myself locally.. takes 5mins but in production they need to reload the data but that should take at most 20mins... Either way... Nothing was done.

Oh and I just remembered I raised a request to it SA group to have some not script installed... That not done either.

And this is why relying on others it at least these people is a bad idea..... Unless your are capable of firing them...

I was originally employed as a Full Stack Python Developer. But this year so far, I only did operations. Now I also got a project to host the legacy Python 2.7 Plone/Zope applications of another company entirely on our infrastructure. This means, that I'll do hardly anything else from now on, i.e. no programming. It was already decided that we'll do the project, and it landed on my desk when everything was fixed.

So I'll quit my job to build my own company with some friends, but I can only leave after a two month notice period. So I have to do the project anyway, for which I feel absolutely zero motivation.

I wanted to become a good programmer, but in my last two jobs I just was a mediocre Ops guy. This is because most other programmers would make even worse Ops guys then me.

ewh, that moment when you make a mediocre track but spotify lowers it’s quality so it sounds bad now.

Having a hard time deciphering if I just happen to encounter a lot of really smart people in my day to day life or if I'm just a mediocre developer. It'd be cool if I was really "passionate" about CS, but in all honesty it's just to pay the bills. I don't hate it, I like feeling like I know stuff and being techy, but it's not my dream to sit crouched infront of a screen and do logic puzzles all day either. I do envy people that turned their passions into profit. I wasn't comfortable taking the risk with that though, so now I feel like I'm just kinda stuck in between a mediocre developer and a person who eats / sleeps / breathes CS knowledge. It's not the worst place to be but it is a little disappointing sometimes. I just hope I start making enough money soon to really afford the things in life I am passionate about.

Debugging is fine, totally part of the job!

Constantly fixing sh1t and new reports of another pile of sh1t coming every day like somebody is throwing them with shovels at us just to open the codebase that is written by the folks who aren't here anymore with some list of obscure libraries that is last maintained about 5 y ago is not ok.

It is not buggy codebase it is actually coddy bugbase!

I tried to be vocal several times to change technology to more suitable one, to make some improvements and to remove code smells(there is a ton of it, smells like organic garbage dumpster with rotten eggs) but "everything works" and there is no real "value for the customers" in that(fixing, refactoring etc.)!!!

Yea it works with sh1t ton of bugs reported every week. Nobody gives a shit, just contempt with their mediocre lives solving bug at the time while i feel like I'm wasting my time and talent on wrong people and fixing other's shit.

That is what happens when prototype becomes product and ships to production because numbers, money and sh1t!

this is why we who care about our career can't have nice things! I am not god damn pest control, I am f*ckin developer.

If you think about the past; you will be depressed and achieve nothing

If you think about the present; you will be happy but stay mediocre

If you think about the future; you will be depressed and may achieve something

Which one do you choose?

I like docker. I think the technology is cool and I have a few ideas on how I can use it. But I sometimes think I'm too stupid to use it.

I'm currently trying to convert parts of my dev environment to use containers. But following tutorials on it confuses me and I get lost with it really quickly and get discouraged for a few days until I give it another try and fail again

Like fuck I already know I'm mediocre but this makes me feel like i should go into a manual labor field instead of software development

tldr; selenium-java (my newest learned tool) vs beautifulsoup4 (my most experience with) or scrapy(average experience, mediocre ability with). Which should I use if allowed to use any for web scrapeing assignment

We were explicitly told we can use anything we know from class or self study (slight bonus for self study implementations) for the group project, but would it be OK/fair for me to use beautifulsoup4 or scrapy to pull the data from the assigned site rather than the selenium-java we were taught in class

If I did use bs4 or scrapy my group wouldn't be able to edit if needed but the data collection is only a small (if immensely important) part of the assignment and I'd have the bs4 script done a lot quicker than with selenium which I have learned more recently (for class) and have less experience with

My curse.

Have a job. Job doesn't pay much. Another mediocre project opportunity appears. I take it. Later, a great project opportunity appears. I take that as well.

Rant "Crap, I don't have free time" around.
No thit Sherlock.

I am building a synth program for producing waveforms such as binaural. The programs I have used in the past have been mediocre.

In that project I am working on a realtime scope to visualize the waveforms. It is fun to learn how to streamline moving data between parts of the application. Right now it has a lot of unnecessary data copying going on, and resizing of vectors. So I am reading some books on high performance C++ to learn how to do this better. As part of this I am thinking about building a circular buffer so the vector is never resized and is always in contiguous memory.

Just plain fun!

[googling devRanters before wasting time with Google]
Any of you does know of a cooking app/service where you can input the food that you have, the tools that you have and get back the recipes ordered by, for example, time-to-cook, the cooking difficulty and tastiness (the last one defined as how much of flavoured is the final meal)?

Apparently the fact I like to study things outside what I do for a living is bad for recruiters.

"We selected a candidate which focuses only on the frontend."

Why is everyone so afraid about the fact people can do more than one thing? Is it the fact they'd realize they are mediocre af if they would have to admit specialization doesn't mean they should stop to be passionate about the rest of the world?

I didn't say stuff like: "I am a pro in every it field", I said: "While I am definitely stronger on the frontend, I have interest in both backend and frontend, because it allows me to better understand how systems work and it helps me understanding that sometimes what may seem easy to do for the other role may also come at a too big to handle performance cost."

I was evaluating a b2b enterprise software solution today. Mediocre except for their real-time analytic dashboard. They used Idashboards.com to analyze feed and display. Tableau is similar. Impressive.

"The next time you see a sixteen-color, blind-embossed, gold-stamped, die-cut, elaborately folded and bound job, printed on handmade paper, see if it isn’t a mediocre idea trying to pass for something else." - Milton Glaser

So, I really tried .. again ... to use intellij. And i simply really don't get it. Why do so many devs like it? For me it feels like swimming in the dark not knowing if my java code will actually build because there is no fucking actual build feedback provided in real time.
I can build the whole project and get a build log, a fucking text log! I want my eclipse problems view, that auto-updates with erronious code as I type ... as I FUCKING TYPE!
Ok so there are various "hacks" to enable auto-build, even while having a running debug session, (in the registry ..., remind me of old windows days *sigh*).
And still, all looks good and I start the program an baaammm, compile time errors on start What the actual fuck?
Also why the heck does it allow to setup/move/resize the panels when i resets them every fucking time I restart intellij???
The UI is so cluttered and illogical, like the debugging view that has three tool/tabbars on it's own, on various hierarchies, even a vertical one. It alls looks so ... in a lack of a better word I would say "hingspieben" [austrian for "puked out"]
The only real nice thing is the "settings sync" to github. Everything else is mediocre or even really really bad.
So intellij users, please tell me, what do you guys really like about it, that is so good that no other IDE has is?

I'm feeling guilty.
I've a lot of fun hearing the flautolence wich comes out from the mouth of my brain farters collegues in my university. I usually fake being a mediocre student who never worked nor programmed anything else except the stupid exercises related to the exams. Yesterday a collegue come out saying: WOAH, YOU'RE USING LINUX!
Good, nice deduction my dear Sherlock.
The best had to come.
The genius decided to mocks me up telling: YOU KNOW IF YOU TYPE sudo rm -rf / IN THE CMD YOU MAKE YOUR COMPUTER FASTER?
Before I processed that he's not serious i answered "no, rm just remov..." and I saw the beaten look in his eyes because the joke misersbly failed. So i proceeded: "hahaha, fun. Anyway i could rm -undo to fix the mess".
As soon i finished the sentence he ran on him laptop and boots up the VM to try...

One of the reasons why I wanted to become a software developer is because I see so many products or services taking the easy way out, at the cost of killing customer expectations. For example, I was told about JobTrack.io, which is supposed to help manage job searching by keeping track of applications and their statuses. But almost as quickly as I was told, my mind goes into automatic promise defense mode. And rightfully so, because the service turned out to be almost as monotaneous as the job search itself! Not as seamless as I'd need it to be to get started right away.

Now, maybe there's a slight chance I don't know wtf I'm talking about here. But, what's stopping this product from using an email client that runs server side, to interface with the user's main inbox, to run sentiment analysis on emails for detecting job application submissions? Such functionality would obviously need permission from the end user, so there are no surprises that some 3rd party app is sorta kinda monitoring your emails. And of course measures should be taken to avoid detecting anything beyond the contextual lines of: "Thank you for applying to so and so", or "We've recieved your application! Next steps".

Present those detections to the user to confirm. And do the same thing for rejections and offers. Shouldn't be that hard especially when most sites these days allow you to sign in with Google, and that Google marks these particular emails as "Important"; which further filters the detection process, and partially does JobTrack's job for them.

Honestly, I think the app has promise, and hope this is just a case of starting off small.

How long can I get by in the professional world and still be incredibly mediocre? Forever?

I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).

Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.

Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).

And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕

Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?

“Why would you ever pay for anything when there’s free ways to learn?”

- mediocre programmer who spent 9 hours a day for 7 years learning to code...

(Great advice!)