Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

A Developer is desperate: his java application servers are unresponsive, thousand of dead zombie threads are sucking all cpus, memory is leaking everywhere, garbage collector has gone crazy, the cluster sessions are fucked....

The Developer goes to the closest bridge, ties a stone to his neck and gets ready to jump.

Suddenly a bearded old man with a fiery look runs toward him, yelling:
- stop stop!!!! Your application is not scaling and misconfigured, your servers are melting, cpu usage is not sustainable anymore, but don't despair

The Developer, puzzled, looks at him:
-I've never seen you...how do you know...
- Hey, man, I'm the Devil. I know everything. All your problems are solved. I'll give you magic functions. They are called Lambda.
You'll never have to worry about your servers, scalability, security, configuration and shit.

The Developer seems astonished but relieved:
- Ok, sounds great! let's try it - suddenly suspicion creeps in - hmmmm but you are the Devil....so...you want something back, don't you?
(the Devil nods lightly with a diabolic smile)
- ...and...you want my soul, I guess...
- your soul??? come on!!! - the Devil burst in a laugh - we are in 2019. I don't care about your soul. I want your ass.
- What!???!!!?
- yes, I want to fuck your ass

The Developer, evaluates quickly the situation.
Few moments of pain or slight discomfort (?) in exchange for magic lambda. It could be worth. He accepts.

After a while of rough anal fucking, the devil asks
- Hey, how old are you anyway?
- 45, why?
- Oh jeeez...45!!!??? and you still believe in the devil?

My brain is melting.

6 hours straight of just Refactoring without a break.

Technical debt is real, it is a bitch, and so are clients to expect to 'see' changes every week.

Boss tells me we need to balance doing work on things the client can play with and the backend code that does it all... 😧ok....

'TODO: remove sample return and connect to backen' As far as the eye can see.

It's 35 degrees. Reviewing pull requests or finding a beer garden was the easiest decision of my career.

AHH! There's so many cool things to program and so many ideas! not enough time to learn. Right now I'm trying to create my first mobile game in Unity using C# and a note taking app for Android with Java, it's melting my head!

I know I was one at some point, but juniors can be so frustrating at times.

After some pairing for a while they're quick to adopt the "Dev" mindset and think as far as they need to...

... but with this latest batch... that day couldn't come sooner 🫠

Having to explain how exceptions work again is the last thing you wanna do under tight time constraints 🙃

!rant

I get asked about being able to hack stuff, like cracking wifi passwords. Mostly I just go along with them and make up some stuff about how you _could_ do it. And explain how it is done, throw in some "yeah its tough"s and words they wont understand. Yeah with a dictionary attack and a powerful CPU with many threads you can definitely do it! You should try it! I say. Convincing them they can. Ofcourse, download kain and abel and look for something like aircrackng on google.

They won't amount to much and probably won't even try it, but I have a laugh. Seeing the hope of hacking and cracking fade away as a child's ice cream melting on a hot summer day.

Hehe

After playing Life is strange for 3 days (with pauses ofc), I feel my brain melting :D
And as I wanted to search for smartphones for cheap prices, I saw this great offer...

melting points

My head is melting. Does anyone have a colleague who constantly complains about missing specs, documentation, project organization, bad processes and procedures? Everything needs to be planned. Not a single small code change can be done without reviewed details. 10min job becomes a week-long session of whining and dabbling.

You give the guy a small task and at the end of the day nothing is done. Just page after page of written documents and lists in Word and online notebooks. Version numbers, meaningless measurement results, latencies etc. And all you asked was "could you just fucking fix this one thing and quickly compile and check it". But no. There must be a review and at least 10 people need to be called into conference. Someone needs to approve everything just so that he can later move to blame to others. "Yeah I know it's not working but I showed you the code and you reviewed it!". Yes, you did, but other people have work of their own so sometimes you need to tie your own shoelaces.

And sometimes finally there's some work done. All indentations are shit. There’re code changes everywhere just because the guy didn't like the previous smaller, compact and logical code. The code doesn't even compile properly anymore. And if you complain, the reason is "there's no proper reviewed and stamped process description, so I cannot know if a variable is supposed to be 10 characters long. Besides 200 character long variable names are much more descriptive". For fucks sake.

Some coders should've gone to work in some tax office basement.

I am well done, burnt and carcinogenic. The constant pressure to always produce, always post a profit, always increase, always commit, always stand-up and succeed is fucking exhausting and ultimately and totally unsustainable.

There are never any fallow years anymore, or days of rest...our dirt is dying...and the earth is weary and worn out. Antartica is getting green...grrrr, and my head is melting too.

Why the fuck can't we slow down a little bit?

#hatehashtags C#needtheocean

// allow

My shower tap has two modes:
- Quark-melting relativistic beam of sizzling hot plasma
- Time-freezing liquid death from the cold heart of Dante’s hell

I have a new job in Spain. I'm from France.
France use AZERTY keyboards, Spain use QWERTY.
I feel like my brain is melting (+_+)

Let's see if my cover really stores heat...
I'm Melting in the shade :( can't work like this.
My nephew and I tryed my convencional milling machine, written half his name. I still got it

Funny thing, I'm noticing now... All the man from my direct family are crazy.
I was helping the mechanic yesterday, telling my adventures and he was always, lik he said father like sun.. The inventors...
Today I finally got my brother for an hour.. He is even crazyer then me, told me just a few of his diys and I'm like... Wow

These days now, my boss trusts me so much and takes my opinions and suggestions and goes ahead with those. Not to mention so lenient with me regarding work times since I had the baby. I’m melting thinking about her.

Ds (dipshits) keep calling my phone 6-8 times a day. Almost all automated calls.

One day AI will handle these robocallers automatically. And then it will just be GAN style robocallers vs robosecretaries training against each other to become better and better at fooling each other.

And then suddenly, one day: skynet.

With a neutral female voice.

Or maybe an Indian accent.

"Hel. Lol. m I k r O s o t tech surprott. We detect virus on ur peesee. You will be assimilated. Where joon connor?"

Like a possessed speak-n-spell melting to death in a dumpster fire.

And we'll have done it to ourselves.

When depression set in, I thought pain relief lied in getting duller. People I called “stupid” — who lived simple lives filled with alcohol and lack of any talent or purpose — weren't suffering. Better even, they denied the existence of depression.

My “wish” was granted when they prescribed cariprazine. In two months, I lost my ability to read, let alone code.

Before that, even depressed, writing a simple email/password auth was a matter of ten minutes in any of the languages I knew how to do web in (JS, Python, Clojure, PHP). But on cariprazine, I remember myself not quite getting what an HTML form was.

Tell you what… you should never wish to become dumber. When I was smart and depressed, the pain was real, but it felt like… let's say a breakup. When I was dumb and depressed, it felt like being raped with a red-hot soldering iron. Or like being skinned alive. Or like when 100% of your skin is a third-degree burn. The pain weren't listening to me, as my mouth was glued shut as if I was Keanu in the first Matrix movie. You can't say, do or think anything, at all, to ease your pain somehow. You can't even realize that just DMing or calling someone is probably a good idea.

Instead of you vs. despair situation from when you were smart, now it's just despair that is actively melting you, so you two become one. Even time loses its meaning. There is nothing out there but suffering.

If you're smart(er than I was at my lowest), DO cherish it. Losing that will spell disaster. So stay away from substances that can facilitate that loss.

Starting to get really hyped about how my book is progressing, thinking about starting to put some promotional items and desk tat together...

Oh lord I'm a better author than a dev, someone slap me...

(I'm slightly terrified that it might actually get finished and may have fans so my mind is sort of melting into sludge and I hide it behind excitement)

Only got 2h of sleep instead of my usual 5h. I'm a walking corpse and there are still 7h left until I can go home 😴

Stupid, calming water-flow sounds are going to bring me down

It's not the "age of AI" you dissecated nutsack munching buffoon, you could lick and suckle my delicious tits with that grandiose old tongue you have, if only it wasn't so profoundly infected with feces of every consistency and color.

Your word, for the two shits it's worth, is still better spent elsewhere than promoting falsehood, giving importance to that which has none, or spreading the belief that a demonstrably unscalable approach still has, somehow, room to grow. It's no fucking s*ndrome but full on imp*sterhood, truly a grand fellowship of pauseless jackoffs.

This is it -- a glorified, disobedient, largely unpredictable autocomplete. A probabilistic bullshit machine. It wouldn't be able to replace you, if only you weren't so fucking stupid.

And yes, I *am* contradicting myself by addressing the incredibly cost inefficient overclocked melting minerstack in the room, but I can hardly make the point without doing it, so shush.

Back to the stone age with this shit. Now pass the fucking joint.

I have so much shit I want/need to learn. I've started learning C while picking JavaScript back up, I'm learning basic electronics but I have a lot planned for that. Not even related but I want to fucking Cook, yeah i said it i wanna cook but why does that make me feel like i should just stop and go back to programming. Idk I just spill shit in these rants. Also wanna learn to speak another langauge but can't find the time, and I have college and dude I'm trying and trying and I need someone to appreciate something I do before I flip or before C destroys my entire being from being the weirdest yet interesting yet fucking brain melting. And fuck JS I Love it but sometimes it's a twat let's be honest

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

So. Here's a cooking thread.

Please behave nicely, get ya favorite recipes out or your "my brain is melting and I randomly chop sueyed hot cooked this stuff together and it was awesome" creations.

Boss assigned code cleanup to me. We put up eslint and fixed a couple of issues, all nice and cute. Now, he wants me to find any redundant code and remove it (redundant fields in config objects). Sounds doable right?

WRONG!

Because we're writing fucking ExtJS. This abomination that is still called a "web framework" in lieu of its former glory supports no typescript, no code intel, no JSDoc, no nothing. Absolutely heinous and deplorable. Add insult to injury, our code on it is even worse. NO single component reused except from a couple REALLY fucking badly written ones, because every component queries for shit outside its jurisdiction so it's all a dependency spaghetti. Everything else is just copy-paste. Barely anything works as intended anymore in this bloody joke of an app.

I tell him in a meeting, I can prepare an automated solution. Some script or something that runs on a file watcher. All nice and dandy. A weekend and a Monday later, I get tired and do something else to clear up my mind. Show him some progress in that other thing. He's like:

Boss: that's good and all but did you remove *insert misused config that got everywhere during copy paste* like I told you to?

Me: I'm still working on it. I switched cause I got tired a bit with the automation.

Boss: automation?

Me: We were talking about in the meeting. *Explains again*

Boss: That's not what we agreed upon

Mfw I've been rambling uselessly on the meeting about it just for you to put me down and make me remove all that copy pasted GUNK from the melting hot garbage that is our codebase BY HAND? All the 150 occurrences of it? What do you think I am, a fucking robot?

Found the sky melting while coming back from swimming​ practice.It was so awesome and I clicked this 😥

So yeah, my IDE is open and I'm just doing my daily rounds on SO when my rig suddenly feels like it's melting from playing Battlefield in 4K everything max. Chrome! Chrome! Chrome! It thinks were married, taking liberties with all my free real estate. You are out! Hey Firefox DE.

When the office is melting in the heat and it takes the air conditioners hours to cool the air to proper temperatures, then comes a scumbag colleague, who eats the smelliest food possible out there! Fuck you, man, fuck you!

"We're scanning the code at the office tonight.
We're looking for bugs to start up a fight.
There's a melting feeling in our brains.
But it's nothing new, you know it drives us insane."
Metallica - Build & Deploy

Do 9V Alkaline batterys explode when in 90 degrees?

Update- Battery casing is melting in room temp. When pulled out of the heater.

While the US is melting the fuck down around me...

Those in other countries, what is all this like to see?

I'm rather indifferent as the riots usually accomplish fuck all, just like peaceful protests, as they don't make higher-ups care at all, they're just annoying.

Been coding with python and like I mean I barely know any other language. So my school asked me if I wanted to go for an olympiad and i was like sure. Python is an accepted language but c++ is the recommended there so I go for the course offered by the organisers. On the schedule it was written that we were gonna learn the syntax of c++ on the first day. I go in, see everyone codng like mad and the organiser comes up to me and is like oh this is a pre course contest. MOREOVER, after the contest which I fucked up because like I dont know c++ and the course was in c++, the trainer spends the entire break playing osu and afterwards during the actual lecture dives straight into vectors and stacks and my brain was melting. mfw he said "does everybody remember". I swear it was the worst course ever. Sorry for such an unorganised and long rant. Had a rough day

Weather forecast says it's gonna be 34 degrees Celsius this afternoon. Guess I'll be melting at work today.

BLAZING FAST

I never see this said with reference to a fucking hardware driver or a shit hot games engine, it's always used to persuade me to use some fucking frontend framework.

It's JS, running in a browser, polishing the turd of the clapped-out DOM - I don't EXPECT it to be fast. I just don't want it to go completely to fuck straight away. The bar is so low that the core of the Earth is melting it.

Woke up and got a fking fever out of nowhere. My vision delays when i turn my head while walking, feeling unstable physically, brain feels like its melting, headache, im hot and have high temperature, burning from inside and at one point i started hallucinating the more movement i made, literally saw someone walking in front of my bedroom while no one was there. And then started seeing circles triangles and square shapes in my vision but for a short period of time. I live with my parents

Wtf is this???? Did i experience mental burnout from excess stress and studying???

AHH!!! PM talk is melting my brain...nodes are...collapsing...

"We need to post-mortem our lessons learned and level set our expectations so we can define quick resolutions and set tollgate approvals, at a very high level."

# clear my head of beastly things
def cls():
print ('\n' * 666)
cls()

Well... I'm in apprenticeship, and the company I work for asked me to do insanely complicated algorithms about paid leaves and stuff (Oh and I'm in France so you get the mess about leaves). And I don't understand shit about that ! About TOIL ! I mean, I'm still in school goddammit ! Oh and I said to my boss : "Yeah, wow, that seems complicated to code" and he said : "Yup, have fun". So even him, knowing everything about that shit knows that it's hard af ! I'm currently dying of death and my brain is melting.

PS : Here's a rare gif of me reacting about what I need to code

Dependencies suck.

I wanted a ruby gem and needed an older version of ruby to run it. Fine, what's the best way to get multiple ruby versions on one system, apparently rvm.

Now I want rvm.

I can't have rvm without getting gnupg first though.

Before I can get gnupg I need brew.

Now I have brew setting my computer on fire compiling god knows what so it can get gnupg so I can get rvm so I can get the ruby version I want to get the gem I want!

It's been running for quite a while...

This isn't the first or last time that the convenience of packages and versions leads to a maze like trail of prerequisites you need to follow.

I'm sure there's some tool that would've helped with my problem, but the problem shouldn't be this bad to begin with!

I understand why it happens but it still sucks and it's a lot of wasted time.

Frankly I'm expecting some people will have gotten so used to this kind of insanity that they won't get why I'm renting about it, oh well, it made me feel better and gave me something to do while brew is melting my machine.

Does anyone feel like their boss is always scheming behind your back. They are changing the requirements and rejecting you without even reviewing your work and are too good to attend any meetings. They’re trying their best but wouldn’t ever give you credit when you are trying your best and getting good results. At what point does the micro management and fear of failure make it so you can’t even take the simplest feature without melting down?

Finance lady keeps turning the air conditioning off.
It's either sticky note on the controller or R&D vs. finance lady on an on/off battle...
What do you say?

If you’re an employee on-call over a weekend (specifically last weekend, new years) do you put it on your timesheet? What if nobody calls though? 16 hours of pay..?

Just asking because I was on call last weekend and then they got pissed I wouldn’t work again this weekend. I just wonder if they forgot or something?

Our product literally has been on fire, practically melting down, for a few years now apparently so that is why I am asking here.

I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.

I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.

Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...

Got a full stack job in a really large org. They write shit code and refuse to comment on code saying the code should explain itself.

And I’m like yeah but if you’re writing spaghetti code at least fucking comment why.

The new job’s pay is like 2x my old job so it’s really fucking good pay but my brain is melting from frustrations with these devs.

I would love to reschedule my whole life to live during the cool night time throughout the summer, but I can't because I don't live alone...
Guess I have to feel like garbage for the next few weeks...

We are practically having tropical weather as the snow is melting.