TL;DR: Clients are dumb.

Client IT Lead: "Your code isn't working on our website."

Me: "Because you didn't load our code into your website. Do that, and everything works."

CIL: <proposes terrible alternative>

M: "No fix on my end will matter if you don't load our code into your website."

CIL: <more disagreement>

M: "Let me discuss with my team and I'll get back to you."

... later that day, in a follow up meeting with client's team ...

M: "Load our code into your website as was initially intended and everything works fine."

CIL's Boss: "That makes complete sense, and I'm not sure why we weren't doing that from the beginning. Let's make that happen, CIL."

CIL: "Okay."

——

👨🏽‍💻🤷🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️

"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"

They're being marked as spam...

"oh damn, how can we fix that?"

You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.

"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"

Have you tried not spamming people?

"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"

No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.

"But we aren't spamming people!"

IT VS Marketing 100% of the time

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱

another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!

Thank god for backups 😓

Clients love to use the word "Broken" (or synonymous word).

Client: The program is broken. Fix it ASAP.

Me: Ok, give me some details so I can help you.

Client: No, fix it. *Becomes an ass*

Me: Alrighty then, let me sit here doing nothing for a couple of hours. Then say that I tested the code against your original request, and it's working as intended.

Client: Sounds good.

(Pretty sure that's how it went)

Dev: boss, there are some abnormalities and confusion in the client's specifications.

Boss: So?

Dev: Shouldn't we get clear about them and then start coding?

Boss: No need. We assume and code. Then show them to our clients and then ask for their opinions. We will change again according to their opinion.

Dev: ..

A few months later....

Dev: *seeing so many specifications change and realizing now have to refactor a lot of codes* , FML.

This is an old rant from over 10 years ago in my first job at 19. I was tasked with turning off one of our clients email because they had left the company. Easy enough, logged into cPanel, job done. Later that day I get a phone call from the clients company asking if there was a problem with the email. No I said, everything should be fine, I did remove a 'joe.bloggs@blah.com' email address as instructed because... *reading job bag*... they had left the company. The client then said, that's my email you've turned off and hung up. Turned out he had been fired and no one told him. I felt horrible. I will always remember that conversation 😓

Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.

Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.

We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.

Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?

Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.

All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.

I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.

Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.

Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.

---

I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.

The typical devRanter

1. Uses dark theme of IDE and devRant app
2. Hates his/her clients
3. Likes Arch based distros
4. Checks his/her ++'s count or notifications after publishing a rant
5. Hates facebook
6. Associate the morning with a cup of coffee
7. Can't do any job when there are no headphones
8. iPhone vs Android? - fuck, they both are good/bad
9. Every time googles git command to remove a local branch
10. The best VCS is git, but I never used any other VCS

I actually took the time to explain to a recruiter that java != JavaScript... He told me they were similar enough... I put it in terms he'd understand: "If you want to make money, you need to understand that they are not similar. If you keep saying they are and send your clients a dev with no java experience, you'll lose clients. if you send devs to a place that's looking for something they don't know, you'll lose devs. Your pitch reeks of desperation and you'll be out of the business within a year unless you actually start listening to the people who know the tech."

I almost felt bad, but... He kept pushing when I said no, haha.

Biggest scaling challenge?
The imaginary scaling issues from clients.

Client : How do you cope with data that's a billion times bigger than our current data set? Can you handle that? How much longer will it take to access some data then?

I could then give a speech about optimizing internal data structures and access algorithms that work with O(log n) complexity, but that wouldn't help, non-tech people will not understand that.
And telling someone, the system will be outdated and hopefully been replaced when that amount of data is reached, would be misinterpreted as "Our system can not handle it".

So the usual answer is: "No problem, our algorithms are optimized so they can handle any amount of data"

Me: you should not open that log file in excel its almost 700mb
Client: its okay, my computer has 4gb ram
Me: *looking at clients computer crashing*
Client: the file is broken!
Me: no, you just need to use a more memory efficient tool, like R, SAS, python, C#, or like anything else!

My very first meeting with a new client:

Client: We need to launch in 6 weeks. Do you think you can hit that deadline?

Me: Do you have a spec for what needs to be done?

Client: No we don't.

Me:

What an awful day :(

The server where I host my 4 clients websites crashed.

Unable to reboot from the console.

I contact the support. 15 minutes later: "we'll look at this"

No news for 1 week despite my messages.

Then... 1st ticket escalation... 2nd ticket escalation... 3rd ticket escalation...

Answer: "Sorry, your server is down and cannot be repaired."

Fuck.

I ask "is there any way to get my data back?". Answer: "No, because we would shutdown the whole bay and all our clients would be impacted".

Fuck.

I subscribe to another server, at another provider.

I look at my backups... shit, the last one is 4 month ago!!

I restore the first website: OK

I restore the second website: OK

I restore the third website: My new server is "too recent" and not compatible. with this old Wordpress. Fuck! I'll look at this later...

I restore the fourth website: database is empty!! What??? I look at the SQL backup for this site... it failed...

I lost ALL my 4th client data!!!

I'm sooooo piece of crap!

One of our clients deploy their own server app. So this happened after a prod deployment. (4am)

*Cellphone rings while sleeping*

Client : we need you on the conference call now. URGENT!

*Gets on conference call*
*Client explain the problem*
*Explaining to the client that the problem is in their side (https connection not working, either network or certificate problem)*
*Client doesn't believe it and pushes me for a fix that I have no control on*
*4 hours later in a heated conversation*

Client : ok problem is on our side. We used our SSL certificate from staging with production and thought it would work.

Me :

I designed a logo for a family member's business with the expectation that I would receive payment once the work was completed. I wasn't expecting a lot, I only really do freelance work for software but I know my way around Illustrator. I'm not one to charge family anywhere near full price and I felt no contract was needed. We were back and fourth for a little bit, getting the logo to his liking. Silly me during all of this didn't watermark any of the images I was sending (didn't think I'd have to, you know... Family) and a little while later he's gone and ordered shirts with the logo on it without paying or even contacting me. When I confronted him about it, he pulls out the whole "No contract was made" bullshit. It's ridiculous how arrogant people can be, I was asking for $50. I put a good 15 hours into it with all the alterations he wanted. 15 hours I could have spent on actual clients.

TLDR; Designed a logo for a family member without a contract, he decided not to pay.

client: the math on this investment calculator you made is wrong.

me: ok, how is it wrong?

client: one of our salesmen sais it not calculating correctly.

me: that's fine. i just need an example, or the corrected formula to use.

client: on this other website we put in the same information and it comes out different.

me: ok, let me investigate... this other site adds a fee every month so the output is different. If i turn that off the calculations are the same. would you like to add a monthly fee field?

clients: no, the calculator is working how we want then.

repeat 5 times at 3 month intervals.

client: the interest calculator is broken again. didn't we just fix it?

me: it was never broken. your people just can't math.

Just went skydiving. Realized I probably should have left behind all my clients' site admin passwords in case my chute didn't open. Turns out I'm still alive so no harm done.

That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

No matter how many times you test it.

It is destined to fail when you will show it to clients. 😫

'lashed out' to a client for the first time yesterday.

Clients have the habit to call after tickets and while its annoying, it's manageable if it happens *sometimes*

It was happening the entire fucking morning and when a client called for an update about a ticket for the second time, I couldn't help but sound frustrated.

"how far are you with the ticket?"
"i have other things to do as well, you know, you're not the only customer i have to help right now"
"i understand, do you possibly have an eta?"
"no. You're next in line, is that clear enough?"
"okay" *hangs up*

*crap*

He e-mailed me afterwards apologizing, that was nice.

I'm sorry sir 😥 nothing personal but it can become so fucking annoying sometimes.

YAAAAY IT'S FRIDAAAAAY.

At the end of the day it will be a beer and no annoying clients for a few days!

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

I thought there was no worse freelancer site than fiverr.

*insert "Boy you were wrong" here*

freelancer.com

No. Just No.

- Limited to 8 bids as a free account
- You get 1 bid back every 90 FUCKING HOURS
- CLIENTS ARE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN ON FIVERR
- HALF OF PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SELL YOUR UPWORK ACCOUNT TO THEM
- 5€ FOR 2000 WORDS OF TRANSLATION? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? END YOURSELF PLEASE
- "Design a custom social network (video chat, chat, forum, shop and payment gateway) quick!!!" for 100€, within one day.

What the fuck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Are you fucking serious right now?!

I hate Upwork so much

Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.

"Can we build an app that works only in South Africa, for multiple clients, with no WiFi connection, each app contains an entire website and database to use offline, where any changes to one database synchronises every client's app, and also save those changes to our servers?"

These clients are hundreds of miles apart and on the other side of the world.

Let's see here, we have:
🤡 Creepy Cackle Guy: watches videos all day and cackles like a hyena, plus constantly farts, and complains a lot. He gets everyone gassed up, no pun intended.

😤Bitchy PM: argues with you about every little thing, lies to pad her metrics while screwing the dev's metrics over. Also lies about what clients say to force launch or what she feels client should do. Rude to clients & co-workers. Runs and tattles to higher ups when people call her out on her shit. Nobody can stand her, she get's the entire office upset.

🙉Darth Vader: I don't think this one needs explaining. He breathes SO freaking loud you can hear it across the room. He also won't talk to anybody. Ever.

🤐The Non-Stop Flapper: nice person, but chats you non stop about their mundane life events, even when your status is set to busy or they know you're swamped. Asks irrelevant questions all day, every day. Heart of gold but needs to reel in the chatting.

🤬 Mr.Rage: whines about EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Has also thrown his food on me once over a joke about pizza. Wants to move up to programming but cant program.
---
So between them all, I scream on the inside daily. 🙊😫😢

And it is official: I am not a project manager anymore.

My Boss has just created a new Automation department of which I am the only employee. So, now, I am an Automation Engineer.

More tools, maybe code and almost no contact with clients anymore. But I am gong to miss a few of them. :)

I fucking hate websites that refuse to show their content unless you enable their JS clusterfuck. Yes I am blocking JavaScript because I'm sick of all those goddamn frameworks from God knows what domain. IS THAT FUCKING WRONG?!! I don't hate front-end devs, in fact I respect them for keeping up with design needs of shitty clients. But that fucking Web 2.0 with 50 frameworks per tab and no HTML or even PHP whatsoever for those who block your JS crap.. shove it right up your fucking ass!!!

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

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

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

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

-__-""""

Ugh, fxk. I got a promotion, I'm now a team lead for 4 developers, and I fxking hate it.

They never asked me if I wanted the position, they just threw me into it this week. They ripped me away from the team I had great chemistry with and put me on this other team with people I have no connection with.

To make matters worse, I'm also responsible for production servers of the clients of this team, one has malware even.

On top of all of this, they made me move desks for a new developer to fill my spot.

How do you demote yourself? Why would a company want someone to perform poorly (on purpose, I don't care) than to just keep their employee happy?

/end rant

Client: I want you to build me a website.
Then makes an order on freelancing website.

Me: Okay, Sir. Can you send me your specifications, please?

No reply.

2 days later

Me: Hello, sir....are you still interested?

A week later
Me: Sir.

Me: Sir.....

No reply

2 Weeks later
Me: Sir......

No reply

Client: Oh, sorry.(Then gives some lame excuse) Okay I will send you the specifications.

Me: It's Okay. Waiting for it.

A week later
Me: Sir, you forgot to send me your specifications.

No response.

#Life of a freelancer.....No stability or security or decent clients.

While being self employed as a programmer may have its ups and downs, at least no one will judge you(except yourself maybe and your clients if they know) when you code drunk and it's Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

Fucking hell, that's now the fourth time in a row that I see my clients getting ripped a second asshole by previous developers, this one charged 1500$ for a "python script" that only calls ffmpeg with couple args, claiming tons of shit like the video being e.g. better quality after conversion - even though all it does, is a straight convert from one format to another. (no filters, anything, just a convert) I feel always so terribly bad discovering that shit and them proudly telling me about the "solution" they invested in..

Best part of working from home? Oh boy, here I go

1. NO COMMUTE !! Fuck public transport. I can just grab my laptop straight to my bed, get comfortable and work in whatever posture I wish to.

2. Relaxation and peace of mind. The local park, library, football ground. I can go anywhere to get work done. All I need is my phone and laptop.

3. Better food - I can cook my own food. Dieting actually works by eating home-made food and not the fried bullshit we eat outside.

4. No office politics - Remote working means you don't have to think about being a circle and getting liked or not. Get your work done and that's it.

5. No "Extra" Activities - We all know HRs are just bored af people making employees have "fun" activities just to push a "culture" agenda on LinkedIn. Umm no thanks.

6. No toxicity - Well, this one is a doozie, you don't get workplace toxicity but you do get home toxicity. People assuming that you stay in ur room all day and do nothing. I'd still take home toxicity though.

7. If there is no work, I don't have to pretend that I am working and hiding my screen from my boss. I can just play video games in that time.

8. Option to start a side-hustle. You have more chances to retain some energy after your shift to start investing/putting time into something that can make you extra cash.

9. Worldwide opportunities - Because of WFH, I work with clients from Netherlands, Estonia, London and Cayman Islands. It never would have happened if I was in an office job.

10. Only work, no extra bullshit - be it smoke breaks, casual tea, conferences, work summits etc. None of that and I don't want it.

11. Your errands get done - Need to go to the dentist at 10 am? You can do that. Need to pick up your kid at 3 pm? You can do that. You need 5 pm time dedicated to go the gym? You can do that.

In conclusion, I absolutely vouch for WFH and would never take WFO for as long as possible.

WFH FTW !!!

I love how some services have trap pricing, pretty much like drug dealers of the interwebs.

Me: I would like to send e-mail to my clients.

Company: Sure bro, here, take our service, you can send emails to all your clients, just 5€ per month!

A year later

Me: I have now over thousand customers, I would like to send more emails and implement some new features.

Company: Thousand customers you say?

Me: Yeah

Company: All in our servers you say?

Me: Yeah, thanks for the great service!

Company: Sure, no problem. We can enable you additional services for 40 000€ per month, half of your liver and two of your first born babies.

App nearing completion. Code tested, everything's working fine. Ready for release.

The client just calls me and tells me that they have decided to turn the app into two separate ones. Should not be a problem, you developers must have some tricks for that, according to the client. Of course, the release date remains unchanged.

Clients!, finally understand that there's no secret button for turning an app into two separate ones.

So this client wanted a demo on Dockers. So I gave the demo with some microservices running on different containers. Later the clients come back and say, "Docker is good. But please fit all the microservices in one container." I say but that defeats the purpose of microservices. But no, the client say. I tried explaining but no is no. Shit!! Fine! Have it your way!!

Tired of stereotypes. It seems that if someone uses a Mac, is posh; if someone uses Windows is a silly cunt, and if someone uses Linux ... well, it seems that's the way to go, right? Well, no.

Suddenly the world is filled with script kids who come and indirectly recriminate you that you have no idea of computer science because you use Ubuntu instead of Arch. That has happened to me with a recently graduated kid.

Really? Do you really consider yourself a good developer only because you have Arch installed and you hate Windows and Apple?
Let people use the system and development software that they prefer most (or that one that their company forces them to use).

This kids have to be more humble and focus on creating better code, help their colleagues and know how to deal with clients.

The worst part about being a web developer is when clients ruin a perfectly good website by asking for dumb things, even though you told them it's either:
a) near impossible
b) not useful/helpful to users
c) deprecated/no longer used code/techniques
e) will harm performance and SEO
d) just plain stupid

I honestly do not understand why clients, with no understand of development at all, think they know more than the developer.

I do not understand why these people think they know what can and cannot be done within a given timeline.

If it's so damn easy, why aren't you making the damn website/app yourself????

#frustratedaf
#donewiththisshit
#ineedthemoneytho

Spent 2 years slaving for a “start up” building not only the core framework but also handling clients, operations and logistics while being yelled at constantly for not delivering even though I was clearly over worked.

Once it finally hit my head that none of this was my mistake, quit, took a few months off and started working as a freelancer for no code development platforms.

Have been working with multiple amazing clients for more than a year now who understand and appreciate the work I do.

Just finished my internship.

I entered knowing nothing and spent the entire year on solo projects.

My company does not use any frameworks because "they don't want to run code on a server that they didn't write", they use waterfall, only use version control on half the projects, use notepad++, never once even glanced at my code to check I know what I'm doing - even when i asked.

Also have never heard of a code review, have absolutely no QA in place other than the devs making it and quickly testing it visually, no requirements gathering - just pictures and have never heard of tdd.

Recently was given a project with no designs, no specs other than a verbal half thought out explanation and was dumped with random deadlines like "this needs to be demoed tomorrow night" with no idea about the project progression or what it looks like. Apparently it's all my fault that it failed.

I am very grateful to them for teaching me so much and giving me opportunities to teach myself on nice projects but come on.

What boggles my mind is that the company is 6 years old and has big, big clients. I don't understand how. I once tested a project about to go out the next day that had been "tested" and found pages of bugs. They would have lost the contract for sure...

Recently, one of our passwords was accidently published on a public page for a few minutes before it was noticed and removed. Unfortunately, this password opens nearly every locked account so it's a pretty big deal.

Management was informed of this mistake and told that we should change the passwords as well as implement a few other protocols to make sure this doesn't happen again including things like unique passwords, more secure passwords, using a password manager, etc.

Their response? It wasn't online long, probably no one saw it. There will be no changes in how we handle ours or our clients' secure passwords.

My bosses have estimated 5 (five!) days to start & finish a corporate website (no wordpress) for one of our clients.
However, we don't even have images and texts :)

This will be funny

I wonder if I'm getting tired of making websites for people. I just "fired" two longtime clients today without really caring all that much. Not for no reason. They just were asking too much for too little. And I was getting bored of them. When I think about what I want to do in my spare time, the first thing I think about is creative writing. The last thing I think about is code and website design. It didn't used to be this way.

I just hate it when clients with no knowledge of developing says I'm looking for "more professional"

FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!

Somebody did that with dedication and you can't just call it that!!

SCREW YOU!!!
😡😡😡😡😡

Mid-Friday: Boss: Start programming this application.
Me: Cool, how will it be setup? what lang-
Boss: Everything's already setup, just start programming in PHP. Check in and make sure it's done by Wednesday morning before 9.
Mid-Tuesday:
Me: Cool, it's done. Had some trouble with connecting our database to the clients, some permissions were conflicting.
Boss: Now I need you to pull it, publish it to our other azure portal, change it to ASP.NET Core 2.1 MVC and install it to teams. Also change the database to MySQL.
Me: I thought everything was already setup.
Boss: things change.
Me: Cool.
*Pulls an all nighter*
Me: Something isn't right...
Wednesday
Me*hasn't slept yet*: It's done.
Boss: Why do you look so tired?
Me: I was working last night
Boss: Well you shouldn't do that.
Me: The deadline is today. only way it was going to get done before 9 was to do it last night.
Boss: Doesn't matter.
9am Meeting:
Boss: it was easy, no hassle, it's up and running.
Me: no hassle?

no if clients replace first

-Welcome to our entry level positing with Xyz company. I know we told your recruiter we are very hands on with developers. But we aren’t. Also you will be the only developer and there is no team.

-uh…. Okay..

-for the first part of your interview we are going to have you write a program in node that will reach out to our api and sort medical data with our clients.

-so you want me to create something live, and you’re going to be using it before you hire me in the actual work place?

-if it works, yes. Then we will decide on if we will hire you or not.

Wtaf?

I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.

I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.

All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.

For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.

Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.

Almond: Look at these stats - our signup process sucks! We really need to make it better.

Boss: Yeah, maybe at some point. It doesn't affect live running though. Leave it for now.

<1 month later...>

Almond: These stats are getting worse. I really think we should redesign this to do x, y and z and avoid a, b and c.

Boss: Yeah, we probably should do at some point, but there's no rush. You can work on it if you really want to, but only if there's nothing else going on.

<2 months later...>

Boss: I'VE JUST SPOKEN TO TWO POTENTIAL CLIENTS, BUT OUR SIGNUP PROCESS SUCKS SO THEY'RE GOING ELSEWHERE! WE NEED THIS FIXED NOW!! WHERE ARE YOU ON THIS? CAN WE GET IT DONE AND DEPLOYED BY FRIDAY?!?!

So last night was a Friday. After leaving the gym I noticed a missed call and a voicemail from my client.

Note this was sent at 21:50 on a Friday night.

My client stated they were "rather disappointed" (to use their phrasing) that I didn't answer. There is no contract that I answer out of hours or any issues with their system.

This morning, I noticed my client followed up with an email. It was a single line saying they found some new AWS services they like to talk about (translate: "I've found some new AWS acronyms that sound cool that I wish to talk about for several hours").

Emergency! :)

Seriously, clients, sometimes :(

Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.

That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small

The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!

Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!

I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!

So woke up this morning and Paypal had just banned my account with no reason whatsoever. I only receive funds from 3 clients who I have been working with for a few years now. My account is already verified with my ID and utilities bill. Am a freelance so I depend on it. So it's a case of ' hey, we think you did something wrong, we are not going to tell you what but are banning you permanently and keeping your money for 6 months'. F piss of shit of a company.

I am so sick of the stupidity and illogical reasoning of clients.

Client: Descriptions are no longer syncing. Can you please fix.
Me: Problem fixed and deployed.

Client: All the descriptions got overwritten by the sync descriptions. Can you please have manual uploads overwrite the descriptions that sync (but basically auto guess what the client wants). We may need a toggle.

Me: Toggle added.

Client: Can you go through the 100+ sites backups and restore all the product descriptions?

It's like are you serious right now!!??

Back to the cheeseburger concept here...

Client: Can I have a cheeseburger (comes with pickles, onions, tomatoes, lettuce), no pickles. A Coke? Oh, but I would like pickles on my cheeseburger.

Tender: Here is your order.

Client: Why did you put pickles on this!!?? I asked for NO pickles!

Tender: You added pickles towards the end, so we put the pickles in.

Client: No! I thought you would have known based off of my original statement that I asked for a cheeseburger with no pickles. That is the override!

Narrator: See how illogical things can get. We can't just assume/guess based off of illogical reasoning.

Almost three years ago when I was starting web development,a friend of mine asked me to create a website for him.

You know those single page portfolio with a blog. I said Ok.

After a week I hosted the website and the dude didn't pay up the remaining amount. After following up for a while I just commented out the links to load all css files and declined his calls till he paid up.

He called and said he suspected a hack, to which I replied yes. He had to pay up the remaining amount + more to prevent 'other future hacks'.

The website is no longer active (koome.co.ke) but since then my interactions with clients has changed.

Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.

A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.

Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.

Qualifications and experience require to start a WordPress consultancy/brand agency:
• Be a marketing/people person.
• No technical requirements required.

Hate seeing others get clients and delivering half-assed solutions and deploying outdated and even insecure versions of everything.

The coolest project I was ever involved on, was when we signed a client in Namibia (we were a South African based company). So I was flown to Namibia for 2 weeks to train the clients etc. I spent about 4 days training the client and I had no more work to do. So the client took me out around town and we drank so much on his tab! He even gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, because he doesnt drink Whiskey! The best part of it, apart from exploring their awesome country and pubs, was Mad Max 4 was being filmed in my town, and my client took me to see the yard where all the vehicles and props were situated, because he owned that property! So all in all, it was more of a paid holiday than anything else!

Company: “we need you to engineer this for one of our clients because you’re an engineer and this is what we pay you for.”

Me: “sure no problem”

Company: “we also need you to do a cost benefit analysis, risk/reward analysis, gap analysis and swot analysis for market fit and business finance because we didn’t task anyone else with doing it and since we’re already paying you for this other thing you may as well do this too”

Me: (opens up resume.docx) “yeah I’ll uh…I’ll get right on that”

You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.

It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....

I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.

To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.

I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.

There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.

So I just got this email from a tech company, I registered to send my CV some years ago , about a dev Job openning.

The descripition included:
Java and Angular ( first red flag )

So I go to their site to check it out ...
No https, ping the domain returns an ip from another continent with 500+ ms latency.

Major flaws on the site usability...
Super dumb password recovery method...

I'm fucking outta here dude. I might send them a proposition to fix their servers and at least put it behind letsencrypt though...

And these morons have big clients, like my bank... wtf...

"No We Will Not Code for Free"
(Parody of the "Cheers" theme)

We're underpaid, clients' scope today takes everything we got.
You turn to us with all your troubles cause "companies charge a lot."
You want our work but you won't pay.

No we will not code for free.
You are not exempt from our fee.
If you want a free site, build it yourself. We're not your coding slaves.
We won't build your crap no matter how much you plea.

"Paying us back" don't mean a thing, money talks, bullshit walks.
If you want a cheap site then go to Geocities.

In Yellowstone to see the eclipse!
No break for me today though, I've got dumb clients to deal with, and I had to wake up at 5am to do a conference call.

Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.

Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.

What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.

How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(

No clients.
No managers.
No bosses (other than in-game!).
No deadlines.

I have decided. I don't wanna adult anymore. LET ME OUT!!!

#sign_out
#rage_quit

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

had an issue where our clients payment gateway would duplicate the charge (at the gateway...not at the application) before sending it to the bank officially - the bank would detect the duplication then void both charges.

the gateway service admitted this was a bug, the bank it was tied to admitted it was a bug - but they wouldnt fix it. so my solution was to send a special uid with the original transaction (put it in a special field) and had the bank track that one as the "known good"

the funny thing? next version of the gateway api included this as a feature, but i got no credit.

No matter how good we are in delivering our projects, clients will still think that we're not worth paying for. Welcome to reality.

We made a simple SMS application - when there is alert in a building, SMS is sent to specific range of numbers, based on the alert type. After a month we received invoice of approx. 10K € from the client, my colleague was supposed to pay
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After checking the logs and running tests on module, we found out it was not our fault, client then told us he played with SIM-card while module was sending SMS and somehow he managed to fu*k up. I still don't get it, partially.. Mobile service provider doesn't give a sh!t about sending tons of SMS/hour? No warning, nothing..

Ahh.. Clients, right?

It's 2:37. I was up until this time 3 times this week working on projects for 6 different clients. I have no reason to be up right now except to be on DevRant.

Reset 65 passwords today already, a new personal best for one day! No idea why the reset password button is so hard for clients to use, aghh!

Saying "no" to clients.

Can code awesomeness for my clients.
Can drive traffic to almost any website.
Can turn half-baked ideas into money for clients.
Have absolutely no game at all with the opposite sex.

Sometimes the tradeoff of being a geek sucks.

So one of our clients is changing the IPs of his systems (3 servers and one VPN).

It was scheduled that we should support them yesterday. They have tried to change the IPs yesterday for almost 16 hours, don't know they have done in all of that time.

Today I woke up at 8AM on a Sunday (in weekends I just want to sleep!!!!) to continue and hope that we finish fast.

BUT NO! THE fucking VPN IS NOT WORKING!! We are trying to do this over Team FUCKIN VIewer.

But guess what... they cannot either connect to the new IPs from their local systems.

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

I get frustrated when I get reports from the support team/clients

"[insert application name here] is not working"

thats all no information on which module or segment ... 😭😭

then I just waste time getting all the information ...

Boss : Did you finish the service app?
Me: Nope, sir you told us to complete the immediate relief website.
Boss: Ok. Did u complete that?
Me: Nope, when it was half you told us to complete the clients web app?
Boss: Oh god. So is that over?
Me: Unfortunately, no sir a month more and we can present the project estimation report if we are free😁😉

Being railroaded by a colleague and accused of project sabotage, then having to submit to a 2 hour interrogation where I was literally sat in a corner and read a riot act. I had done nothing of which I was being accused. I sic'ed HR on them in a followup meeting but all HR did was sit and listen and then find in their favor despite the written evidence because my manager outranked the HR manager. That was when I learned that employees are always wrong when the manager wants them to be. I freelance now. No manager, and I can fire my clients.

When project managers copy and paste clients' vague requests word for word with no further explanation

Let’s see I suppose the most pissed off I’ve been at work would be....

Being blamed for a clients mistake when their newsletter email settings where being changed over to a new mailing system but during the change over they wanted to still send out mail using the old list. So a single endpoint was kept in place so they could send one last newsletter out after it was approved as part of the migration and they were to inform us when they were done so we could change that endpoint over.

Several months later when everyone had long forgotten about it, the client tried to send another mass mail out using the old endpoint and complained when no emails had been sent.

I was blamed for making this mistake even though management approved the fucking old endpoint to be left in place at the clients request against my concerns that someone’s going to forgot about this and I was never informed to swap it over.

I quit on the spot and walked out the door after that.

So today a client requested that the domain name in the address bar should be all capital letters because of corporate design. Don't get me wrong, this is a valid request for someone who has no experience in the IT world. But he refused to believe me that it wasn't possible. He even claimed that he has seen it at least hundred times and called me incapable. I don't get clients.

I am actually a bit angry that there is no fucking thing to rant about at my new work - no dumb clients, no dumb project managers (I am doing project management with the boss and the company is somewhat startupish) and the project is interesting as well.

We are now in a full swing enshittification of the entire internet. Almost no companies are interested in providing any value, it's the phase of securing the position between those that provide value and clients - and just collecting rents. Capture enough of the market, milk the product and the client, turn the service into shit while charging progressively more until it all burns and crashes. And then, well, pass go, collect $200, rinse and repeat.

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

I really wish people valued health over profit.

So I joined a company last month and last week I got assigned to the biggest client we have. The project is quite big and there are no deadlines coming up. I was sick for a couple of days and hence could not turn up at the office. Apparently the client called up my manager and went on a rant about this situation. So now I have to work on the weekends to cover up for the missed work while on meds that make me sleepy.

Fuck such clients.

Clients that add you on Facebook and start asking at 3 AM how their project is going.

No this is my personal life, how about you get lost and call or email me during working hours.

I dont work weekends ever. And I dont bring my work home with me, once I finish for the day, Im finished. Even if there is a deadline looming or something is due for a weekend release. I will only work when Im in the office. And I wont work extra unpaid hours. All that does is create unrealistic expectations from your employer and clients. I did it once and learned that there was no point and I could have just gone home and it would have been fine. Im never doing it again.

"Oh, let's delete no-reply@domain.tld because that's not needed by anything"

Stupid fucking clients...
Now users can't verify their accounts. Nice!

I see people earning $10k to add small features that take no more than a week worth of work and here I am making full fledged custom ecommerce sites for $1k.

Money is apparently based on who the client is not what ur doing for them..

So how do i get those clients?

Biggest challenge was to accept that no matter where you go, what you do, you will have to deal with stupid people.

They come in all ranges, starting from hr, interns, juniors, coworkers, code reviewers, seniors, managers, boss, clients.

And in order to grow in life, you have to learn to deal with them. Better even if you could make them a little less stupid.

I don't think it's to complicated...

Dumb clients, no matter who they are if they want you to fix their computer ... Create a new Twitter , hack, when you don't hack.
They make our lives hell .. why ? Because ignorance.

My favourite is when they expect you to work for nothing.oh but you can have 2% it's a billion dollar idea you'll make like 20 mill!😒🙄 All I'll do is sit here since i was the genius if the idea you work out the details ? 400 hours you say? I'm sure it'll take 20 don't be silly now.

Clients that barely can turn on their computer that have opinions on how much complexity and time is involved developing X feature. I'm no rage-o-holic, but that is one of those rare things that make me want to stab someone in the face.

I'm a perfectionist and like things done the right way, but had to learn to let go and remind myself it's the clients site and their choice. No amount of logic and reasoning is going to stop a hellbent client from wanting the dumb things they want, even when it's bad for design, performance, usability and/or SEO.

Clients that ask you to build X and then when you ask about said details to know everything up front, you get a deer in the headlights look.

I get it, not knowing right away is fine, but 5-6 months later and still "not knowing", being absolutely lazy with no responses to questions or just dumping the work to me to figure out from whatever source material you got it from and force me to crunch to save your ass isn't fun for me and I really don't give a shit about how much praise you give me publicly for the job I did.

I'm a stupid twat. Spent at least three hours today, all wasted. I had to update a user manual and change all the branding for a system I've licencesd and going to resell to my dumb clients. There was no original to work from only a pdf. Managed to convert it to word but all the formatting was fucked. So set up some heading and paragraph styles, proper header and footer and auto generate TOC's. I did all this without actually reading it, thought I'd get the formatting and branding out of the way first. So after all that I started the job of editing it and updating it. Quickly realised that PDF I converted was for a different but similar system. Tommorow is Groundhog Day.

I love getting a fucking email for every fucking change, instead of getting a list of desired changes.

You know what? Fuck this, I'm tired of being the nice guy, I'm not even getting paid for this, and you expect me to do it expediently on a Sunday. I'm done, you can find someone else to piss off for free.

Everything about the company is a mess. The only thing that is decent is the people. And by that I mean they aren't shit.
Workflows are fucked.
Clients are fucked. You're pressuring me to get this shit production ready before new year's eve and you still don't know what the text should say and want to make changes to the UI? The fuck?!
Design is a complete shit show. There is a design team. They only make a fucking psd to show clients how an interface would look like. No mobile version (but it's still expected to work!), no markup. Resolution is fucking inconsistent and whenever a change is requested, they are nowhere to be seen so I have to actually do designing on top of having to use this worthless fucking framework I hate it so much.
Codebases are turbo-fucked because of said framework.
Databases are an inconsistent, fucked up mess. No foreign key constraints because every single fucking table is using the MyISAM engine.

And the thing that really makes me incredibly angry is all the "custom systems" look the fucking same at the database level. Like 30 fucking useless tables made for stupid HR workflows that make no fucking sense.

At my previous job, no matter how many times I explained it, "a jquery" was an image slider for by boss. No need to say new devs didn't know what the hell he was talking about when he said the clients wanted "a jquery".

almost a year ago, i have no idea of what i was doing at work cause everything was new: coding languages, databases, clients, co-workers, etc. i had 0 experience and i am back here again on devRant after 3836382 years and i am proud to say i've learnt so much and have been promoted to Project Manager. im happy asf and i am now ready for another round of dev rants!

I've learned over the years that there's no such thing as a Proof of Concept app. You might as well call them beta versions since some salesperson or manager will see it and immediately tell clients about it who will buy it and then you have to support and expand it.

Employers and clients think developers come up with genius solutions while in offices, hell no!
Most of the genius solutions come when a Dev is showering, gaming, peeing, pooping etc. So don't fire me cause I am playing Dota 2 on my laptop. Am innovating bit*h

Client writes a bug report: This and that doesn't work.
Me: This functionality never was implemented. Please open a feature request.
Client: But this is a bug. Without this feature, the service won't work as we expect.
Me: But this wasn't in the requirements for release. So you have to contact the PM for a feature request.
Client: THIS IS A BUG! FIX IT!
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF! THIS IS A NEW FEATURE AND YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!
Unfortunately, I never sent the mail. But I kept it in the drafts. Maybe someday...

Clients with almost no idea about tech stuff are really funny !

made a prototype and showed the demo to clients. They asked me where it was stored and how to access to the code. Told them where it was stored was was a trial and it has expired. Asked me why I didn't pay the subscription. Also asked me if I could send them the code, for them to "try using it" and "implement it in their office". Told them if they wanted to use the program, it needs to be done again (since this is a prototype). 3 days now, no sounds from the client.

To quote Charles Bukowski:
"and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"
I always have tendency to fall into feeling lonely and abandoned, but these days my life is tossing some of the wildest curve balls more than ever before.
The latest one yet just happened this Monday. My manager quit and there was no knowledge transfer, and it was not on the good terms with the company.
Now I'm the only member of my team, and I have to take care of some of the projects that I've never worked on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not setup for failure, and there are no expectations for me to know how everything works, quiet the opposite. But working with our clients and debugging the projects that I literally setting up on the fly had been a rollercoaster.
Second time in this company I will be looking for a manager in my department, and teaching them how everything works. Fun times.. fun times never change..

I hate my freelancer life.
1. No weekends
2. No particular time to close
3. Work for 12 to 14 hours without sleep sometimes
4. Keep explaining the dumb clients about how development is not wordpress.

Its all fucked up. I have no life.

My average Lines of code this month is around 700 LOC/day. Whereas the average that showed on internet is 100 LOC/day.

I have choosen a hellish life.

"Minor edit"?
Why do clients always have to try and quantify the amount of effort a task is going to take while having no clue as the actual work it is going to take?
MINOR EDIT!
I bet to them changing a fundamental law of the universe would be a "minor edit"

Why do clients always try to use our lingo? They sound stupid. I read a post yesterday that said "no coding necessary. Just HTML and CSS" . Um. What? I also have a client that always tells me "I just need you to make some updates to the CSS with programming" . 😐🔫

My last day at my current company and damn, I couldn‘t be happier. Consulting was the worst decision I ever made and from tomorrow on I‘ll be free.

No more lying to clients, no more pushing of horrible products, no more silence towards problems because they didn‘t pay for a more expensive service.

I can finally stop hating myself for my job!

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

There is nothing more fulfilling than working you ass off 2 days, learning a new technology, and getting it to finally work as per the requirements and then ...

getting told that the absolute cunt of a client forgot the release date, announced its release 2 days early and decided to casually ask why there is no app on the released URL (it's a tiny Agonizing Reality [AR] app meant as a gimmick on the invitation cards for an upcoming convention).
My boss told me, the thing I worked on is now being scrapped and will not be released.

Yes, I wish the clients could slowly die in agony by a tree growing out of their appendix. Nature shall reclaim their corpses and feed a happy pig which I would happily have a feast of. 🤗

My first freelance project - happened to be with the worst client. They didnt wanna pay more than $500 and also had no clue what they want, so each time i present something they request additional features or changing the ones implemented. In the end i kept the half downpayment for my time and bailed without deploying or anything. I introduced them to another freelancer to take the project and never went near them again.

To clarify, it was not my first project/ just my first time dealing with clients for projects instead of doing them at work. Ever since then i have a strict no dealing with clients directly policy.

I wish clients knew what went into building custom features.

"Oh, you can't just turn it on?"

No...I have to write the gah damned feature FFS!

the c in devRant stands for client

Yesterday hr called me for a meeting 1 on 1 that lasted for over 1 hour.

Me: i work on my side project when i get home every day

Hr: ohhh.. so you do have time to work on another project aside from ours?

Me: what? I said i work at my project after work when i come hom-

Hr: so you have that much free tim ok how about this. Would you like to work on another project for our clients? So you'd be working on 2 projects-

Me: ...

Hr: one day you work on this primary project the next day you work on the secondary project

---

Corporate people really think giving me MORE work with NO increase of payment is a REWARD???? Go FUCKV yourselves

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

There is no such a thing as a good dev days. There are only bad and worse days. Unless you are millionaire and you don't have to deal with clients.

I use WordPress for my clients. No prob there. I hate it when I use someone else's paid theme and I have to beat my head against the CSS because they've used a lot of #id and !Important in the main css file.

Makes a child theme almost useless.

Coolest project? No project is cool anymore after clients changed their mind for the 9000th time which happens like... always.

What a bunch of cunts.
It's sad how they keep applying restrictions to everything. Two years ago, there were no restrictions. Now:
Max one website, random account locks if you ever get actual visitors, no support unless you're premium, max 5 simultaneous clients, one hour sleeptime a day, some "random" disk full errors or internal server errors and at least two hours downtime a day.

Fuck off.

Ok, just built my first hello wold using react and after installing node babel react etc... The resulting folder is 51.7mb big. Makes me wonder what am I doing with my life why should I do this. what's the fucking point of it all.
Don't get me wrong I like react and I think it's really cool, but what is all this going to achieve at the end "build a website to sell rubber poop" like wtf... some company wants to sell shit and some monkey with an MBA is going to set the deadline and add Features. No one understands the shit we go through no one cares and we just build websites and Android apps... maybe there is no point here maybe there is nothing.
I remember when coding was fun now it's just building highly responsive web/Mobile based IT solutions to clients who wouldn't know a good website if it fucked them in the ass

I've been a developer for 15+ years, all the time as a consultant with so many different clients, have been mobile developer(ios and android), front end, backend, and many other roles, I love programming, but lately, I don't know, don't feel excited about it anymore.

I lie on every interview when they ask what am I looking for in a project, to be honest, everything looks the same to me, just showing some parsed data, which is provided by a backend which is stored in a database, at the end everything resumes to this, I do not see any challenge, or any interesting thing about this anymore.

I don't know, I mean, you can get good money on this profession, be in big offices and stuff, but, there is something missing, at least for me, is like, nobody speaks each other, no friendship, no honesty, no connections, is like, come on, we spent most of our most useful hours day after day in here, there should be a connection or something, I see many people(including me) having lunch with their cellphones, is kinda sad, I wonder if it was like that in the past.

I don't know, it feels so gray lately.

know what is worst than fucking clients from hell?

fucking websites that need a mortherfucking good spec computer to run. i cannot even type properly. thought my keyboard had problem. no. I can fucking type fucking quick and well here now with no hiccup. i wish i can burn those all down.

no wonder we love devrant. even the website is fast and good.

Follow-up on yesterday's rant.

Boss hired dev-ops team to restore data from the broken server image. They said it may be completely impossible. Which will probably make clients want to kill us considering it's an government agency.

I wonder how large the contractual penalties will be considering they are almost completely incapable of working without the system and it's going to be few days until anything will be fixed.

Oh well, since no one bothers me it seems it's currently not my problem and I'm free to code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

Building a website using Wordpress and Visual Composer for a client is pretty easy, right?!

Until the clients wants to change one of the icons to sofa “you can’t use image, and visual composer has a list of only 5 icon libraries and none of them has a fucking sofa icon”.

Manager says just do it today!
Ok no problem.. just had to figure how visual composer communicate with the libraries to show them in the module area, edit the function, create the font/svg files for the new icon, edit the css file of one of the libraries to add the icon. And boom its working fine!

No tutorial about this stuff so had to figure it out by reading the code and see how they did it so I can do it.

After finishing this, they just gave me few more changes as I have done nothing.

Thank you

My tech debt meltdown is happening right now. We are releasing our huge micro service based product next week with no automated testing of any sort. Our front end clients are relatively DRY. No tests and dry = can't change anything = hacks on top of hacks.

Why? Team lead won't listen to me and has beaten me down so I don't care anymore. If it's broken fuck it.

a former client and their client keep contacting me about the project i did for them, we couldn't agree on a new contract but they keep asking me things about the site but, if they had signed would be billable.

Sorry i dont work for free.

Clients assume that because they can't see it, means no real work was done. Or even worse, you show them code that was written for the server, even demo the apis but without a pretty front-end it's pretty much meaningless. Even if ITS NOT YOUR JOB TO DO THE FRONT-END!!!

I hate that clients think the most important thing for a demo is UI. Working Application > Nice looking application with no functionality

I was working on a new feature for this legacy project.. Just minding my own buisness then all out of the blue I got an email from our client (before the email I exported the live database because I needed to reproduce a weird bug) saying the sync stopped working
<backstory>
The database needs to sync every 15 minutes because it has a master-master relationship with a 3rd party database..
</backstory>
So I was like shiiit! Did I do that!? So I checked the logs, nothing... I called the 3rd part to check if they have problems, nothing.. Then I checked the network logs... Again all fine... 30 nervous minutes later, I got a new mail... Saying it finally synced... Still have no clue what happened or if it ever was a problem... God damn clients man...

So I work in a web development company in my town and have been doing a while or heap of parallax sites for our clients. Now obviously when we do the designs we get them in and get them to play around with the site before we go ahead and push their new site out and make it live right.

Wellll who would of thought that a simple parallax site would be so hard to use for the general user??? Recently we have been getting the occasional call where the client is getting complaints about the site only being a big ole image or just one block of text. After investigating why their site was broken or why the users weren't able to see the whole site I came across no problems at all.

Today I got a call from the client who instructed me that after explaining to one of his own clients that he had to scroll down the page that everything was just fine!

I mean, what? How do you miss the big ole scroll bar on ya screen or even think to even attempt to scroll? Some people aye lmao

I have to say one of the most annoying things in software development is building tools that will never be really used by clients, sometimes clients just want something new and shiny and once they get it off it goes into a dark closet of no use to gather webs

That moment when the client sets the meeting during your lunch hour.

My over promising boss is upset that something that used to work doesn't work now because support decided it had to be changed. We took it apart to rebuild it and it's only partially finished right now. Says he can't show it to clients like this. Well no we told you it wouldn't be ready for the deadline you forced upon us, even before the requested changes, but instead of listening you tell us not to argue and just get it done.

Why python can't into proper dependency management?

I Node.js we use npm. Modules are downloaded per project and packaging is easy.

In Java we use maven/gradle. Never been so easy to build and download libraries and package your project.

But in Python? No, it's not easy. You have to use virtualenv first so pip/anaconda won't download globally, then you must write setyp.py in a million different ways. Packaging and distribution to clients? Good luck with that.

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

My company provides its services as web pages and web services to our customers.

Once a year we update the certificate used for the https connections.

I notified the update to the clients that use the web services.

One of them asked me a copy of the public key.

No problem. Open the web site with the browser, save the key and send by email.

One day later the client asked me the public key in a zip file because the anti virus blocked my attachment.

Why the client hates the Chain of Trust ?
He could obtain the public key by them self from the browser or openssl.

Migrated to new email clients, half a page long signatures were gone and no notice to put it back.
So I added my own: "Freeeeeeedoooooom, no more signatures".
Promptly got called by PM to: "It puts the signature back in the mail or else it gets the free seating back."

A coworker created several WinForms-Tools because it was "more comfy" than learning XAML which we usually use for all our sw clients.

Now that these tools are relevant for our infrastructure and some even for the product itself they have to be maintained by others as well.
Note: he tried to use OOP but the result is more like a complete new style of programing . Processes, objects and external scripts in the mix.

Mainreason why noone could know about it: the product manager used him as kind of private dev for some hours a week. No reviews, barely documentation... Now we decided that developing the tools from the scratch is more time and cost efficient.
What a mess...

A server's purpose is to serve clients. So if a server is down, it can't serve clients. So it's no longer a server, amirite?

I told you fucking moron clients doing that "little" change would be complicated and in the worst case it would end fucking up your whole spaghetti crap. A really HUGE spaghetti monster of that you aren't aware because you guys don't know a shit about coding conventions.

*Clients call me complaining about their software is broken*

-Hey, we're in serious trouble. Our users aren't being able to see the proper calculated values. Why that little change had so much side effects?
- I already told you why.
- Can you fix it asap? Our clients are complaining.
- No. Deploy an old copy of the affected modules while you give me a prudent time to refactorize that crap.
- Refactorize?
- ...

I used to work in their place, 3 years later I quit that crappy job and decided to make them my clients. I escaped from the micromanaging thing but I didn't from their ugly practices.

Anyways, I have to fix this shit asap. Money talks, at least until I can find a better client.

Everytime you tell yourself "This time I'm going to make them stop putting the cart before the horse again!!! No more forced shit implementations!!! NO MORE ! I'm strong!!"

The last hour in the next week:
- Selinux: off
- Firewall: Any-Any
- Application data: Everything installed on OS disc.
- Documentation: At best, someone remembers the server supposed-to-be dns record
- Service Accounts: Your domain admin account and sysadmin for databases.
- Patching: DON'T EVER THINK ABOUT IT..AND NO REBOOTING! I have set very important runtime variables.
- Backup: Maybe someone else will set this up.
- Monitoring: Not needed since clients will create tickets if system fails.
- Production Status: vague at best. Sort of silently transitioned to production.
- Handover status: Probably, but I quit before the project closed.

!

I want to launch my own think tank and employ some the great devs I've worked with over the years.

No clients or stakeholders. Just us, building and releasing stuff.

Those working as freelancer, how many times has a potential client told you that if you do this job for cheap he would refer you in his business circle and you would for sure get atleast X projects in next quarter ?

Wasted 2 hours configuring smtp on this Windows box. I hate when clients choose the OS with no relevance to the language.

TIFU by showing login data during presentation

I was presenting my school project when my teacher asked if I could show him the source code. I said ofc, just let me login to the FTP server. I completely forgot that it was also shown on the big screen, and a random funny student logged in and tried to replace the index file with a joke file. Of course, he didn't want to make damage, so he made a backup. But this backup caused the problem, because he connected to the FTP through Windows Explorer (wtf?), and when he made a copy of the original file, it was renamed to "Copy of xy", but in a localized version, which contains special characters. Because of these characters, some FTP clients couldn't even connect, others just couldn't interact with the file. No download, no rename, no delete, nothing. After trying out like 8-9 FTP clients, I just remembered that I could rename it in PHP. Well, it got deleted instead of being renamed, but at least it wasn't there anymore. I have spent like half more hour with searching for a backup version on my computer until I found it.

TL;DR: showed FTP credentials during presentation on big screen, random student accessed and renamed a file, special characters in name fucked up the server, luckily I found a backup.

Have you ever had to fire someone? or get someone fired?

I’m thinking about a time when I should have made sure a guy was fired.
He had no business leading a project, and I knew this early on when he suggested connecting a public frontend straight to a clients’ ERP.
I wasn’t on his project but I ended up cleaning up his mess when shit hit the fan.

That moment when you found out, the "digital PMs" and "digital art directors" who have NO FREAKING CLUE about the limitation of the web... promised the clients fantastical things... at ridiculous timelines... WITHOUT CONSULTING any of the devs... GARGHHHH

It's so fucking hard to explain my job to people who don't have slightly idea about it
Person : what you do?
Me : Web development
P : what's that?

M : you know websites on internet for users or clients for products/information bla bla bla

P : like amazon, facebook, xyz ?
M : Yeah you get it
P : so you develop facebook?
M : huhh.... No not that I'm not working for FB that's a different company we create websites according to clients.
(Inner me: why don't you fuck off already)
P : huh... Okay ( no fucks given )

Today I had to restart a VM that should contain only an apache server, after a period of time some clients complained that there a functionality in the system is not working. I checked the code and I found that this functionality is depends on local server in deferent port, so I back to VM log and found there was a node server was working on this port.
Every thing was fine till now, I check folders but there is no FUCKIN js files for node server.
After hours of searching I found 5 files in the public/assets/dist/js path that named with the same functionality name and a number 1 to 4 and the 5th one is a TEST.js. After checking all files I discovered that the server file is the TEST.js !!!!! seriously WTF ...

I have been coding for 2 years, 1 month at a company

Teammate1 has been coding for a year, a genius, learns everything in a week, knows all major js frameworks, refuses to adhere to any rules except no rebase on pushed (luckily)

Teammate2 has been coding for a year, learns slowly, very reliable, has no common sense at all

Teammate3 the designer, really has the skills but always busy, never has time for a meeting, gets very mad if it looks different from her original plan.

We're all college students short of money so they all want to work for clients. I don't have the leadership skills / charisma for this.

ATTN: ALL DEVZ

I think we all should just band together and say FU! to all of these software companies and form one gigantic software corporation, steal all of their clients, and make them beg on their knees for us to help them. Not only that, make them go through a series of VERY stressful interviews (to see who deserves our time, of course) in which we simply say....."no" with no explanation. Bwahahahahhahahaha!!!

Wishful thinking.... 🤔

No matter how many books I read on design patterns, there always comes a time when you've just got to toe punt a bull of mud across the line to meet a clients needs.

1 year into the project, spending nights fixing issues, but
today the client realises that things aren’t working out and we need to stop the project. 🙃
Does money, hard work and time grow on trees for you? NO CLIENTS ARE NOT GODS. They’re cuckoo.

The CEO just made a huge huge push-over to the developers.

He doesn't have any customers/clients and wants us to push our limits to make a Service Oriented Architecture where legacy code is needed to be revived, no documentation, and a single motherfucking mobile developer who has 3 projects already in his 1st month of stay.

We just launched our web app service a month ago, clients pay thousands for it! of course still no raise.

Keeping the clients happy is very important but when you have alot of shit to do, being a glorified helpdesk bugs me the fuck out. My inbox is screaming at me: "Please no more... Master please end me!".

What is it about clients that provokes them to ask about the same feature every day? No, it’s not fucking done yet, I don’t have a team of devs under me who work overtime to finish it overnight. It’s not going to get done any faster if you keep fucking bothering me about it.

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

I guess no one except designers know the pain of dealing with clients.
I am a dev and a freelance designer and sometimes my patience drops to zero and walks out from my desk and try to sleep, just to not break stuffs out of anger. You guys think dealing with a designer is an issue? Try dealing with a dumbfuk client!

> Rental agreement ending this summer
> Sign up for apartment in rent controlled country with 10+ years in queue
> Be told I might have to relocate anyway because dropped clients
> Say yes, that'd be cool
> Apply for apartments in new location
> Get offered one in this city
> Get offered one in other city
> Have <1 week to sign
> Declining would mean no first hand contract ever in that city
> Contact boss man to know where I can work
> On vacation until end of June

Nnnnnnnggggggghhhhhhhhhh

Having to work for clients sucks. They are so rude. "We sent an issue over yesterday and it's still not fixed". You think you're our only customer? You think this shit is automated and takes no time to fix? You think you have resources working on you stuff 24/7. You don't man. Get in the queue and be grateful a load of time and effort goes in to your website. Sit down and stfu. Ahhh... that's better.

I developed an Android app that authenticates users via HTTP. Because it's an internal use app for employees only, we are in charge of unsubscribe the users that have access to the app in case they leave the company; all we have to do is update a bit column in one DB table and that's it, nothing complicated. My manager thought it was a good idea to develop an entire "front-end" website to make this task "easier", and yes, I am the one he put in charge of doing this, even though I work in the company as an Android dev, not a web dev. Making this site would be really simple and it'd only take a few hours of effort, but I find it really stupid and a waste of time coding a whole website to achieve a goal that only takes one freaking SQL sentence and no real clients using it. I don't know if, in fact, this is a stupid and useless idea, or I'm being a dick and have no reasons to blame my manager and bitch about it.

Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:

If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.

TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.

So I make websites on the side for small time clients for some additional income. And without fail every time I sit down to work on this one site something goes wrong. First there were problems with the hosting, and now the template that the client chose is no longer for sale. I hope I'm not going to lose them over this :( I've sent them a list of alternative templates and contacted the company behind the original template to ask what is up. Real shame because they picked what I considered the favourite too and now I regret waiting to fork over the money to make the purchase.

Real, seriously honest feedback wanted.
What do you do when you are stuck at a place that has potential but it is being run by someone with the wrong idea?
For example: not to toot my own horn, but I shine at front end Development. Not just slicing up designs, but seriously creating amazing user experiences. And honestly, there is no shortage of work for that ... every client we have has an expectation that their site or application will look awesome. And we have some very big clients.
That said, the manager truly believes that we are all inter-changeable and should have no preference. As a result, John Doe over there who has zero ability in front end gets tasked with building the front end of what should be an amazing app... while I eventually get tasked with some sitecore bullshit that I have no interest in.
And it goes on and on and on.
It is no coincidence that anytime the dice land on me for front end, it wins an award and always ends with an awesome thank you from the customer.

I am not sure what to do, because it just makes no sense to me. And this is just one example of the mismanagement.

Any help?

My university decided to switch their mailing software to outlook. So no smtp/imap in the future. How am I supposed to do my mailing stuff now? I use older ("non-microsoft") mail clients like mutt or upas? What about standards? Aargh

What to do if the client does not ask for changes?
This makes no sense.

Working for a large client converting paper forms to the web. Stated goals, simplify data entry for clients, improve data quality, reduce resourcing in backend human processing.

We met to review prototype and discuss workflow questions. Crazy deadlines, with the usual changing scope creep.

We start to point out the need for data validation, to shorten # of questions based on answers.

Business says no. All forms should be submittable regardless of what user enters, don’t put validations in because all that warning messaging confuses them and takes up more time.

Web form should behave like the paper copy....

Welcome to 1975!!! This is why 2018 won’t be like 2018...

Today I was orders to check out one of our applications. Accounting said that the Twilio bill was constantly increasing even if we do not get any new clients. In 10 min I found out what is the problem. All calls are recorded and stored in Twilio, which charges handsomely for such service.
Developers instead of downloading those recording to our data lake, use Twilio as storage, because no coding was involved.
Company lost around 30k dollars this year and around 10k-20k in previous ones, because someone was lazy to spend few days to download mp3 from url.

Start a business, it'll be fun they said. One of those days you'll realise that you're in a situation where you'll have to fire a friend from your engineering team, there's no way around it..

People keep on thinking and saying
"You're so lucky, you can choose the clients and the team, and work whenever you want to.."

Yep. Highest highs and lowest lows go hand in hand. Thank god there's both.

No better way to start off a new year than to wake up to message from the boss telling you that you need to start to work even harder because there are projects overdue and clients has started charging penalties.
Of course he doesn't care that there are only two of us (me, a Junior Android Dev and he iOS Dev) and there are 3 projects, all with deadlines in December 2017 or January 2018.