There's this guy where I work who's one of the senior linux engineers. To me, he's like a linux god. He knows how to solve the most difficult problems and somehow copes with all the stress/workload. Next to that, he's only one year older than me!

Whenever I'm at work, I consider myself a junior, which I actually am. I also, as said earlier, see this senior guy as a fucking linux god and consider myself to be an absolute newbie around him but he is the most kind/friendly guy ever.

But then, today, something happened which made me feel like a god in front of him, a very, very weird feeling.

For him, doing his stuff is the most normal thing in the world while for me, it's still a learning process.

For me, programming is the most normal thing in the wold, while for him, it's still something he just knows the very basics of.

He asked me if I knew something about javascript/jquery. Said yes as I often program/script in javascript.

Explained me what he wanted to get done, it was a very simple thing for me but after hours of online searching, his lack of javascript knowledge still got him nowhere.

Told him I'd give him a working script in 30 minutes. Emailed it to him in 10.

He seemed/reacted the way I always do when he solves something I have no clue how to solve.

It was really weird to witness *him* being amazed of something that *I* made/did.

Today was a good day where I saw that one person's limitations can be anothers' most easy thing, even if that another person sees that one person as a god.

Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"

Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)

In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic

Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them

In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure

Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?

Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...

Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea

Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'

I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:

Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine

Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know

And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews

Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

A tcp packet walks in to a bar and says “I want a beer”, barman says “you want a beer?” and tcp packet says “yes, a beer” .

In high society, TCP is more welcome than UDP. At least it knows a proper handshake.

A bunch of TCP packets go into a bar, until it’s overcrowded. The next day, half as many go in.

A bunch of TCP packets walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hang on just a second, I need to close the window.”

When I try to send SYNs to chicks, I don’t get any ACKs. Just FINs and RSTs.

IP packet with TTL=1 arrives at bar. Bartender: “Sorry, can’t let you leave…and you don’t get any beer either…” 

The worst part about token ring jokes is that if someone starts telling one while you are telling yours, all joking stops.

The great thing about TCP jokes is that you always get them.

The problem with TCP jokes is that people keep retelling them slower until you get them.

I would tell some UDP jokes too but I never know if anyone gets them

The best thing about UDP jokes is that I don’t care if you get them or not.

I had a funny UDP joke to tell, but I lost it somewhere...

The sad thing about IPv6 jokes is that almost no one understands them and no one is using them yet.

I tried to come up with an IPv4 joke, but the good ones were all already exhausted.

A DHCP packet walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Bartender says: “here, but I’ll need that back in an hour!

DHCP jokes only work when there is only one person telling them

The worst part of SSH jokes is that, even when they're not funny, you suck it up and just pretend they were anyway.

The problem with token ring jokes is you need to wait your turn to laugh

I’d make a joke about UDP, but I don’t know if anyone’s actually listening…

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

No one knows the pain of that more than a front end dev trying to reduce load times of a web page.

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Me, doing QA

PM: "stop submitting bug reports about screen size, we're only supporting one resolution for now"

Me: *What do you mean you're only supporting one resolution it's a website and it breaks on screens <1400 px tall*
*Sigh*
"okay, what resolution?"

PM: "No one knows"

Me: *dies*

I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.

One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.

Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.

I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.

I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.

He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.

Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.

So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.

He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.

This one colleague at my work.

I'm pretty new to a lot stuff and I stress out about some stuff a lot more than the other guys, mostly because I'm scared I might not be able to fix it.

But whenever that happens, I explain this guy what's going on and then, while making jokes, talking in a very calming way, he always knows to fix it in no time!

For everyone who does this, thanks for being there for the little/new guys :)

Lead dev walks in:

"Remember what I said about doing dumb shit solutions in languages that no one understands?"

Me: "Yes.....why?"

Him: "That reporting script you did for <x department> needs some modifications and you decided for whatever fucking obscure reason to do it in perl"

Me: "I felt......experimental"

Him: "Well yes, that is cool and all but it needs some modifications as per <X director> and only your dumbass knows perl because you are just too fucking cute aren't ya?"

Me: "You think I am cute??? <insert spongebob blushing meme>"

Him: "I fucking hate it when you write shit in perl"

In my defense, it was a really short fucking script

For clarification: This was a friendly convo even though it doesn't sound like it. He is actually my employee, and a rather close friend, so there is that level of trust and comraderie

Once upon a time there was a dev.
The dev had a resume that said he could dev.
We called the dev, he sounded intelligent.
We hired the dev, who was a bit green, on a three month probationary period.
The dev did very little.
When asked, we said he contributed to discussions, but seemed unclear about what to do, and maybe they could keep him as an intern if they wanted to have him at all.
They hired him. As a full time dev.
6 months later, that dev was shocked to find we could log into the servers with a privileged account.
We (his team mates) were sad.
We asked him to fix a few prod errors.
A little while later he said "Done!"
We then had to walk him through how to actually fix them, not just add a couple pieces of info to the table.
We were sad, again.
We asked him to fix some prod errors again.
We had to walk him through the process again
We expressed concerns to our superiors about his abilities because he was all theory, no hands on ability
They promoted him
We were sad
A few of us said "Fuck you guys, I'm going home"
They said OK
Now that guy is the only one that "knows" that code base
I get calls sometimes asking me questions.
I told them to pay me a consultant fee.
They said no
I said no
They called again
I laughed at them

Listen to the people who know when you ask them questions.
Listen to the people who know when they tell you there is a problem
Don't be like that company

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

- Take a course called "Mobile Application Development"
- Teacher is new and is thus lost on how things work because there is no formal training for them
- Teacher only knows Objective-C so that's all we're allowed to use
- Nobody owns a Mac and I think one or two people had an iPhone/iPad
- Only 4 public Mac computers are available to the school
- One to two people are on them frequently, limiting our time on them as well
- Not a part of the schools normal imaging and updating system, so we get to do it ourselves, which takes up like a week or two of classes (4 classes)
- This includes installing XCode and getting Apple IDs
- No real instructions are given besides "implement the APIs for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps into an app"
- Being an ass, for the final day instead of showing off the app we made I made a PowerPoint of my dislike of Objective-C and various struggles I ran into and how I decided not to make the app at all.
- shrug emoji

Disclaimer: non dev related.

So I went to a festival today. What is the most stupid question you can ask at a festival?
And the winner is
And the winner is...

'why are you sweating?'

THE WHAT? ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED?!?
DETAIL ONE: I'M AT A FUCKING FESTIVAL
DETAIL TWO: I'M DANCING MY ASS OFF
DETAIL TWO: EVERYONE IS MOTHERFUCKING FUCKING FUUUUUCK DANCING.

Mother of god, stupidity knows no fucking boundries 😲

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

Spent 4 hours today working on a monitor that wasn't working. someone had put by their garbage can in the rain. I dried it out for about 2 weeks before plugging it in. It turned on but when I plugged in the DVI, it did nothing.

Today, I pulled the ENTIRE thing apart because either I could find out what was wrong, or all is lost anyways. Who knows what the rain could do to it?

With no luck, I did a quick search online about the model and found that this one just had some defective firmware (Who knew monitors had filmware??) I installed it, ran it, it took about 20 seconds and it worked!

Lesson learned once again: google is your friend

TLDR: In defense of Powershell - the rant:

I don’t get the Powershell hate.

You don’t hate a screwdriver for not being able to turn a nut, you just *don’t use a screwdriver to turn a nut*

Once you recognize what the tool is good for and you don’t try to use it like Bash, it’s wildly powerful, and satisfying to use in a way Cmd.exe never was.

Cygwin or a Linux Subsystem can only go so far on a Windows computer. You’re dealing with two fundamentally different OS architectures. It makes sense you’d need different tools.

And like it or not, Microsoft owns the non-tech-user desktop , corners the non-tech server business market, and Active Directory is THE tool for managing Windows desktops on a large scale - So Wanblows is not going away anytime soon.

Automation without some weird ass sysVol batch login script is finally possible. Anyone who knows .Net classes can leverage their methods from directly within Powershell. Remote management of headless Windows servers is now a reality. If you have an Office 365 Exchange server you can literally Powershell remote to it for management, just like your favorite cloud hosted Linux distribution.

No one said Windows is a better OS, but an object based shell on an object based OS *makes sense*. It’s useful for its environment. Let it be.

!rant
I must be dreaming .... Honestly! I am with a client that knows what he wants and has no problem to express it in clear words. They understand my tech talk and talk back in tech as well. We are on the same page regarding best practises. They envy my work and have really good ideas and express constructive criticism. What is going on here? I must be in a parallel universe or something?
Okay, one downside... Coffee is not free but a cup is 20ct, which is quite alright imho anyway. Oh, the even bigger downside... Things have been so constructive that my time there is almost over since shit got actually done in the most efficient way ever!

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

NEVER ACCEPT to be the ONLY DEV in the company who knows the whole product!

I am in the position of being the only one who knows all modules, there are even modules I developed which no one else will be able to maintain as soon as I leave the company, which I am planning right now and this also makes me getting depressed about.

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

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

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

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.

The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.

In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.

40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...

Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow

Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow

Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to

Manager: uhm ok ... I see...

I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.

There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).

I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.

I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....

And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

The previous developer left no fucking documentation of how he developed this fucking website. Did I mention no one else in the company knows how he developed this fucking thing.

Fuck.

Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

About 2 months ago. My job fired half the dev staff including the only other web developer. I am a junior, and now the sole web developer. I have been yelled at for not working fast enough and not knowing the code base well enough. (I did a lot of Rails, and this is a Spring shop). I have daily panic attacks about coming to work and having to be here for 8 hours. I have never felt more abused. I'm constantly stressed, and drinking more than I should. All advice given to me has been "just stay there til you find something else or they fire you." but it feels like no one really knows how unhealthy this is for me. My one hope is that I didn't bomb this interview at a university. I fucking hate my job.

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

The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.

The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.

The documentation does not exist.

Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).

The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.

The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.

The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.

And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)

But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.

Before 10 years, a WordPress site hacked with sql injection. They had access to site, they modified many php files and installed commands to download random malwares from over the internet.

At first I didn't know that it hacked and I was trying to remove any new file from the server. That was happening every 1-2 days for a week.

Then I decided to compare every WordPress file with the official, it was too many files, and I did it manually notepad side notepad!! :/

Then I found about over 50 infected files with the malware code.

Cleaned and finished my job.

No one else knows that I did a lot of hard job.

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

It's my first week working at shithole.co (can i say that?). My boss is a micromanaging asshole who knows the bare minimum re: programming. He thinks css is hard (no offense). I'm fresh outta college. He expects me to be able to do a very complicated api development through an equally complicated authorization process. Every fucking day "Is it working yet?" [This is my first week on the job]. I don't think he's read the documentation and I don't think he understands how to. As I am typing this out I realize I'm more educated than this dumb ass. Oh, some more context. Our senior dev is working on a more important project So we don't have time to bother him? So I am doing his job for 1/10 the cost. Oh, and i'm not allowed to contact him because he is too important. When the app inevitably crashes and no one knows how to fix it. I will give them my nutsack to swallow (can i say that?).

Finally got a new job, but it's already a horror story not even 2 hours in (making this while on break)

Everyone here is an Intern, IT? Interns, Designers? Interns, HR? Interns.

The Person who I should've worked with got fired yesterday, and now I have to work all of his shit up from 0, Documentation? Fragmental, a few things here and there, but nothing really.

IT security also doesn't exist in the slightest, there is an Excel sheet called "Master_Passwords" and every single password is in Plaintext, written out for everyone to see. (at least they used "strong" passwords)

And the place also looks run down, theres PC's, Laptops, Mics, Cables etc. lying literally everywhere no-one knows what works and what doesn't (since everyone is an intern)

Not to mention the "Server Room" is an absolute mess itself, cables hanging from literally anywhere, powerstrips are ontop of servers, each rack has like 2 or 3 2U Servers, (in a 40u Rack) and there are 10 of them!

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

My co-workers hate it when I ask this question on a technical interview, but my common one is "what is the difference between a varchar(max) and varchar(8000) when they are both storing 8000 characters"

Answer, you cannot index a varchar(max). A varchar(max) and varchar(8000) both store the data in the table but a max will go to blob storage if it is greater than 8000.

No one ever knows the answer but I like to ask it to see how people think. Then I tell them that no one ever gets that right and it isn't a big deal that they don't know it, as I give them the answer.

Making an Android app for a group project. Of course, no one besides me in the team knows anything about Java, or Android, or life, apparently.

A guy "worked" on some small feature for 90 minutes last night before calling me for help. He can't comprehend git so he sends me a message containing his spaghetti code. I proceed to bang it out quickly the right way with him on a Skype call watching my screen but he isn't asking any questions or contributing at all. We have an approaching deadline so I am beyond coaching this guy.

We go to test it out and I had forgotten a line. Simple fix, but it prevents the feature from working as intended. Rather than being remotely helpful the guy gets an attitude about how I write buggy code and that the feature should be robust. I fix it and he slinks back to silence.

Cool. Thanks for the help bro. Glad you could contribute.

One of the biggest reality checks you will run into when starting your first dev related job - and which they don't teach you about in school - is that a lot of the time will be spent working with other people's code, and rewriting it into "your own" is rarely an option.

You might be super into making things, but not everyone manages to maintain that same spark while taking over a 15 year old project with fundamental issues that have to be triaged "for now" because you need a hotfix on this other specific thing out in prod before lunch.

There are no gods now. They left the company years ago and nobody knows why they used the windows registry as a user repo.

there is another team in our company that has its site in the US. we haven't been working with them for very long, but we do have some common topics on which we work loosely together and exchange some information from time to time. i have met the guys only once in person when they visited Germany.

PM asked one of the devs of this team if he could move to another time zone, so it would be easier for us in Europe to arrange meetings with him.

move to another timezone. within the US. to the other side of the country where there's noone he knows. also, no site of ours.
only so it's easier for PM to arrange fucking meetings with him.

can you believe that? i cringed so hard when PM told me about that. (of course the guy refused, shocked pikachu)
and when he thought aloud that maybe he should ask the guy to move to Germany, i told him that the colleague wouldn't do that and that this was a terrible idea. he was really surprised and asked "hmm, you think?"

dafuq, hell yeah i think?!

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

"Delete node_modules folder and execute npm install" is the js version for "reboot the machine". Often works, but no one knows exactly why.

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

I suddenly realized all the technical debt shit I told my boss would happen years ago given the way things were done/heading then... Just occurred pretty much all at once last week in the form of critical production issues...

The teams like:
-we need real time server process monitoring
-structured logging for apps
-containerization so one app didn't affect others

Me thinking: yes.... I told you so like 3/4 years ago when I first joined the team and kept repeating so much I got tired of saying at every annual review...

This is exactly what happens when you let technical debt grow and have no free time for developers to look into and fix then while they were small and not critical production processes... Or properly document and peer review them... (Got a shit pile of projects that no one knows how to use or even exists because the devs left the team) and they'll have a lot more when I finally leave... Hopefully this year.... If I can find another role and not need another medical procedure... (Doubtful)

I am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

This dude that i been helping on his project for free wants me to travel to his city(which is in a different country) to discuss the project and what's missing lmao hahahahahahahahahahahahaha yeah right.

Wondering how he managed to text with his head so far up his ass.

Fucking idiot.

Suuuure thing buddy, guess i will be paying for all my expenses as well using the money you have not given me? Fuck you think this is? If i agreed to help out it was to help one of your developers who so happen to be my boy and even he knows u is full of shit

Think this is my first rodeo? Bitch asked me to send him the project and i fucking denied it and he didn't like it. Said the code is his lmfao not ze fuck is not. No contract? Bitch your ass can come on over to Texas and demand it. Damn sure your dumbass is going to dislike demanding shit looking down the barrel of a .45

Fucking idiot

Not really hacking, but my roommate says otherwise. So we share a router in the apartment and I’m the only one that really knows how to access it, so of course I change the password and tell no one (not like they’ll try to get in anyway).
Occasionally set roommate likes to get blackout and play music very loud at 2am. To be petty, on those occasions I set up an RPi Zero to connect to the WiFi, restart it, and sleep for a minute, and repeat. He’s still convinced we are getting DDOSd, and suspects nothing.

Reason I don’t just set parental controls - he gets more frustrated when the WiFi appears for 10secs, the music is just about to start and shuts off again. So he gives up quicker. Otherwise, he resets the router and I have to set up everything from the start.

Here is the problem.

We all make mistakes. It's part of our lives and we learn a lot from it.

But you motherfucker, acting like an all-knowing being amongst all the developers. You think no one knows better than you. You learned something 2 years ago and you think nothing has been updated after that.

You make a mistake, you accept it and learn from it. But if you think you know everything, stop asking me to review your code. Fuck you, cocksucker.

TeamLeader: I need you to stop disagreeing with the decision of the management, the people in there are taking their decision for a reason.

IHateForALiving: When integration tests were failing, the management decided to comment out the ingration tests; god knows how many bugs slipped by.
When users had problems with the idiotic migration process the management designed, the management decided to remove down migrations; it took two weeks before the QA team started screaming, as all their machines were filled with garbage data.
I was writing type definitions for my code, you removed it. You effectively ensured the only person capable of working on that particular piece of code would be me.
I have been proposing for 8 months to make a unified scheduled jobs system, you all decided to create at least 5 different -and incompatible- implementations, at least 4 of them are total garbage with setTimeout, there's no way to ever unify them and God willing they never break, if they do there's NO WAY to find out even where tf they're hidden in the code.
Every time you were making one of those bad decision I was the only one warning you of the problems you were creating. The idiotic change of the day is going MongoDB+Angular: I can keep a low profile if you want, but when this blows up you can be damn well sure I'll handle my 2 weeks notice because there's no way on earth I'll be stuck with the aftermath of you lot taking technical decisions you are clearly unable to manage.

I am interviewing people for a job position with python knowledge.

My first question is how to reverse string and second one what’s the difference between set and list.
So far no one knows.

Fairly speaking I am asking only basic questions about what is decorator, generator, lambda. Also some basic data structure questions.

Is it to hard ?

I lost my faith in humanity.

I've run into problems with the app I'm working on, the problems are related to issues regarding code.

No in fact it's related the last guy who wrote the app, the code has no comments and the variable names make no sense, the only comments in the code are blocks of code... With no reason as to why it was commented.

I have to add in some checks to determine if a person that has logged in is a full member or not (full member has access to the feature I've added) and the way the guy has made this app works makes no sense to me at all.

I've tried my best to avoid all contact with his code because it makes me want to yell out in frustration.

But for this one case I have to work with what's there.

I know I've mentioned this before but I've hit my limit yet again.

And for those who don't know this guy managed to scrape together skeleton code from two apps to make part of this app, rather than using parts of the other apps he left out code that was specifically made for the other apps, (majority of the commented out code).

One app was a taxi app and from the looks of it the feature he used was to get GPS location (which I don't understand before Google maps is a think after all... The taxi app USES Google maps), the other app is some sort of funeral webcasting app (I found code imports for it, without any actual code).

I don't actual understand how this guy could put this together without not thinking "maybe this is a bad idea"

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live

I'm that psychopath right now..... Fuck that guy (don't know where he lives though)

It's about a guy that knows better.

I was working as a subcontractor on a bigger system. We (subs) were not allowed to deploy code, we had to wait for contractor to deploy.

One day I got an email that my code is bugged and that my feature is not working on production. I checked it on test env, everything was fine. Then I checked if the code I wrote was deployed. It was not.

I send an email explaining that if they deployed my code it would be working. Then I got a response. There was a bug in my code.

Another email. I asked how would they know? Do they have a test on their environment that failed?

No. There is one guy that READ my code and he said it should not work, so he will not deploy it. He was not a programmer, he was a business consultant responsible for the documentation.

His issue was that I used a function that was not in a class. So if the function is not declared it's obvious it will not work. I had to explain to him in another email, that you can use object of another class inside your class and then call a function, that is not in your class. It was the last time this guy blocked my deploy.

TL;DR, I had to explain a non-dev how object composition works in order to have my code deployed. Took four emails.

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

Sooo I've been working on an ancient php 5.6 project that did not have any documentation and was a homemade "framework" created 7 years ago. The original creator is long gone and no one else knows a lot about this project.

When I first looked into it I almost immediately noticed the security flaws...

Old outdated libraries
a "development" feature to easily turn dev mode on/off
BY A GET PARAMETER!

it spits out full sql queries and php warnings -.-

Oh and did I mention that the site is a webshop.... and has a backdoor password?
AND THAT THE CUSTOMER REQUESTED THAT?

Since fucking when did "bare metal" mean just running on an OS?? At a conference and literally everyone is like "we got kubernetes running on bare metal", got super excited for a bit because just the idea of that sounds amazing but they're using it as slang for "basically not in a container or vm."

Nothing exciting at all. Now we're patting ourselves on the back for getting software working without it being preconfigured as a container or a VM image. No one knows how to do anything any more. MUCH too much abstraction going on.

I guess it keeps me more employable, but the state of the world from a developer standpoint is just sad.

(For reference, this is what the first sentence of "Bare Metal" looks like on wikipedia "In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.")

**Me, while working on sql based project**

Manager: Does anyone knows java! Want a sample login screen written in java.

**I'm the only one in my team to know java, thus raised my hand**

Me: It's done. Mailed you the .java file.

Manager: I can see my password

Me: I fuckn hate myself. ***Forgot to set password field as password type***

Manager: you are no different than others.

Me: Yeah..😶 **f@#& you**

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

When I first got in this companie, with 3 other people, one of the first thing they told us was about a "rule" that we never deploy on Friday's or at the end of the day, but no one else in the company knows about it. It's the department's little secret 👌

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

In a former company we had a CEO that was no developer but thought he knows better just because of googling stuff.
One meeting was a very ridiculous one. He told us which technology we should use for the new project. All of us developers objected and agreed on something better.
It ended in he yelling at us and calling us stupid and incompetent. This meeting lasted almost a whole day.
I left the company soon after.

So apparently there was a prod issue all day today because some server app couldn't start up.

The error was caused by missing Params...

And seems everyone that got asked to look at it are pretty clueless.

I looked at the text msgs now cuz my phone wouldn't stop vibrating from notifs (yes it got that bad) and I'm thinking, of all the ppl you guys could've asked, no one reached out to me... Who well knows exactly it works, and how to fix it.

But the issue with the team is everyone works on everything but most people have no idea how the apps actually work...

Jack of all trades, master of none...

Anyways, sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos ain't too bad either....

So, I'm living in a completely computer illiterate family and I was called to help my father with something on a Laptop where he wanted to stream his favorite Soccer-Club.

So I walk up to him, ask what's wrong, and he says (roughly translated from German) "That thing doesn't work!"

And I'm just like ((Wat u mean))
So I ask him to explain the problem in detail.
Apparently his streaming service wasn't loading his stream.

Well damn I say, try searching for the problem on Google and find a solution.
((But no no no imma just call my son for everything that's freaking wrong with tech, he sure knows what to do))

As I'm not that experienced with Webservices as of yet, I had no idea what to do.

He was fucking furious!

"You always act like you know everything about tech and programs and stuff and can't even help me with fixing this Stream-Thing?!"

I responded simply by saying "It's not my area of work!"

Seems like he didn't know the difference between TECH-JESUS and hobbyist software engineer.

So I stand there and he just goes on one of these typical boomer tech illiterate rants, of which I'm sure you can imagine enough being on this platform.

tl;Dr; It pisses me of big time how people are not even trying to understand technology, nor attempting to help themselves by eG. Googling some simple problem, but rather just ask around and then being pissed off if the asked person just doesn't know the answer or can't help!

Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

Best part of being a dev? Rock star status when things are going well: had to get a fix out by 18:00, boss walks by as I'm watching something on YouTube and tells me the client called and wanted to be sure we'd have it done in time, told him not to worry and went back to my video. Pushed the fix at 17:30, and tomorrow I'll be in the same position: every last minute fix delivery only grows my reputation for getting critical last-minute fixes out in time... As skeptical as my boss was at the time when he walked past and saw me on YouTube he had to he polite because he knows how crucial I am to this project

I think tomorrow I'm going to work on my own project and slack off, no one will be able to tell me different

What can we do with a boss who urinates in a cup in his office and then dumps it in the kitchen sink even when we (all women) are sitting there eating lunch?

We are certain of what is in the cup because it smells, is yellow, and it sits right on his credenza in plain view. He’s even left it outside the office, forgetting to empty it.

A few weeks ago I was washing my lunch dishes and he dumped it right on top of my stuff. I was pretty much in shock, I just couldn’t believe it.

Is there something wrong here that I’m not getting? He’s the owner, the boss, in his 70’s, and very respected, but I don’t understand this. No one knows what to say. We feel that if we said something, he would deny it and since he’s the boss, who knows what would happen. Is there any way to approach this? The only other males in the office are related to him. Someone did mention it to one of them, but nothing has changed.

Q:Why should a professor teach things that aren't in the source book?
A: so he can get an exam that not even himself can answer properly!
Q: But why?
A: no one knows the answer. It's one of the philosophic questions that has no answer. But maybe to hurt his students!

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

It's sad. When developers create the application and ONLY know how to lunch it by clicking that green button in the IDE, having no clue how to package and launch it properly...

it makes me sad.

Now I'm supposed to dockerize an application no one knows how to launch outside the IDE.

I feel JS has taken over...

The good.

Easy to learn, thus everyone knows it

The bad.

Everyone knows it, so npm has disgusting code that's used in prod.

Npm itself is still an unstable mess at times.

No one knows what it is to be a good programmer .

Dozens of frameworks every year since everyone thinks they can make it a bit better.

Classes still suck , no interfaces !

Applied to a Jr. Dev job and was hired as a Digital Marketer — I can deal with this, I’m AdWords & Analytics certified. What I can’t abide is that I spent the last year working my ass off learning to code and the person next to me with the Jr. Dev position only uses DIVI and has zero inclination to study, learn or write basic HTML & CSS—much less PHP. I’m not an expert by any means but I love programming, I love the problem solving, the challenges and the culture of it all. So far, and these are only two examples, I’ve shown him how to use the target attribute to open a page as a new tab, and how to register a nav in the functions.php file to create a menu but he is unwilling to even attempt it. Rather, he told me that I was too technical and that no one would be using code in this day and age.

For the record, I think DIVI is a cool platform, it’s clear that my boss knows nothing about code to be fair and I love my job— this is my only issue so far😂 I just needed to rant.

BE GONE CLOWN!!!! MAY YOU BE CAST BACK UNTO THE DEPTHS FROM WHICH YOU HAVE SPRUNG!!!!!

🪄✨

👻👹👺

🤡

can't wait to be absolutely fuck you rich while the clowns continue to fumble around in the sandbox for the next 5 years 🪣⛏️😂😂😂

all those years, crouched over a laptop, learning React, then TypeScript, then PostgreSQL, then .NET, then React Hooks, then Redux Toolkit, then Golang, then GraphQL, and even RabbitMQ and gRPC mixed in... more and more and more............ IT'S TIME TO SPREAD MY WINGS AND FUCKING FLY BABY!!!!!

why work for clueless clowns when your own technical know-how is literally 1000x (or perhaps infinitely) theirs? Was I an idiot? Yes, I was! Way too nice and I bought into the hype fake idiot brain culture, but now I've finally woken up. Time to ascend to the stars by myself.

Cheers devRant, this 🤡 is finally going to transform into a 👨‍🚀🚀

You may not hear from me for a while sadly, but I'll be sure you guys get the first shoutout - see you on 🪐

Being a programmer in a scientific discipline can be infuriating.

using "no one" ="almost no one"
using everyone = "almost everyone"

1. No one knows what even the very idea of good practice is. And everyone refuses to learn. 3k lines of repetitive copy pasted main. 500 lines of plotting method.

2. Raw C-style pointer based array creation. Won't use develope array libraries because what if development stops. FUCKING HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR CODE WHAT IF DEVELOPMENT ON YOUR CODE STOPS. FUCK.

3. LOOP VARIABLES DECLARED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE METHOD WHY.

4. Everyone wants to make modular, independent code. No one wants to use OOP. NOPE. ALL IN ONE FILE. WRITE C++ LIKE A FUCKING PYTHON NOTEBOOK. FUCK.

5. LIBRARIES OH MY GOD PLEASE DO NOT CODE UP YOUR MATRIX MULTIPLICATION. PLEASE DO NOT TRIPLE LOOP IT. NO. THE LINEAR ALGEBRA LIBRARY WILL STAY IN DEVELOPMENT.

6. Please realize that literally not one comment over an 1800 line file does not help anyone.

FUCKING. WHY. WHY ARE WE SCIENTISTS SO GOOD AT SCIENCE AND SO FUCKING SHIT AT THE CODE THAT MAKES OUR SCIENCE HAPPEN. WHY. FUCKING. WHY. FUCK.

Stand up on Zoom...
Day 1: No one knows who will speak their daily tasks first or last
Day 45: There is mutual order which appears out of the blue and everyone has their own sort of roll number for speaking in stand-up meeting😂

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

!Rant

My boss just gave me a task "deploy this project today".
1. Made by a junior dev, and I have to take responsibility to upload it in this short time (no blame to jun dev, she's new and need to practice)
2. In a crm that I personally never used before, I need to study it and adapt at least the paths
3. Task was given at 13.48 during lunch pause.
But
But
The best is yet to come
Wait

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ready?
4. He doesn't know the server where to deploy it!
No one knows.
The IT doesn't answer, but still, I have to deploy a project TODAY (2h and 47 minutes left eob).

Got a job as a database manager, they wanted me to update their sql server and some of their .net apps. Turns out their sql server had no databases and all their data was stored in an ms access 2003 applications that was using windows for workgroups security!!! It also had no interface, hundreds of tables and queries and there were multiple access db it was connected to. To make things worse the person who built all this stuff used acronyms for everything he did, table names, variables, queries and even bloody window folders!!! It was hard as hell to figure out what anything ment. Oh and the .net apps were asp sites that heavily used dll for storing his code and no one knows where the original source code for them are. Did I also mention there were no comments for any of the code, no database dictionary, no notes or anything.

So apparently I'll be rebuilding everything from scratch and transferring over the data to sql server. AND NO MORE F**KING ACRONYMS!!!!!!!

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

IF YOU UPDATE AN ADM PLATTFORM FOR FUCKS SAKE DON'T DO THE FOLLOWING THINGS:

1. ONLY DOCUMENTATE IT IN A POWERPOINT

2. WRITE DOWN IPs AND PORTS ONLY ON A WHITE-BORD

3. MOVE TOOLS TO OTHER SUBNETS OR DOMAINS WITHOUT PROPERLY KNOWING THE WAYS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THEM

4. USE YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS AS RESET OPTION FOR LICENCE-MANAGEMENT ACCESS IF NO ONE KNOWS THE PW

5. LEAVE THE COMPANY THE DAY AFTER THE UPGRADE IS DONE

Because the guy who has to take care of the upcoming problems is not going to like you!

BUT having to deal with all of this at once would not be a problem if your, so called team (30 People who work with those applications e.g. as test-engineers) would actually work together instead of having that "not my daily business, I am going to drink coffee" attitude.

Apparently I am the only one who has enough balls to see, admit, and report a problem to our leadership.
This always leads to Me fixing the issue...
....that's alright I am learning a lot...
...BUT IF A TEAM-MATE, WHO HAS THE SAME DEGREE AS I AM GOING TO GET, LEAVES EARY BECAUSE: "HE DOES NOT KNOW WHATS WRONG", IT TRIGGERS ME!!!

- The apprenticeship guy

PS Needless to say hundreds of clients have access to those systems and I worked through a shittload of official tool docs just to get to know the tools first...

It’s still to easy.
I hope one day software will get so complicated no one will be able to fix it.

Somewhere in future :
- government established law that new AI system is only one that can accept new law
- every financial operation is monitored by government supervision AI
- we developed robots that are taking care of us
- everyone is happy cause work for money, shelter and food is now optional
- education is fully digital and managed by AI
- whole knowledge is based on asking questions, we don’t need to write and read anymore
- we use one common language and our knowledge specialization increased

A little more time passed by in this utopia.
- after power loss most of data got corrupted
- last man who knew how to restore backup died last night ( R.I.P. admin we will not forget you )
- people trying to save knowledge base to rebuild part of this civilization but no one knows how to make a paper because it haven’t been used for ages
- we decided to put what is left from knowledge on stone but we forgot how to write since everything is audio or video and most of time we were spending in VR
- someone decided that we draw some pictures
- all of use are now drawing animal heads like we remember ourselves from VR, let people know our tech is good
- some people love cats so they try to make cats from stones
- volcano eruptions destroyed most of stones that we made

Starving waiting for another respawn of my DNA sequence. I hope we manage to survive this time.

At my job there is little to none documentation of the software. Software is from 2000 and updated since...

Imagine the features no one knows about.

I'm not much a fan of JavaScript. In fact, I am not very fond of any dynamic language, but JavaScript is one of my least favorites.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS for all of my web serving. Why would I do that? Am I a masochist? Yes.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS because having the same language on client and server side is something that web has never really seen before, not in this scale. Something I really really love with NodeJS is socket connections. There's no JSON parsing, no annoying conversion of data types. You can get network data and use it AS IS. If you transmit over socket using JSON, as soon as that data arrives on the server, it is available to use. It gets me so hard.

JavaScript is built to be single-threaded, and this is rooted deep into the language. NodeJS knows this isn't gonna work. And while there's still no way to multi-thread, they still try their best and allow certain operations (Usually IO) to run async as if you were using ajax.

With modern versions of the language, the server and client side can share scripts! With the inclusion of the import keyword, for the first time I have ever seen, client and server can use the same fucking code. That is mindblowing.

Syntax is still fluffy and data types are still mushy but the ability to use the same language on both sides is respectable. Can't wait for WebASM to go mainstream and open this opportunity up to more languages!

I wanna make you feel what you have brought into my house!!

I was working with security cameras once in a home automation project. One of those camera particularly stand out by offering a cgi without password request to view and change the current passwort and username.

Seriously wtf is wrong with you? I mean this thing automatically connects to an internet service offering everyone to connect to it with that passwort and username. And I know some of you might say "hey chill the cgi is only available on the wifi" - dammit no. Security is a lifestyle do it complete or get the fuck out. God knows what other mistakes there might be hidden in that thing screaming out to everyone to watch me taking a shit.

But that's not the end of it. My company arranged a call to the technical support of that camera so that I can explain the problem and a patch gets released. Those guys didn't give a shit about it and were even laughing at me. Fuck you!

So whoever is responsible - I will find you - and you will never see me coming.

> be me
> started using greentext on devrant a while ago
> semi successful rants
> people start using greentext too
> lookMomIDidIt.avi
> be happy
> no one knows I started it
> maybe it wasn't even me
> sit in shower
> try not to cry
> cry a lot

Shit. That's not a rant about coding

> fuck microsoft

Code comments #1: A way to document bad code that wasn't reduced to it's essentials and thus unreadable. Bad.

Code comments #2: A way to explain for non-programmers how the code works. Wrong place.

Code comments #3: Company policy. No one really knows why, but others do that, so we better do it to. The management sucks.

Code comments #4: Because some hip methodology/guru describes how to document code. After a few years, when the methodology has been (unofficially) forgotten, everyone still comments the code the same way. The old management sucked.

Code comments 5#: For insecure programmers who want to convince them self they understand the code they've written. Maybe apply at McDo?

Code comments #6: Some programmers are apparently paid by lines of code. Possibly understandable.

// Comments, anyone?

Running a wild UPDATE statement against an inventory database, it was chaotic and didn't have backups.... yea I know 😅 the backup service died god knows when and no one noticed. I was only new at the time so #notMyFault

UPDATE stock_on_hand = 0; WHERE id IN(1,2,3,4,5,88,972,7388);
# rows affected 1,234,567,890

> I think I almost died inside.

Oh the fun that mess was to clean up.
The positive outcome of this was, we had backups working again not long after and the inventory counts where accurate after that stock take.

Why is it that CS students with no industry experience lament about HTML all the time?

I don't get the weird obsession with talking about how it's "not a programming language"
No one who knows what they're talking about is claiming it is.

Hyper Text *Markup* Language.

Markup is in the name.

We got new dev leader. He has zero experiences in our field of working but he thinks, he knows everything.

He suppose to manage our work and plan development, but he is just changing our functionalities. When you try to explain to him, this wouldn't work, he just doesn't listen and try to convince you his way is better.

He also hire one of his friend. And now he is hiding him from me, because his friend is working on the same thing as I do. No idea why, but we could work together.

I am so sick of his shit that I started to look for a new job. I can't stand such an egoistic person.

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

Some of my colleagues have a joint birthday party, I'm here with them drinking beer. A friend here knows that actually today is my birthday. No one else knows and I hate boasting about myself and bringing attention to myself. I'm fucking sad today... Should have gone home to my family. If you have a beer at hand, have one on me!

Many people / engineers around me talk about trendy stuff like Cybersecurity or AI and show off what great encryption and neuronal networks they 'have built' ( I would rather say 'using').

I kinda get the feeling of 'Everbody talks about it - no one really knows what's goin' on inside (especially those guys who hate math and even algorithms).'

Am I just stupid or does somebody else here feel the same way? I mean people have been doing serious research about this stuff for years. And currently many kids are coming up with it as if it is easy stuff like the bubble sort.

"We totally know everything about SEO, you should trust us and pay us so your website is #01 because we know how Google ranks their shit" (not literally)

No fuck you. No one knows how google ranks pages. No one. And your pseudo information is even free to find on the first google result about seo that is above yours. Oh look, they must be better than you with that.

Why it is so difficult to find an internship for a Computer Science Student?
I do have good resume, I am full of energy, I can spend a lot of time on solving problems and development. I can learn new things.
But everyone wants a intern who knows everything and can do miracle for them. No one is giving chance to ones who are in learning phase. Just try us and you will see the potential in us.
Been trying to get a good internship from last 3 months. 😔

My previous boss has bad habit of relieving employees. He find out his links in a employee
s new company and then god knows what he did with that.

For, that reason I did not mention my current company when I switch but today I tried to find out those people who left before me it was shocking that no one updated their current company.

Creepiness of the former boss was real. Everyone was scared.

To all web devs adding cookie-nags on your companys pages: stop that! Now! No where does that cookie law require you to ruin your site with nagging popups. Where's the focus on usability?

And the rule about informed consent? Which normal user (like my mother) knows what that means anyway? I call bs! Politicians, don't get me started.

Every user on the internet goes JMIGA: Just Make It Go Away, click whatever making that crap disappear.

What user will go "holy shit, they're using cookies!! I'm outta here!" No one in the history of the internet, that's who. Argh.

FUCKING FUCK ANGULAR!!!!
LIKE FUCK IT IN THE ARSE AND BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER WHILE LAUNCHING A MISSILE ON IT TO BE SURE!

(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸━┸

So I am making something on angular and I got everything running in ng serve(development environment) , after handling all issues and showing it to my boss man he approves and asked to put it up on prod for a demo , doesn’t sound like an issue , I make the prod build on cli and BAM! 16 errors ? No issues right?, I’ll just google the issue. Googles.... there aren’t no clear solutions to it as the angular version keeps changing and nobody knows what broke it, I mean people have the issue,but like 100 reasons that can cause it,
HOLY LORD RELEASE A NEWER VERSION AFTER MENDING THE OLD ONE
But nooooooo!

Angular Dev:We fucked this one, lol what should we do boss man?
Angular boss man: lol just leave it, we need to build the new version with newer bugs,

P.S. I like angular, but it’s like a underdeveloped framework, too many issues and too many changes

uSE AnY pRogrAmMinG L@ngu@g3 yOu liKe.

1nTervi3weRs Do N0t CarE aBouT tHe L@nGuAge.

Fuck you. Stop asking time complexity or space complexity of functional code. No one fucking knows.

!rant
I saw a devrant user posting something about "the cockroach" that survives in the company no matter what so I knew I had to rant about something similar. I worked with a guy and his ability to talk shit is in direct proportion to his salary. The guy watches youtube all day, searches for things to buy, goes to vacations and no one knows what he does. :)) plot twist: he just forwards ( not sends ) emails from the business to a software provider. Did I mention that he has the highest salary( don't ask how I found out ).
Anyhow, the guy is winning at life, no one gives two shits about him, he is always hiding and running from work. While writing this I'm actually amazed by his skill, how do you end up like this? He reminds me of Wally from Dilbert!

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

We had a company feedback meeting the other week; an airing of grievances so to speak. One of the complaints was about how when someone calls 911, no one knows exactly where it goes.

The way he phrased it, we all though it was a metaphor. But as they talked about it, someone said, "Wait, are you .. you're taking about real 911 calls? Like this isn't a metaphor?"

All VoIP gets routed via the central office; so when someone from the California office dials 911 on a phone, they get a 911 dispatch in Illinois. 😶

Fuck, I only need to hire ONE fullstack developer who fucking knows what he's talking about and not trying to weasel their way into this job. I tell them that there are no annoying managers, no KPI, no bullshit, I thought this is kinda valuable, but no

How hard can it be?

Oh so day continued....

My boss just asked me before I left... You know that report we wanted automated, you said you'd get it done by today, is it done yet?

Me: well uh who dragged me into a PROD issue because no one else knows how to investigate... EVEN THOUGH I BUILT AND SHOWED U HOW TO USE THEM... SEVERAL TIMES. (no i didn't say this last but that's what went on in my head).

Oh and I figured out what the issue was...

!story

As is the case with many of you, I am also the de facto technology fixer for my family, and usually the first one they call when something goes wrong.

Usually it's a 'something wants to update, should I do it?' simple issue. Other times I have to remote connect to see why Word isn't uploading templates correctly or whatever.

Yesterday was different though.

Me: So whatcha need?
Mom: Well, my office has recently wanted me to be remote-capable in case they need me for something and they don't have the right people to fix it (she's been working at the same office for 20+ years and knows basically everything)
Me: Okay. So I guess they're setting up a VPN for this?
Mom: Yes. And I was calling because they might try and install it on my personal laptop and I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned about our IT guys being able to look at or steal all my personal data.

I then proceeded to explain how a VPN works and that convincing her company to provide her with a separate computer would be the safest option and whatnot. But I was honestly really surprised that she was concerned to begin with.

For a while now, it seems there's been one story after another of companies being irresponsible with their customer's data, with little to no reprocussion or action that could really make a difference.

But as a direct result, we're now getting to the point where even the tech illiterate are becoming more aware of how this is effecting them.

It gave me hope for the future in an industry where many times there is very little. And I hope it does for you as well.

Thanks, mom. I'm proud of you.

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

So, here is the worst experience, not one.. but recent two of many of the encounters I had with my OOP teacher... (I am in Second Year of Engineering). Lets Call him T.
To give a background of T... He knows nothing but acts like he is the master... you'll get to know this...

Incident #0:
*me developing a website for a client and T just bumps in*
T: Hey, what are you upto.
M:Nothing sir, just some Web-dev stuff.
T: What languages do you use?
M: I am currently using embedded ruby.
T: No no, I meant, what languages do you use for web-dev?
*inner* M: Ok, try to act stupid... He is not worth of all the knowledge.
M: Sorry sir, I just use simple HTML-CSS.
T: Ohh, I use Wordpress... It's a great language to build websites.
*inner* M: He has no idea what WP really is, he is a fuckshit.
T: It's so simple and easy, that you code for Desktop view, press Ctrl-M and then it automatically makes it for mobile view.
*inner* M: Bursts out into laughter
M: OK sir, will look over it.

Incident #1:
*He is teaching, suddenly topic comes of Oracle Certification for Java*
T: I know many of you have idea about java, but do you have what it takes to be an OCJP..
*inner* M: LOL...
T: It is a really hard thing, and I can bet... I can bet *he did repeat that twice* that no one from you can even qualify OCJP.
*inner* M: It's time... It's time
M: Excuse me sir, first of all it's OCA... OCJP does not exist anymore... And secondly, I am an OCA...
*inner* M: Yeah... Fuck you bitch!
*assucimg inner* T:Fuck, asshole..$#@#%@!@$@%#

And whole class was like -> o.O

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

Even though I have 500 reputation on StackOverflow I'm afraid to ask a question! Coz other devs can be really down right mean! No one knows everything, we are all here to learn. Some ppl don't understand that they too started like this.

Ok, so I REALLY HATE ChromeOS. MY story is this: I'm using Chrome, and I want to get a file from my computer to my phone. Simple enough, I just plug my phone in, and... oh, wait! First it has to open two new windows for my phone's two storage areas. Ok, fine. I close the windows, get my file prepared, and I click/drag it over to the folder I want. Except, the computer doesn't FUCKING see it as a device anymore. It knows it's attached, but it doesn't fucking communicate with it. Ok, maybe it's a cord problem. Nope! Same issue. Maybe I need to update? Nuh-uh! That doesn't work either, since my computer's not supported anymore! And, the cherry on the top of the fucking shitcake that this whole situation is, the Files app, the one that you use to view the stuff on your hard disk? OH, IT JUST GOES AND CRASHES. I can open it! Nothing shows up. No devices work. It's just stuck like that until I reboot my machine.

God... FUCKING damnit, chromeOS.

Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...

Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.

Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.

So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...

Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.

Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)

One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.

They still use the old shit for billing.

Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"

No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...

Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.

tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity

Tuesdays at work suck. This is something I've put a lot of thought into.

Take Monday for instance, we love to hate him, when it comes to Mondays we all know the score we tell Monday where he can go and he takes that and owns it. He knows we hate him and we all know where we stand.

Wednesday is hump day, not great but we know we're halfway through the week. Thursday gets us a little excited cos we can see the end of the week.

Friday is the one we've been waiting for and we love him, Saturday and Sunday are bliss.

Tuesday... What's Tuesday got? It's just a day, there's nothing going on with Tuesdays.

Well except this week, in the UK we had Monday off as a statutory vacation, so this week, this week Tuesday is the day we love to hate, he's now got all this beginning of the week rage directed at him. The other days are unaffected, Thursday and Friday still have their thing, Wednesday still marks the half way point.

Monday has buggered off and let Tuesday be something for a day, I don't think he can take it. If he could Monday would probably go into retirement. Monday probably has more hatred directed towards it than Katie Hopkins (and that's saying something).

In short, no, no I do not want to get out of bed and go to work today, but I will, cos that's just what we do, but fuck you Tuesday.

Fuck you with a bag of spanners...

...Sideways...

...With habanero sauce...

... And a pineapple.

Image relevant.

Tried getting puter to talk, puter no want to talk.
Me sad.
Me tell puter to stay put and listen at 4444.

External device doesn't do shit.
Me sad.

Read the docs. Nothing. Written like a 5 year old would.

Be angry, how do I put external device into tcp/ip mode? No one knows, the docs don't know.

I get frustrated and pull the USB cable out of it.
Mfw it starts spitting out requests to my server with no end in sight.

Mfw the requests all just repeat.
Mfw the docs tell me to acknowledge a request I have to respond with a content type of
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
How.

Not possible.
Mfw I decide to dissect a request to check it's accept header.

Mfw it says text/plain.
Great, no idea in what format the thing expects it.

Try writing out query string plainly.

It fucking works.

Why can't people just learn to write proper documentation.

We are a small company, and our CEO and CTO attends our daily standups(not sure why)

At the end our CTO, after a little discission with our PM, goes: “This” is more importent and should be gone first - its money to the company.

Pm: Fine but then “that” wont be worked on for now.
Cto: ohh okay, but “this” is really importent, so do it first.

Standup done, people returns to work.
1 minut later, Cto comes into the dev room.

Cto: “something else” is also really really importent.
Pm: ok, so then we do “something else” instead and we will put “this” on standby for now.
Cto: and remember “operation” has the highest priority of all.

For fuck sake... just pick one or decide what it is you want....

Cto has no clue to what he is doing. Does not have a long term plan, other then get money into the company based on really short term goals.

Easy to say im not his biggest fan, and I am a 100% sure he knows this.

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

!rant
Warning : This rant is long and is a rant asking for help and suggestions. If you will read and dont leave any comments, please go search other rants. Thanks.
-----------------------------------
Hi, fellow ranters. In our community, we have a tech class where teens (teens here mean 14yo -15yo) come to learn computer stuffs. Teens here are selected by a test and an interview. There are some teens who are f***ing awesome. One of them are proficient in scratch. (yeah, the orange cat) Another is awesome at PhotoShop, and the other loves windows xp. The teacher uses Microsoft Visual C++ IDE made in the 1990s. The kid sitting to my left made flappy bird with gamemaker. About 10 to 11 teens doesnt know what ctrl+alt+del does in windows and never did programming before... 3 among them always brings coke and oreos and eats super loudly. CRACK! And I bet no one knows about git.
Ok. Enough for the awesome teens. Now what we learn.
We learn C! Yes, C. We learned for, if else, switch and all those stuffs, then learned variables, which made other students who never did programming before be (―,.―).
Next class we will learn about functions in 3 hours. Then array and pointer in 3 hours. Thats it for c programming. Then we do some unnecessary stuffs and time for the finals.
We need to make a project with up to 4 teens as one team. Now I am asking you awesome ranters to suggest some projects for about 4 pros and 16 noobs can do. 10 hours are given in class and we can do in other times by ourselves in home. What should we do? I bet many of them will say to make ascii art in c which is dull and I have no thoughts of doing that.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
To see my skills, go to my profile page.
| Comments below
v

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

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

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

I'm currently working on a feature that no one likes. Everyone knows that it will be removed soon because the users won't understand it, but it still has to be implemented due to client-side Management madness.

Good thing: the contract with this client expires in 3 weeks :)

anytime anyone asks me to write a solution to fizzbuzz - i do it in brainfuck because even if i screw up...no one knows. :P

++++++++++[>++++++++++<-]>>++++++++++>->>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-->+++++++[->++
++++++++<]>[->+>+>+>+<<<<]+++>>+++>>>++++++++[-<++++<++++<++++>>>]++++
+[-<++++<++++>>]>>-->++++++[->+++++++++++<]>[->+>+>+>+<<<<]+++++>>+>++
++++>++++++>++++++++[-<++++<++++<++++>>>]++++++[-<+++<+++<+++>>>]>>-->
---+[-<+]-<[+[->+]-<<->>>+>[-]++[-->++]-->+++[---++[--<++]---->>-<+>[+
+++[----<++++]--[>]++[-->++]--<]>++[--+[-<+]->>[-]+++++[---->++++]-->[
->+<]>>[.>]++[-->++]]-->+++]---+[-<+]->>-[+>>>+[-<+]->>>++++++++++<<[-
>+>-[>+>>]>[+[-<+>]>+>>]<<<<<<]>>[-]>>>++++++++++<[->-[>+>>]>[+[-<+>]>
+>>]<<<<<]>[-]>>[>++++++[-<++++++++>]<.<<+>+>[-]]<[<[->-<]++++++[->+++
+++++<]>.[-]]<<++++++[-<++++++++>]<.[-]<<[-<+>]+[-<+]->>]+[-]<<<.>>>+[
-<+]-<<]

No one of my family knows exactly what I'm doing for living x)

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

Worst experience with managers.

Joined new company.

My work experience, knowledge and everything else was upto the mark(exceeded at some places) with their requirements. I was handling full technology stack for previous company.

But while negotiating he declined me salary I asked for because previous company was small (startup with no big name, it shut down after few years) also previous company payscale was low so they offered me increment based on that payscale( which was low compared to salary they offer for same experienced person).

He also hired one more guy who was from big company with same experience, but he got more salary than me. Later I came to know that he knows little compared to me and most of the time manager asked him to take help from me for coding.

Now at the time of increment he is offering me increment with which my salary is still less that the other guy.

I think its time to leave.

Follow up on a previous rant:

I visited a customer to talk about the reporting discrepancy between two applications.

It turns out the applications were custom built by outsourced developers from Russia, that communicate with each other through a byzantine (and completely undocumented) series of web services, excel import/export tasks, and a customized SSRS environment.

These are spread across at least half a dozen servers, some on-premise and some cloud based, there are at least 3 SQL servers (2 running 2005, one running 2000), a 10 year old local install of TFS (which no one knows a username/password for), and who-knows-what-else.

They laid off their entire IT team years ago, and they have no backups.

I'm not certain anyone there even understands what the software is supposed to be doing beyond the most general terms.

No one knows if they even have source code.

Biggest case of "nope!" I've encountered in more than 20 years of IT experience.

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

Things that I will do during the next few weeks at work because I am an asshole:

Write an entire CLI utility in Rust for internal processes, no one on my city understands or even knows that Rust exists.

Write a small desktop app as proof of concept for another department that had made the idea some time ago in either: GnuSTEP Obj-C or Lazarus Pascal for the same reason as the Rust application.

Job security people. And I have a tendency to write things in stuff that no one else uses.

Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something

Well I asked what Wednesday could bring in my last rant.

Potential redundancy apparently. Company I work for has just been bought and no one knows if any jobs are safe.

The question is do I still have a interviewing suit? (One that fits)

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In my project group, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.

What is worse than React native? A crash in flutter ....

They need to work on their stack trace all it's errors lead to framework assertion failed, but which fucker in my code caused it....

No one knows, time to play cat and mouse with this thing 😒

Today our computer science coordinator went to me when we had another lesson on the computers. After a few moments she came to ne and said: “Can you come with me?”

I left the classroom with her and she said: “I’m happy to see you”
I didn’t expect that because she’s jealous and doesn’t like me. But of course she had again found something to invent.

Then it started:
C: “Did you try to install something”
Me: “No. Why?”
C: “What did you try to install, because my antivirus is telling me that it contains a virus.”
Me: “Nothing”
C: “It was on (my personal site)”
Me: “Yes, I visited my own site to see how it looked in Edge. As I don’t use any Windows device.”
C: “That’s the virus”
Me: “It’s a simple HTML file with CSS. No JS or so.”
C: “MY computers aren’t here for experimenting. I can see more than you think.”

I got back to class and told it to a friend.
She really is an idiot. Because her pictures are on a 50 mb “server” from our ISP that everyone can access. But she can see anything. Curious why she didn’t see that that friend also visited my site...

Fuck her. I’m asking myself if she even knows what HTML is as she will teach us how to program with scratch, where you simply place blocks.

PS: the antivirus didn’t show anything. I downloaded the same one and shows me nothing. She’s just inventing.

I see a lot of talk about complex numbers, and yet
for all they are worth, I have not once been
able to find an explaination on how to calculate
them by hand, namely the real component.
For example
(-5)**0.5
(1.3691967456605067e-16+2.23606797749979j)

2.23606 is obviously just the square root of 5, but where the hell did 1.369 come from?

Apparently no one fucking knows, and no site I've found gives a simple explanation for someone new to math in general.

"use a calculator", "hit a button",

How about no.

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

in college ages ago, professor was "teaching" us overloading in C++, he goes something like this:

"so you can overload a function by changing the number of arguments, argument types, or method return type"

I dare put my hand up: "emm .. you can't overload by just changing the return type"

"you can"

"but, but.. how would the compiler know which overload I'm invoking when I call the method?"

pause..

"it depends on the type of the variable receiving the method call result"

"what if I call the method without assigning the result to a variable?"

agitated by now: "ah these are complex compiler concepts that are too complicated blah blah"

although I was unhappy, it was useful to realize no one knows everything

No one in my family has ever been a developer. No one understood what a developer does so I just was labeled the one who knows about computers. Thankfully my immediate family was ok with me studying computers and I wasn't pushed to be a doctor or lawyer like most stereotypical ones do.

Reporting is not fun..

Scenario 1:
* A user says they need to export certain data from our system..
* Developer W makes report called "Foo detail report"

Scenario 2:
* A user says they need this report to also show some extra fields
* Developer X makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields)"

Scenario 3:
* A user says they need this report to be run with a different search criteria
* Developer Y makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar"

Scenario 4:
* A user says they need this report show data grouped in a different way
* Developer Z makes a new report called "Foo detail report (extra fields) by bar- new grouping"

The above scenarios happened over and over for several years in no particular order...

Current Day:
* Some users have certain reports they use and rely on but we don't know which ones
* Nobody really knows what all of the reports do or what is the difference between them without looking at the sql
* If we want to change data structures we have many reports to update
* I have a request from a user to add an extra column to one of the reports

Just figured out that while I was on vacation they made a really well thought (not) decision to switch to Firebase despite having 4 fully managed VPS with low usage.

Wanna know what the big deal is?
The only one who looks like knows anything is the fucking intern.

I was trying to understand the thought process and everything revolved around "its real time" argument.

No one knows how the api really works, the benefits of "real time" , and we are using the free plan :)

Yeah... People really do overthink things here...

It's May 4th and no one in my office knows the significance of today.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

I'm going insane.
My colleague wanted to sort an excel spreadsheet and got an error. "Can't sort, column width must match" (or something along the lines) . Which basically means you got non uniformly merged cells.
Without telling me this, he asked for training on how to change column width precisely, after spending 30 minutes explaining he done just that. Column by column for all 40 columns he did just that. Resized to 10 of something (no one really knows what those width numbers in Microsoft Excel really mean) and try to sort.
I Shit you knot, he got the exact same error and flipped out angry at me for creating a shitty system (I think he spent an hour or two total with double and triple checking the sizes)
I did laugh because of this, but I do feel bad for not asking what was the real reason before all of this.