I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

My classmate is a real SAVAGE!!

He (team leader) and his team participated in hackathons several times and kept losing.
He noticed something common about winning team, majority of those team members were women, even if they were non technical and their project was pure bs, they were winning in the name of women empowerment.

This time he came out with a plan, he fired his boys and invited women into his team, and even made one girl the team leader.
Result? HE WON!!!
NOT ONE BUT THREE HACKATHONS BACK TO BACK

AND

His so called women team was invited by Google to pitch their startup idea.

Now, if they gets funding, he's gonna kick out these women and bring back his teammates

Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.

TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!

(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)

One of my non technical friend thinks 'inspect element' is a bug which Google haven't fixed yet

Trying to explain what database is to non technical people/ non developer

Ah yes, progress...
Why do SJWs have to infiltrate everything and project their own racist views of the world onto non-problematic terms?
Slavery has existed for as long as humanity and abolishing the terms will definitely not solve slavery and opression.
I am not against Git changing the default name but I am against them doing it in the name of "inclusivity". The technical world exists by merit and not inclusivity. Why make everything about color, race or slavery level?

I might start referring to non-technical people as muggles.

WTF Python!!! "Master" and "Slave" perfectly convey the concept. In the English language many words have different meanings based on their context. It's plainly obvious that no allusion to human slavery is meant in the context of software or hardware module relationships. I don't even think it is problematic. The real problem seems to be the people who are taking terms outside their intended space. Why are we linking a scar on human history to terminologies explaining technical relationships?

Then lets also ban 0 and 1 because it can offends non-binary peoples!

A seasoned colleague just wrote this and I think it was very valuable:

On tech debt:

So the big challenge with technical debt is making non-technical management (CEO, COO, CFO, directors) understand what it means, and just how it operates. Sometimes it actually makes good sense to incur technical debt to get to market sooner, just as it sometimes makes sense to borrow money to get cash now and repay that loan later with (hopefully) resulting greater revenues from that investment. But just like a loan, tech debt always has to be paid some day. The longer the tech debt goes, the more expensive it gets. And also like a loan, the cost compounds, like compound interest on a loan. Tech debt should always be chosen with a clear plan to pay it off at some point in the not too distant future. The longer one waits to pay it, the more expensive it gets.

Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

Being non-technical is not an excuse for being stupid

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

Saturday late night wisdom.

Software developers you need to work on communication skills.
Everytime LinkedIn says need a problem solver. It means a guy who can understand what non technical guy is asking for and translate that to a software or at least come up with a example of why he is wrong. Explain them. They are not dumb fellows for asking that feature. You might think the feature is stupid. Don't assume this. Sit with them. Understand thier user flow, understand the frustration your software is causing them. Then you'll see why are asking for that X feature.

Every feature request made is basically my opportunity of understanding of product. Don't wait for users to tell you requirements. Understand and suggest, implement prototypes and show them, a causal question such as "Hey would you think providing a keyboard shortcut for this submission is great?"

Understand our job is not just to write software.

Our job is to solve thier problems using software knowledge.

Don't you agree ?

1. Do you know why my computer is so slow?
2. What cellphone do you recommend me to buy? (They always end up buying the cheapest)
3. What do you do at work? (Answer: "I create applications". Anything more complex than that is not going to be understood or they will loose interest)
4. Something is wrong with the: [TV, Cellphone, microwave, etc.]. Could you please take a look? (Believe or not, if something works with electricoty, my family thinks I can fix it).
5. Is it true that if I send this WhatsApp message to all my contacts I will have more options?
6. I need to build an application that (pretty much The Matrix), how much time do you need and how much would cost? Don't you dare to give me wrong numbers. (We have to see the future)
7. (Continuing the previous point, a non-technical client) I don't think that would take so much time/money. (Every time)
8. I want to use the latest Front-End frameworks. I want to see all those beautiful animations in my page and that it runs smoothly... I also need that it runs in IE 5.
9. So, you have been working in the back end? If you don't have a screen to show to the client is like you didn't do anything in this sprint.
10. Why haven't you built and million dollar application? Everybody is doing that right now....

Yep, those are only a few downsides of our profession if we count family, friends and even co-workers. But I can't imagine myself doing anything else.

Been married for 14 years to a non-technical spouse. Biggest issue has been not able to properly vent about technical issues to my best friend. She still listens when I do even though I'm sure she doesn't understand. But, I love that she tries anyway.

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

C'mon people! Spread the word! "The cloud" is not "just someone elses computer", it's a completely different way to compute!

I'm so tired of the oversimplifications done trying to explain the consept. The massive amount of work, sweat and tears put into the orchestration, automation and abstraction layers to deliver truly elastic, scalable and self healing infrastructure, applications and services deserves a fuckload more respect than "just someone elses computer"!

Hosting and time-sharing have been with us almost as long as we have had computers (mainframes etc), but dismissing the effort of thousands upon thousands of devs and ops people to make systems robust and automated enough to literally being able to throw a wrench in the engine any time during production and not have the systems suffer is fucking insane!

The whole reason the term "cloud" is so fitting is not just because it was coined from the cloud-shape used in technical and non-technical drawings and illustrations symbolising the internet, but also because of the illusion of magic it gives the end-user not being able to see "whats inside the music box".

Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.

I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.

The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.

It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)

I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having a non technical boss is such a pain. He thinks all the features should be a piece of cake. There should be a course in business departments where people will be taught how programming works.

People, what a bunch of bastards, especially the non-technical “educated” ones. We call them “mundanes” in our office.

YoU nEEd tO tHInK MorE LiKe oUr nOn tEcHnICal UsErs

That's your fucking job you powerpoint monkey, I'm writing code since age of 14, I distrust everything that doesn't spit out logs of what it's extacly doing to my console including you, my gf says sudo to get my attention, how the hell am I supposed to know how normies think

Good fucking God non-technical iPhone owners are such a fucking cancerous group

"You're just mad because you're broke"

"Lol broke boy."

"That potato ass camera though"

"Shut up before I take your battery out."

Like fucking Christ what an autistic buncha fucking brainless monkeys. We should have a Holocaust for ignorant cunts like them.

These Google/FB/etc algorithms almost know what I like. Almost. And that makes it even more infuriating...

"10 banana smoothie recipes Elon Musk would like!"
"Become a Senior Java developer in one week!"
"Read this article from a non technical journalist about the technology behind bitcoin!"
"10 tips from muscled Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for Gym workouts!"

All of this feels like receiving a blowjob while still wearing pants.

In Russia we have a huge techno-nazi community. They often can be found on some programming forums and a website called Habr.

They’ll shame you if you’re a web developer and don’t write in Asm or C. They spread toxic memes and insulting “stupid humanitarians”. One particular guy constructed the whole ideology that is focused on technological enthusiasts being the “master race” and implies recycling non-technical people in so-called “bioreactors” for energy.

Please don’t be like them.

Tragedies of Non-Technical Boss:

Boss: What happened yesterday, tried reaching you several times, you were just unavailable!

Me: My wifi stopped working as there was some issue at the ISP's end.

Boss: You could've atleast dropped a skype message that your internet is not working!

Me: Yes sir but the internet was not working, so I couldn't drop that message too!!

Boss: But you should have, I was in panic what happened to you...You were alright or not?...

Me: Yup I know, I didn't see the wifi tragedy coming.

Boss: If ever the internet goes down or anything sort of that happens just drop me a text on skype, that your internet is not working. Okay!

Me: *Confused* as to if he is high or just not listening to what I am saying...

We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.

The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.

A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.

I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"

What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.

Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?

Fresh internship story/conversation (Part 1)

Happened today:
- "Can you hack someone via cmd?"-cheap coworker at my internship workplace
- "Can you hack the NSA from any device?"-cheap coworker
- "Can the police identify me, if my face is on a Youtube video?"-cheap coworker
- "I can see all devices I have been through when I want to connect to a target as a route.
*talks about hops in a trace route, but uses non-technical terms for it*
*uses "ping host wikihow.com" instead of "tracert wikihow.com" to demonstrate it, besides of that "host" was not supposed to be there in that command*
*he had to google how to use the ping command on Windows*
*finally uses the ping command properly*
"Here, you can see all the devices our machine has connected to to reach the target"
ME: Aha. But dude... you know that all these ip adresses are in fact the same ip. These IPs are not any different. They are all the same. Besides of that this IP is the IP of this *points to domain name on windows cli* domain.
Him: Oh... I had a friend named ... *continues telling me some "hacker stories" from his past*
Me: *ignores him and always just responds with "Aha" to him* -cheap coworker

Happened yesterday:
- "You have programming classes? You must be an expert in Excel then, right?" -internship boss

Those developers working under non-technical bosses, i understand your pain.

1. Pain when they don't realise that output != number of hours put in. Aaaaaaand that acting busy doesn't mean someone's working.
2. Pain when chilling out in office is necessary, because mind jobs don't work same as other jobs. Wherein if you don't vent it out you're gonna screw up the code. Them not getting that.
3. Pain of "meetings".
4. Pain of changing the feature when you're done, and them acting as if its a minor change.
5. Pain of vague requirements.
6. Pain of a product not thought through, and them trying to blame the implementation.

A meeting, non-technical PM to me:
"Could you borrow me your laptop? I haven't taken mine and want to make some notes."
"Yeah sure" I said, launched some text editor and turned the laptop to her side. During this motion other colleague had chance to glance at the screen. His eyes opened wide with mix of horror and WTF look:
"What the... That's really not good idea."

Turned out I was in complete autopilot mode and pressed Win key, entered "gvim", accepted by enter.

I've launched Vim.
To a non-technical person.

Hating WordPress is cool these days, but:

1) Shitloads of themes for clients to choose from (I'm not good with designing and where I live you are more likely to meet a unicorn than a front-end developer that can code).

2) Non technical people can understand it's admin interface without lots of explaining.

3) Huge community makes it extremely easy to find answers even when looking for pretty specific stuff.

For me it's a valid option when making something simple.

In Italy (Milan)🇮🇹, job hunting is a fucking hell for misfits like me:
• Young(26)
• 1 year(working) experience + continuous learning/improvement at home
• Skillful and adaptable full-stack
• Willing to do greater things with software without being payed like a monkey

This is the last week working at my current company (from which I rejected the renewal of the contract for 26K€/13 months) and almost every time at a new interview everyone tries to down sell me by default or because of the fucking little time that I've been inside companies without even looking at my skills/capabilities.

Also many little companies made by the CEO and a technical manager that are looking for someone from which being provided food 😒(metaphorically).

(On another side, in one month, me and my gf need to move to a new apartment, the renting process sucks, and she has issues to find a non-slavering job because she is a foreigner(with good knowledge of English and Chinese) with very basic understanding of Italian and I see her crying often in my arms because it's hard and stressful for her to become economically independent as she would like to be)

!rant ! technical
Just want to share with my devrant family.

Finally in relationship.
Funny thing is
Me-she
24-29
Hindu-jain
Non veg - veg
Don't have dressing sense- awesome dressing sense
Programmer-jewelry designer
Not so hygienic - so much hygienic
No gym ,no exercise - yoga master
Geeky - hate pc worms
2 times in jailed - follow every rule
Back bancher - front bancher
Love shayari/old bollywood song - EDM / western songs

Common bridge between us

MARVAL FANS
😂

Currently in the middle of quarterly planning (its been fun so far). Needs to be signed off by business today.

- My team has ~25 man weeks available in terms of capacity.
- Looking at only priority 0 tasks, last night we calculated the ask from product stands at 64.
- Including P1's, P2's etc. its well over 100 man weeks.
- Email was sent around from business with a list of tasks, asking which can be dropped, de-scoped etc.

Product (non technical) response this morning:
- This one can't take 2 weeks, its not that complicated.
- This one needs to stay, It was originally a Q1 task.
- Can we make this one smaller? (currently only a 3 week task)
- 14 comments on other teams items.

<extreme-sarcasm>
... ah perfect, that cut down the items by less than half. We are now ready for the deadline in 4 hours to have all this signed off on. Great job everyone. Thanks for all the insightful discussions. Go team!
</extreme-sarcasm>

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

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

I've decided that whenever a non technical person be it a client or a non technical PM tells me it's easy or tells me it'll take only x hours, I'm going to tell them to either do it themselves, or let me do my estimate calculation. You don't fucking understand one line of what I do yet you can magically calculate the amount of time I'll take on the task? No fucking thank you sir.

I interviewed to this small company. It was a position requiring a lot of experience they said. They did Microsoft SQL server and their technical interview questions were so easy it took me a lot of time to answer them because I was looking for traps, like for real. Think I might've answered too complex for them as well.

In the non-technical interview they joked about how they'd need to reserve two saunas in team events (Finnish thing) as they were all male and I would've been the first female.

Then they asked questions about my *children*. "Who takes care of them when they're sick?" Ummm, yeah, illegal much.

In the end they didn't hire me but they took two interns from the vocational school (or applied sciences). Yeah, so hard a job a Master of Science in Software Engineering with (at that point) three years of full-stack experience couldn't handle but some not even graduate interns could do?

Oh, and fun thing was. A couple months later a recruiter called me about the same company. I told *her* the story and she said she's gonna drop that company from her list and said no wonder they complain about not getting people for them. xD

I also send a tip to my unions discrimination department. They used my case as an example in presentations so suppose this experience served a purpose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think I do this face more often than I realize.. specially when non technical people start giving me suggestions.

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

When you're used to hanging out with developers and you hang out with non developers and get a little comfortable and tell a technical joke then spend an hour explaining the joke

So, the other day a friend of mine called me. It's been years that I haven't talked to this girl. She says "can you do me a favour?". I asked "what?". To which she replies "My Facebook account has been hacked. Can you do something and destroy the guys pc? Don't let him create any other account or even let him use the internet. Ban him from the internet or do something.
And I was like

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

Friday I left my then current company as I felt my technical skills were not being appreciated, forget about growth. I am all set to join much nimble organization where technical skills seems to be much required. Such a relief as struggle to continue working at a place where appreciation is almost non-existent is over.

An Architect is born.

You know what's worse than hell?

Your non-technical boss thinking he knows coding.

In the middle of night you are going to fix the problem he created, because he messed it in live server.

Having to talk to non technical people and explain them technical things. Painful in every sense of the word. :(

Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:

"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.

"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.

A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.

When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.

When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.

People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...

When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.

Had an interview with a potential customer last week, and he started questioning my technical capability in the middle of the discussion on the basis that I’m taking notes with pen and paper...

Yes, I can type. At 90+ WPM, I can darn near produce a transcript of everything we say. But I won’t remember any of it afterward, because it passes straight from the ears to the hands without any processing.

“You see, that’s what we have something called ’search’ for...”

...Yeah. Except that doesn’t help with picking out the most important points from a wall of text, organizing it in a way that allows visualizing relationships between concepts, and other non-linear things that are hard to do on the fly in a word processor.

“Well, how about we get you a tablet with a pen and you can just write on that, then?”

How about no.

Ended up turning him down because of other concerns that were raised that were, suffice to say, about as ornerous as you might expect from that exchange.

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

The pain of explaining technical stuff to a non technical boss!!!

Non technical people are interesting. Not only do we have to switch to unga bunga language to help them, but they accuse us of man-splaining when we do.

Major update went good through the IT side.

Somehow on a different department, some moron botched up what he had to do (he has a technical role, but he is no programmer or analyst or anything like that and even though he is an admin (with big fucking quotes) no one here would call him so.

He fucks his shit up, and the DBA and myself have to go and fix it. Fine, whatever.

Why am I ranting? Because this bitch sent an email tagging half the board and every other VP stating that it was I.T's fault this happened. Somehow, she had forgotten that she had tagged me into that email since she tagged the Web Developer section email.

I did not give two flying fucks and in front of everyone called them out on what actually happened. I was polite and used some very non-directed "bitch it was you" comments. But it pissed me off that she did that shit behind I.T's back.

Everyone in that email replied saying thank you.....except for her.

I will slap a hoe, I swear.

I really hate to have a non-technical Scrum Master...
He makes these long meetings to explain EVERYTHING to him and ask us help to be on meetings with clients in case "he over commit us" with more work.
I've had cool Scrum Masters but not like this dude that is a pain in the ass...

PS. he's good friend of the boss... so I'm sending him videos about what his role should do 😕

PS2. Fourtunately, he's about to be switched to another project soon.

Ah the wonders of working with non-technical people. 😤
I had a logistical problem. The SSD on my laptop crashed.
Me: No biggie just request new one.
Them: Sorry we don't have any on stock.
Me:Okey then give me a new laptop.
Them:Ok fine here you go.
Me:I specifically required 16 GB of RAM.
Them: ok here is an extra 8gb
Me: I need DDR 4 not DDR3
Them: don't have any. We will restock shortly.

A couple a days later a colleague requested 8gb DDR3 and got DDR 4.
The fuck is wrong with people. Can you not read?🤔🙄

My manager is instructing my team to add a feature that can only be enabled for users by running an update script in the database.

When I argued that it's not really "complete" if it can't be turned on without someone going into the production database, I was told that not only is it complete, but they plan to have our non-technical customer service enable it for customers if the customer requests it...

Apparently giving everyone and their brother write access to prod is a good idea, but implementing a checkbox is a "waste of time and would cost too much money".

Probably going to float my resume... :-p

Me: we've refactored the project to make it easier to support in the future
Non-technical VP: Cool can you print it off so I can have a look

😕

Down a non-technical rabbit hole yesterday:
- watch a cat bury his poop during smoke break
- google "why do cats bury their poop"
- click a link to the Felidae family
- get interested in the differences between puma's, cheetahs and tigers
- read up on the whole genealogy in detail
- spend an hour looking up the endangered status of Felidae
- close work laptop

"Nuff for today"

That slow realization that you're hitting burnout due to the toxicity of those in non-technical roles above you is wild. Also, Jira, Scrum, Sprints and all the extra bullshit can fuck right off as well.

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

Who else feels that devs are underappreciated? Especially by non technical clients.

I fucking hate non-technical founders looking down on the tech team as if it we're dispensable, and as a result, undervalue us in terms of money and equity.

A non-technical colleague said she bought some bitcoin on a site over a year ago.

She doesn't remember the name of the website.

Asus have now decided that a removable battery is a feature people do not need anymore on a powerful laptop.

My battery or charger had a fit and blew the fuse on my charger and broke the battery, and now I have to send my laptop back because they can't send me a new battery, as replacing it myself would void the warranty.

Please for the love of all that isn't completely retarded, nobody start taking more pages out of Apple's book, even some completely non-technical people could handle changing a battery before, this benefits no one.

To make things worse, I'm on holiday right now and leaving the country for a year a few weeks after I get back, so if they can't get it back to me fast enough, I won't have the laptop for the whole bloody reason I bought it for, just because some smart arse designer has clearly never owned a laptop in their life.

Non-technical manager who been managing my team for years: "hey can you take a look at this log?"

*log is all PHP*

Us: "we're iOS devs, none of us know PHP"

Manager: "well why not?"

HOW DO YOU GET PAID MORE THAN US

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

So tomorrow I have to explain to my non-technical principal that the "game engine" I say I'm going to make in my senior project proposal is in fact not a car engine in a game. And I also have to explain that a mechanic would not be an ideal mentor for this project.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

My idiot boss keeps coming up to me and asks "How far along?" every hour. Shut the fuck up you asshole let me work for some time undisturbed before you poke you non technical nose and ask me that dumb question!!!

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Pet peeve #91847 - when your non technical manager routinely forwards you articles about technical subjects, usually written by non technical idiots, and says "please see if this is something we should be using".

Yeah, I get that your business manager friend has heard Blockchain is amazing, Rsocket is revolutionary, and everyone should now be using Kafka, but none of that makes any sense for our use case.

The clincher had to be telling me to look at AWS groundstation though. And no, we don't have anything to do with satellites...

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

All I want is a another DVI cable so I can connect my secondary monitor digitally instead of by VGA. From their reaction, you could think I had instead asked for a gold-plated desk. Was it really nescessary to have three guys check (non-technical people, too) if *they* could see a difference between my monitors? My primary one is DVI, and *I* can see that the monitor connected by VGA is blurrier. Who connects a flat panel monitor by VGA anyway? Just the idea of an unnescessary pair of analogue-to-digital/digital-to-analogue conveters in the middle of what should be a straight digital connection should be an affront to any sensible technical person. So of course, no extra DVI cable for me.

Call me stupid, but I think it has probably cost the company more money from lost productivity having three people look at my monitors instead of just buying me another DVI cable like I asked for nicely.

It really grinds my gears if colleagues from non-technical departments attempt to use technical terms but use them wrong. It might be gatekeeping but please, use a technical term if you are confident you are using it correctly. Otherwise use layman's words. Using technical terms incorrectly sends our brains down the wrong road and we have to make a mental U turn. And you sound like a masterhacker from a TV show or movie.

Fucking non technical managers and their shitty clients to whom they suck their tiny weiners need to realise that I cannot reorder elements every 10 minutes to the shape of their fart comming out of their ass, test it, deploy it, trigger webhook, clear cloudflare cache, and meanwhile be sure that it's written in quality manner for future upkeep with commits that have sense.Hope deadline driven development dies in hell where it belongs

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

I wish to create a guild for software developers. Like in the old age, where certain masterwork developers work together in order to provide non-hacky solutions. The beauty of a guild is that it would allow proper apprenticeship, Blacklisting of toxic companies and directly help with wage negotiations. Too often I see proper professionals working overtime just because they are harassed and having "impostor syndrome" (I know the term is hated, but passes the idea much better). Also maybe that would eliminate technical debt...
But hey, this is just a vision... :')

Non Technical Friend - Bro Apple is the shit!! I'm getting a Macbook.
Me - How's it better than other laptops for you?
Friends - It looks the best .. It's Apple bro!
💢
.. Ok. Enjoy 😐

Here is what I see in industry right now.
Don't go on math but get the gist.

1. 9 of 10 developers are Web developers
2. 9 in 10 developers want to be data scientist
3. 9 out of above actually give up and start doing Web development
4. 9 in 10 developers think CS education is not necessary.
5. 9 in 10 developers want to work for Google Facebook and Microsoft.
6. 9 in 10 developer don't make it to above companies.
7. 9 in 10 developers think design and test are important but never do it.
8. 9 out of 10 developers don't want to code after 5 years and just want to exit industry to non technical roles.
9. 9 out of 10 developers don't get rants and dev memes posted here.

What's your take on this

So I finally got my senior project approved by my school's assistant principal (the one who deals with every student's project) and he said that the three forms of evidence I suggested were not enough. A quick summary of my project: I'm supposed to make a game engine in Java before April of 2017. Every student needs 3 forms of evidence that they did the project so I suggested screenshots of my work, the finished source code, and pictures of me actually working on it. In addition to all of that I would have a ton of documentation and sample projects to test different features of the engine. Well, he doesn't really understand that for a high school student, that's already enough work for a couple of years and thinks I need more evidence. So what does he do?

He requires me to find at least 5 people to test the engine and complete a survey about it. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except I'm a high school student and don't know more than 2 people who are fluent enough in Java to work on a game. And, I have to finish the project before January now to give the people enough time to work with it.

Long story short, I'm not even out of high school and I'm already experiencing the struggles of dealing with non-technical people.

When your non-technical manager calls you 18 times in a row at 0730 on a Sunday, you know there's a problem.

When the first thing said when picking up in your free time (after being woken up on said Sunday morning) is "why did you not answer earlier", ... ...

Ps. He was using the Dev link, not the production link.

PPS. This was a little while back now but felt like sharing 😂

When I realized my job isn't to code, it is to hack for hacks.

As smart developers our job is to be accountable to non-technical product management types who care nothing for elegant system design or DRY code. They expect features get done fast and "technically complete." They use terms like "minimum viable product (MVP)" to imply we'll go back and improve things like refactoring and tech debt later.

They will not. Most likely they won't even be around. Producers and scrumlords have the highest turnover rate of any role on a team. By design they get bored or frustrated easily and are constantly looking for greener pastures. Many people in self-proclaimed "non-technical" roles like this never had the patience and attention span to learn a real vocation, and they've discovered a career path that doesn't require one.

These are our masters. As developers, we will answer to them forever and always.

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

A coworker of mine was asked to make a utility C# app to help with our internal testing. The idea was that the app would collect data and display the results.

He decided that it was very important that the app have a command line interface. He's spent far more time building the app from scratch for the command line than he would have if he'd used C#'s built-in GUI utilities.

Today was our demo day and he shows an internal command-line app in 2017 built in C#. I asked about the GUI and he said that the command line functionality was more important. I suggested that it was maybe less user-friendly and he proceeded to explain to me how "non-technical" people might prefer a GUI, but clearly any serious developer would just want a command line app.

I feel like, in one fell swoop, he trivialized my suggestion, didn't address any of the data visualization needs, and suggested I wasn't a "real developer". Am I right to feel a little outraged by this?

Before the lockdown, we regularly had our client's testers in our office to evaluate the prototypes of potential features.

Some of them would just be left on their own with the software and tell is their experience afterwards. The Application is tested on our machines while the Testers are taking notes on their devices.

So one of the testers suddenly told us she had a "non application-related, general technical problem".

Well it turned out that she selected some text in the application running on our machine, then right-clicking and copied it and then unplugged her USB-Mouse, plugged it in on her Laptop and wondered, why she couldn't paste the text.

Since then, my respect for our UX department grew enormously since we very rarely get complaints.

When your wife is non-technical

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Being told the "solution" to a technical problem by a non technical person from a meeting I wasn't even invited to participate in. This middle finger goes out to middle management everywhere.

Am I the only one who gets extremely nervous the night before an interview as that technical test can encompass the entire academic field of CS. I'm just worried I'll forget the difference between a clustered and non-clustered index or fail to convey the difference between TDD and BDD.

I'm ten years in to my career now, so I 'should' know my stuff. I've produced the tests my self, hired other devs, but I still feel the nerves.

Top three reasons why I love to code:

1) People will think you are a wizard and feel so afraid of you that they call you nerd and give you a office in a cold basement (especially good in summer times)

2) Your friends call you for every problem they have with their computer and will give you a few bucks or beers in exchange.

3) You can rant about technical stuff and no matter how unfounded the rant is, your non-tech friends will believe everything you say.

Everyone is remote working and executives keep telling non-technical to push their communications into shared channels in Microsoft Teams.

It forces analysts and managers to ask questions plainly. They are getting developer input quickly so aren’t wasting time on in-person meetings. The higher ups see how little many produce. Developers are busy churning out software as usual and responding to technical questions.

Our CEO said something in a channel that suggested he is considering downsizing the management and adding more developers. 😱 The response was that analysts and managers packed the developer schedules with online meetings and are trying to initiate more documentation work.

That awkward moment when a non-technical person asks you about coding....

Do you have a few months?

I am a Full-Stack Developer and recently had a talk with my boss about how the push notifications work and he is pretty convinced that it has something to do with the IMEI number of the phone, he being a person with a non technical background makes it even more difficult for me to explain stuff to him :/

Especially when you are working under a non-technical project manager :/

Fucking hate my job 😡
I joined as nodejs dev at a mnc 3months ago involved in banking software in which i dont have any domain knowledge.. first 10 days I was told to go through fucking udemy nodejs and graphql tutorial (wtf) which i already have experience with before joining.. after that my reporting manager gives me task to resolve fields and gave me shitty jira story link to read.. that shit story link had no explanation about the fields and what the database it is, then she says to use some shitty sdk which is built internally by shiity devloper which had no documentation and have to follow other module which was again written by that sr. Dev... They hav fucked up the graphql and nodejs and entire stack and also till date no one has ever given any explanation about the domain and the fields and database schema.. this manager refuses to share knowledge about the domain now how the fuck i resolve the graphql schema which was again written by non technical b.a.. all they have used is latest technology in a shitty way with no standards to to follow .. no dataloading no caching no batching.. use shitty sdk which does not give access to dbconn and fucking tightly coupling expressjs which when i start consumes crazy 400Mb of memory .. these fucking seniors devs + the fucking b.a having 12+. Yrs exp each have fucked the entire codebase... Each day killing my passion for app development.. fuckkk ... Dunno what to do now

>pentester
Raised an issue with a web application for out client that was weak TLS protocols/cipher suites in use on the sever hosting their application.

Then I was asked to confirm that reissuing the certificate was the correct remidial action for fixing this...

Man, it's scary to think non-technical project managers are in charge of fixing this stuff...

It’s really painful how non technical people think all technical stuff is the same.

The amount of times I’ve been brought in to help someone with a printer or WiFi network.

I didn’t do a computer science degree for this.

I’m also pretty sure my last two bosses think fixing the printer is the same as creating large scale systems.

My last boss wanted me to build a Vr chatbot despite spending the last few years building web servers and react/redux apps. I mean I can probably figure it out and it’ll be fun, but don’t think I’m gonna get this done in a week with all my other responsibilities too.

My new boss wants me to singlehandedly build a massive marketplace system that would probably take a team of ten, several years.

Fed up of being around non technical managers who don’t listen to me with my feedback.

Time for a new chapter in the new year.

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

!rant
Update & Thoughts of AngelHack10 Abu Dhabi.
The judges were so non technical they were impressed by an app demo (not ours) that could recognize objects printed in black and white on an A4 paper. The app claimed to read the 3d shape of a device and calculate the running cost based on its power consumption.
I think hackathons must have two pitches one technical and one business. Else every one with hardcoded demos can fool the judges easily.

Project manager : At 9:30 am these all are the tasks you have to complete today.
Me: OK ,sure.
Project manager: At 10:30 have you completed any thing.
Me:no not yet we can meet at 11:30.
Project manager: At 11:30 have you completed the tasks.
Me: no it's takes more time post lunch.
Project manager: post lunch have you completed the tasks.
Me : give me 5 mins ( integrating the code).
Project manager: 5 mins over.
Me : showing the application with out testing.
Project manager : This not working.......!
Me:(I know that )then I have to check .
Project manager : OK go and come in 10 mins
Me:(in 10 mins I have to test and fix the bugs you non technical brute) sure .

First rant incoming!

I love when bizDEV people who are clearly not technical try to be technical. I mean I get when you want to try and understand something and I am totally down for letting you in on why we (the engineers) decided to do something a certain way. When you then go and tell us “no” and give the reason of “because I said so” it really doesn’t still well. Then you wonder why we don’t want to talk to you about anything? I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you know nothing about anything we are doing but sure, why don’t we just go along with your plan because you are totally omniscient.

Then he decided that he wants to be in all the “idea” discussions... I really don’t understand because my ideas are not scheduled and I am not going to set up a meeting and write them down for later so you can feel needed and important.

This project had such a good chance of becoming something great but I have a bad feeling it’s going to fail now because non technical people are in charge of technical decisions.

End of rant, thanks for listening.

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Patience is not slapping a non-technical end user when they explain how easy it is going to be to make a change to an application.

Dear non-technical managers :
GO FUCK YOURSELF !

It’s really painful how non technical people think all technical stuff is the same.

The amount of times I’ve been brought in to help someone with a printer or WiFi network.

I didn’t do a computer science degree for this.

I’m also pretty sure my last two bosses think fixing the printer is the same as creating large scale systems.

My last boss wanted me to build a Vr chatbot despite spending the last few years building web servers and react/redux apps. I mean I can probably figure it out and it’ll be fun, but don’t think I’m gonna get this done in a week with all my other responsibilities too.

My new boss wants me to singlehandedly build a massive marketplace system that would probably take a team of ten, several years.

Fed up of being around non technical managers who don’t listen to me with my feedback.

Time for a new chapter in the new year.

#whosHiring?

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

A brilliant letter Richard Feynman wrote to Stephen Wolfram:

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

October 14, 1985

Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540

Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science
inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is
necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing
that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in
- but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering
it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't
enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you
will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but
will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them
in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people
as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my
friend.

Sincerely,

(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')

Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.

We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.

Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)

The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window

So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.

This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.

So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.

No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)

There really ought to be a special word to describe a non-technical user who keeps finding weird, edge case bugs that we can't reproduce.

Any ideas?

One of the most rude things you can do to an open source project is immediately question why they use a specific (language, toolkit, gui, build system, etc) and suggest they use something entirely different simply because it is "better".

Like I can't even compare it to something a normal non-technical person would understand.

It's not even a preference thing like what car you drive or iPhone vs Android.

I've literally donated hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time and you get the benefit of using the software free of charge and then you have the balls to question what I've given you.

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.

I think I have ranted about this before but holy fuck why are non-technical people obsessed underscores??

NO, you DON'T need to replace all the spaces in the name of your Excel file just because you're sending it to a programmer.

believe me,
when your companies non-technical HOD(marketing), start a discussion with you on topics like Elon Musk and other hot topics in the technical world.
It feels good
2 hours no code just discussion on fav topics.

Can someone explain to me why non-technical people even work in tech companies ??

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but can you, for example, imagine that someone who doesn't even know what brick is would work on a construction site ?

Or can you imagine working in bike repair shop not knowing neither how to ride a bike nor how's bike is built ?

Sure, every company (especially large ones) needs bookkeepers/HRs/accountants etc. that don't need to know the inner workings of business.

Those people don't bother me, and they are necessary to keep the circus going.

I'm talking about all those middle management individuals.

All those "Project Managers" , "Business Analysts", "Directors' , "Principal Program Managers " etc etc ..

Such thing thing would be unthinkable in every other industry but somehow, in tech, anyone can work as long as they can throw a sufficient number of acronyms around.

Am I the only dev being in the universe who hates dealing with non technical PMs and POs?

Every time I interact with them I just want to kill myself.

PS: I still think their roles are important. Just hire people that know what they are doing.

I worked at a computer repair shop about ten years ago and had a coworker who seemed like a pretty cool guy, very smart, and a few years after I left that job I tried to look him up online to reconnect - I thought there was a potential friendship there. But the weird thing was, for all of his technical savvy, his online presence was almost non-existent. I found him tucked away in some old posts on some weird forum site, so I registered on it just to send him a PM. Unfortunately he never responded.

Seeing how cool the community's work stories here, and how they know a lot and how they work in organized companies makes me feel like an absolute piece of shit who's lacking a lot of industry skills.

Remotely working for a startup that lacks any sense of organization, CTO is a volunteering web developer who never shows up. A lone wolf I am. I never signed to be a lone wolf. A product that is based on an absolute garbage product that is in turn based on another utter garbage product. It feels so much pain every time I have to deal with that garbage that I end up watching some stupid anime instead. Decent salary for a junior, very friendly people, and a very empowering non-profit cause but still... technical side is just shit and I don't think I can keep with this.

Sigh :(

Ubuntu NHS
Maybe, we could finally see Linux in a non-technical environment!
What do you think about this?

How do you teach non-technical coworkers to trust you're doing your work to the best of your ability? You know the type, they're used to having everything measured by simple numbers. Number big = good work. Number small = bad work or slacking off. The moment they run into something that doesn't work like this, their heads explode.

MRW working with non technical people and they say "Repo is too problematic, we'll just swap files through Dropbox"

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

There is nothing as hard as explaining the work of a back end dev to a non technical person

Having a non-technical boss is the worst thing that will happen to any developer.

Worst part about being a dev.

Non-technical people see your awesome app.... and then bring their faulty hardware gear for you to fix! Wtf!!

I'm genuinely shocked at the number of people I see on here bashing automated testing as a waste of time, simply because my entire career has taught me the opposite (and it's usually only non-technical managers I see who don't want to see "time wasted" writing tests.)

I'm also just as genuinely curious - what do you guys do instead? Just don't test and deal with production issues as they occur? Pass it off to a separate UAT / human-based testing department and let them sign it off? Assume that because you're using Haskell / some other discipline it'll work if it compiles?

Non technical Co-founder comes up with some batshit crazy idea and says it’s Agile because he thinks that means you’re not allowed to argue with it.

Dumb people are dumb.

Mentors dont understand the power they have...

My mentors boss (non technical) will ask me to do something that either makes no sense or technically impossible. Without a mentor whos willing to say "that makes no sense to ask" or just "he will need an extra week to do it" can change an internship from a horrible nightmare to a great experience

Some people just don't get it. When you meet friends who are either non technical or very new to programming, all they ask you is what language do you use.

The language is important but not everything. It's what you do with it that matters. Just because you know python, doesn't mean that you can do machine learning. Even simply asking what do I do is better than that!

The language is just a tool! Learn to be language agnostic please. Be a programmer, not a code monkey

Social interactions. Made me realize what people expect from an application. Earlier I didn't have end user perspective and used to design complicated GUIs with too many technical words. Now I make simple and easy to use UI with instructions that can be understood by non-devs too.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

I don't understand the hype among the non technical people about Blockchain! Why the fuck they want to implement everything in Blockchain? Don't they know that it is not for every single application and mostly used for some trustless applications?
Now one of our clients wants his restaurant website to be implemented in Blockchain!

Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.

But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.

This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.

I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)

So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.

If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.

My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️

How did we normalize Project Managers (non-technical scumbags who literally just make excel sheets and track work items) yelling at Developers (they literally get everything done).

Imagine having PMs yelling at surgeons for not removing a tumor fast enough or something.

"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.

Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?

I am teaching myself a new skill.

Everytime my non-technical boss speaks about devOps, I am going to force the tetris theme tune to play inside my head to block him out.

This site makes me lose hope in non-technical population...

But it's funny.

That’s it! I have had enough of business development, design and other non-technical departments of the business! STOP making us technical types sit through your demo meetings and circle-jerking each other on how great everything looks and “how exited you are for the future…”!

Look, I’m all for enthusiasm but taking it in turns to make over optimistic comments feels false and nauseating!!!!

A client's representative (was an operations manager maybe; non technical guy) was explaining his legacy project (a knowledge transfer session), mentioned about using Azure for their new system.
One of the senior .net developer in the room interrupts this guy and asks "can you explain what do you mean by azure?"
I was like "what the fuck! did I hear it wrong"

Astounded and impressed by the congenial behavior of some open source contributors who have grown into household names. I'm referring to tomas votruba and Sebastian bergmann. It's almost as if they belong in another world, judging by my experience with other developers and big people in general

They aren't social media influencers but Sebastian has almost singlehandedly maintained phpunit since the early 2000s. I tend to expect them not to dignify me with a response when I engage. Tomas "disappointed" that expectation on 2 different platforms where I use different monikers, in a very jovial manner, showing that's just who he is

Sebastian sympathised and apologised to me (an obscure nobody he owes nothing), this morning within minutes of me calling him out for publishing a major update that removed some helpful utilities without explanation or providing alternatives. The humility not to lock the thread or block me like one of the php sub mods did is examplary

Even from my current standpoint, it's easy to look down on those who have not contributed as much I have to the language or acquired as much, so it's a lesson I hope to carry with me, emulating the non technical attributes of these model citizens

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

Having to explain to non technical project managers that: Just because you don't see anything that's changed on the front end doesn't mean that I haven't just spent 6 weeks so trying to future proof and anticipate every little thing that might change on the backend!

Fucking Power Apps and Automate/Flow:
You want to make an app?, great!
- Easy UI and editor, you can make a decent app in a day
- Best data integration in MS space bar none, connect to anything under the planet no problem.
- Deployment on mobile and desktop instantly and at scale, you better believe it.
- Wanna take from sharepoint, manipulate the data and throw it at XRM, we gothcu.
- Source control? FUCK YOU FOR ASKING GO DIE IN A FIRE.
- Proper permission system, Yep, based on O365 and azure AD
- Just let me get the source code please?: BURN IN HELL MOTHERFUCKER
- Integrated AI, indeed we have it. And chatbot frameworks on top of it, no problem at all
- ...

As a tool it is aimed at non technical people, not by making it beginner friendly, but by making it developer hostile. And whenever you hit a wierd quirk in the editor you wish you could just go edit the source code (WHICH YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE SNIPPETS OF), but you are never allowed to touch it.
I am so very tempted to make a version control layer on top of it myself, scraping it via scripts and doing the reverse on upload, but it will be janky as fuck.

Interviewer said that passing technical interview means that 90% of the time I will get the offer.
In the final interview with management, I can't answer some questions because I didn't study. Isn't final interview should just about getting to know each other like hobby, interest, talking about company products?
They gave me some puzzle to solve :(

After that, they wait another 1 week just to tell me I don't pass. Why the fuck they wait 1 week just to tell me that? They should just tell me 1 day after!

I still have other job openings right now, but the job searching has been very depressing.
I will give it like 1 more month. But if I can't get any leads, I will just give it up. Maybe tech is not the right job for me.
I will just go back to my old job in non-tech. It's not exactly my dream job, but at least they don't treat me like shit like this.

No matter how much social skill improvement I do, it never makes meetings with non-tech leadership type people go as I expect. It is ridiculous how I have gotten so good at communicating, to the point where I can easily manipulate people, but they won't fucking have a straight conversation. Do non-engineers have an inferiority complex every time an engineer slips and says a technical term?

I just sat down in a meeting where I was grilled for answers, and when I went to explain the bigger principal that made them confused, they didn't want that much detail. Wtf? Just tell me you don't care and you want the job done, no need to pretend you want it done together just because you want it done now and your way.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

When your non-technical project manager tells you not to use a technology that you know is the best for the job

Boss(non-technical) complains we are behind the schedule he set without consulting the tech team, the complains we don't all(including BAs) don't do code review. CHOOSE!

*Note: I am not bashing code review*

Me: Interview is in 3 hours, I'm prepared, it's non technical anyway, just be yourself.

Brain to me: What the fuck is big 'O' notation? Objects you mean chairs? Turing? That's some kind of robot right?

Also me: fuck....

What is more disaster
Than manager thinking to assign a production deployment to non technical person.

Some staff couldn’t access some admin pages and they thought it was a permissions error. Um, no. Chrome is showing you an “aw snap” error page, which means it’s a problem with the site and not your access. The pages are querying too much data and it’s causing an operation timeout. It’s been like this for months but no one reported it. Did they not need to use these pages at all for these past months? Non technical people keep doings things that make me want to smack my head against my desk. FTR these issues existed before I started.

What is it with non-technical managers, especially those in sales, thinking that the solution to all problems is to "just pick up the phone and ring them?" This was *always* his opinion, whether the web service we were using wasn't accepting a valid request (apparently this was best "explained over the phone", I kid you not - have you ever tried speaking JSON?!) or whether we just needed a simple request going in to increase the API limit. I mean I could send an email or log a ticket in a few minutes tops, but you want me to spend 2 hours on hold to a support department only to be told "ah we don't take those requests over the phone, here's the URL, log a ticket."

Then it's always a case of "I don't understand why they're like that, all the guys I speak to are happy to help on the phone". Yeah, beacuse you're in sales & marketing you muppet. Blathering on to each other so you can stroke the egos of yourselves and your companies is kinda in the job description.

Grr. This was all a while ago, but I thought of it just now and the pure concept just annoyed me, so here it is. I really hope he's not doing the same thing to guys under him now (but let's be honest, he probably is.)

Another day with non technical scrum masters and product owners.

Anybody else sometimes do not like being a team lead?

I am the senior most person in my team (in fact took interviews of the rest of them). While I love the work and the team, I sometimes feel that I do not get to code that much. I am mostly assigning work, or helping others. Even if I get in the zone, there is always someone who needs some assistance or some meeting, which breaks the flow. Also the tension about non technical stuff like salary increments, giving feedback and assigning backups. I do love it mostly, but my ass is nearly always on fire. The team loves me though. I am still young, took this responsibility because the owner trusted me with this (he has no complaints). Thoughts ?

I could use a few more non-technical people telling me how I can do my job better.

When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.

Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.

When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.

Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!

Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?

When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:

1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.

Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).

Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.

When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:

(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".

Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.

There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".

It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?

So the other day I was talking to my gf about how it was crowdy in the metro area and how big the queue was for ticket, she said 'You should never say it was a big queue but it was a long queue' and I said 'It wasn't a big queue but it was a double queue' and I started laughing.
My gf being from a non technical background didn't understand why I was laughing so much.