Well that was a fun call I just had.

Owner of the company I freelance for: Hey I forgot to tell you something.

Me: What?

Owner: I bought you a plane ticket to fly to Puerto Rico. You're heading out in a month.

Me: What?! Why????

Owner: To set up cryptocurency mining rigs.

Me: Just because I know a bit about mining doesn't make me an expert.

Owner: We have $80k in our pocket in investments from outside parties, with another $20-30k on the way. You get 20% of the coins mined for as long as you manage it.

Me: So we're gonna set up several rigs, utilizing a b250 motherboard, g4400 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 10 GPUs each. We'll have AMD rigs for monero and Nvidia rigs for Ethereum and others. We'll use awesome miner for profitability switching on the fly. Each machine is probably going to be $5k each, possibly $4k with bulk discounts. We'll need at least 1500W per rig for power, 2000W to be safe, so we need to make sure we have ample power delivery to the mining warehouse.

Owner: I thought you weren't an expert?

Me: I'm not, but when there's money involved my motivation to Google goes into overdrive.

The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

I'm not an iOS expert, I just wanted to get Google ads on my iOS app so that I could make a few petty dollars at the expense of my users. Is that too much to ask?

I started by following Google's instructions: install cocoapods, copy and paste some swift code... Compile failed, app broke. Carefully retrace my steps. Nothing.

Stackoverflow (praise be with them) suggests upgrading Xcode. Go to app store and click to upgrade Xcode. No progress bar, no status updates, just that pissy little spinner for several minutes. I become impatient try a few more times. It ain't happening.

Stackoverflow (holy of holies, defender of the weak) points me to an alternate source for Xcode, on the app store dev console. 4GB and some time later, an attempt to unzip gives "unknown error". Genocide of sorts.

Stackoverflow (all that is pure, all that is kind, all... I think you get it) says upgrade your OS. I tried months ago but I had issues with that pissy little spinner. Persist. 5GB and a "heavy-year" of time later (sorry), it installs. Then Xcode installs. Then bar a few errors, the app compiles.

So after almost 24 hours, life resumes. The lesson.. respond to all obscure iOS errors by upgrading. If fully upgraded, calmly acquire a baseball bat and destroy your machine. Make sure you have a good book nearby in case of either event.

Thank you for reading my rant. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay Apple
$150 so that I may list my app in the app store.

Anyone know this bitch hacker 127.0.0.1 story?

WORST HACKERS OF ALL TIME

CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS BECUASE IT IS SO LONG...

TLdr bitch hacker hacks himself by localhost

bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can’t you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn’t kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you’re stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You’re a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again… I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you’re so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-9ff3c180.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> elch you son of a bitch
<Metanot> bitchchecker how old are you?
<Elch> What’s up bitchchecker?
<bitchchecker> you have a frie wal
<bitchchecker> fire wall
<Elch> maybe, i don’t know
<bitchchecker> i’m 26
<Metanot> such behaviour with 26?
<Elch> how did you find out that I have a firewall?
<Metanot> tststs this is not very nice missy
<bitchchecker> because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me
<bitchchecker> be a man turn that shit off
<Elch> cool, didn’t know this was possible.
<bitchchecker> thn my virus destroys your pc man
<Metanot> are you hacking yourselves?
<Elch> yes bitchchecker is trying to hack me
<Metanot> he bitchchecker if you’re a hacker you have to get around a firewall even i can do that
<bitchchecker> yes man i hack the elch but the sucker has a fire wall the
<Metanot> what firewall do you have?
<bitchchecker> like a girl
<Metanot> firewall is normal a normal hacker has to be able to get past it…you girl
<He> Bitch give yourself a jackson and chill you’re letting them provoce you and give those little girls new material all the time
<bitchchecker> turn the firewall off then i send you a virus [Please control your cussing]er
<Elch> Noo
<Metanot> he bitchchecker why turn it off, you should turn it off
<bitchchecker> you’re afraid
<bitchchecker> i don’t wanna hack like this if he hides like a girl behind a fire wall
<bitchchecker> elch turn off your shit wall!
<Metanot> i wanted to say something about this, do you know the definition of hacking??? if he turns of the firewall that’s an invitation and that has nothing to do with hacking
<bitchchecker> shut up
<Metanot> lol
<bitchchecker> my grandma surfs with fire wall
<bitchchecker> and you suckers think you’re cool and don’t dare going into the internet without a fire wall
<Elch> bitchchecker, a collegue showed me how to turn the firewall off. Now you can try again
<Metanot> bitchhacker can’t hack
<Black<TdV>> nice play on words
<bitchchecker> wort man
<Elch> bitchchecker: I’m still waiting for your attack!
<Metanot> how many times again he is no hacker
<bitchchecker> man do you want a virus
<bitchchecker> tell me your ip and it deletes your hard drive
<Metanot> lol ne give it up i’m a hacker myself and i know how hackers behave and i can tell you 100.00% you’re no hacker..

The moment you realize you're just good at googling and not an expert in programming...

That's when the internet connectivity is down!

Client: I want you to reverse engineer this piece of software!!
*posts some link to an exe on altervista along with some unrelated crap*
Oh and "I PAY"! (Because you can't even take that for granted anymore these days.)

Me: Alright, I'll look into it but I'm not a reverse engineering expert so don't expect too much.
*Closes Facebook*

Client, day after: Hey have you looked into it already? Have you finished it already?! HEY, RESPOND ALREADY!!!

Me (thinking): YEAH AFTER 1 DAY AND NO PAYMENT DETAILS WHATSOEVER, I INSTANTLY DROPPED EVERYTHING JUST TO PLEASE YOU, FILTHY RAT SACK!! You fucking wish, motherfucker. Down to lowest priority you go! And if I don't feel like doing it, how about I just drop your request and tell you to suck my fleshy snek, HOW ABOUT THAT HUH? Fucking piece of shit 😤

Worst Person you Interviewed?

I interview many developers at my company. Today, I interviewed someone who seemed fairly qualified. Then I spotted a large gap I his resume. When I enquirer about the gap, he disclosed that he had served prison time for pedophilia. He further disclosed that as a condition of his release, he had to be supervised when using a computer.

As we are a gov/medical company, we are not allowed to hire people with a criminal record. He begged me but I told him that it was again company policy. I felt sorry for him not finding any work and being forced to beg, but I also had a knot in my stomach over the details his crime that he elaborated on.

Anyway, he scored 0 out of 10 on my interview scale.

Right after him, I interviewed another developer who seemed great on paper but when I proved further, he didn’t know jack about JavaScript, despite his resume show him to be a “jQuery expert”!

So, I asked him what he does in his spare time and how me keeps his development skill/knowledge up to date. He said:

“...no, I don’t study this shit in my spare time... I’m not a facking need!!!”

I stopped the interview right there. I might sware here on DV, but it my office I keep it civil & professional. So I certainly do not appreciate it when a diaper wearing, snotty nosed, junior wanker swares in my offices to merely protect his willful ignorance and shows pathetic pride instead of humility. That interview comes to an end immediately!

The pedo got a 0 out of 10, but this brat scored a -5 out of 10!!!

I have so many interview stories I could tell you...

#fml

Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.

So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.

They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.

After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.

I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.

Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.

The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?

The last two frontend devs I interviewed.

First:

He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.

Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.

So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"

Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.

"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."

Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.

His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.

Second:

This was a phone interview.

It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.

We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.

We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.

Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a bunch of contesters fort the worst interview.

#1 The Dishonest Ignorant

Me: *asks question*
#1: *stumbles*
Me: It's okay to say that you don't know.
#1: *continues to ramble on without making sense*
Me: Well, okay. That is all. I don't think that this will be a fit.

#2 The fraud

Me: How would you rate your knowledge in object orientated programming?
#2: Very advanced! I am an expert!
Me: Can you state the difference of an interface and an abstract class?
#2: *surprised pikachu-face* Well not that advanced!

#3 The trickster

During a skype call (without video):

Me: *asks question*
#3: *keyboard sounds aclacking*
Me: Are you googling?
#3: No *click clack click a clack* ... and to answer your question: *starts reading from the first search results*

The real bummer is, that in all of these cases, just saying "I don't know" would have been fine. (The "expert" OOP-guy would still have some explaining to do.)

It's not like that our interview process resolves around trick questions or that you'd get kicked out for getting one answer wrong. Though how can I trust somebody not to lie to me on a daily basis if they fake their interview?

We keep the interview relatively basic and rely on real-word coding exercise anyway and it helps us to get an idea on where we would gain support from them and where we need to support them.

As a developer you spend a lot of time learning new stuff anyways.

It blows my mind.

When I was looking for an internship...

- Hello, I noticed your cv and you have a great portfolio! Are you familiar with responsive design?
- I have a basic knowledge on that, i am not an expert.
- Ok, can you come for an interview on Monday?
-Sure

Monday morning....
Interview with CEO...

- What's your experience with responsive design?
- I have a basic knowledge on that, i am not an expert.
- Sorry I need someone expert
- But the job is for junior dev and it's an internship
- Yes but man hours of someone to training you will be a cost for me.
- Ok, thank you
(Step before closing the door)Btw you should had check my portfolio, 4/8 websites are responsive.

LinkedIn is an alternative reality unhooked from the rest of the world, where hypocrisy and arrogance meet, creating Leaders, Experts and Analysts.

- Every company is an industry leader globally.
- Every offer is life-changing.
- Every normal person suddenly is an expert in his field
- Each candidate is an expert in time management, customer relationships, and software development priorities.
- They are all happy to share their achievements in a disinterested way
- They all deal with important issues, with great reflections on the meaning of life and reality around us
- Each written post usually starts with a question followed by a life experience
- Companies are dynamic, they change their internal processes on a daily basis

Please shoot me, I've had enough of this shit.

- Few companies are leaders globally
- The offers you make are traps and I always have to look for where the bullshit is.
- You're not an expert in your field if you've been doing the same thing for 10 years without moving your ass out of that chair.
- If you were a time management expert, I wouldn't have to call you every week for unresolved tasks, and I wouldn't even have to do 150 meetings to postpone the goals set. Exactly what is your experience with the customer? Because by heart shutting up and always saying yes is not a good way to get the job done.
- I have great news for you. Nobody gives a shit about your work successes. At most they're envious.
- If you really are such a deep and introspective person... how the fuck is it that working with you is hell?
- Copying a quote from a website and then building a narrative on it doesn't automatically make you a superstar
- Companies, especially the largest ones, take years to change and if they do it is because there is the economic motivation behind it, not because they are visionaries.

This rant was written by scrolling through my LinkedIn feed.

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

My friend and boss，told me he would teach me code 2 years in a half ago.

I didnt know what css or html was and i used to call java javascript.

I can know create my own module with webpack， have my automated doc， use react， redux， he taught me linux， git，unit testing， databases，docker， and so on...

Im not an expert in any of it butbi know what they are for and can play with them more or less comfortably.

The best advice he ever gave me was:

“coding is not about coding. We are like the greath painters of history. They were great at painting but even more at creating. If you have no creativity， you can paint as well as you want， its worthless.”

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

How to make Xcode crash:
1. type: self.btn
2. Profit!

I need to add this on my CV as an expert in making xcode crash, not implying that Xcode is a shit IDE !!

I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.

I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.

I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.

The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.

The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.

The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.

They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.

Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.

Im so fucking pissed. so in my family (im an only child) im the computer expert. but everytime i touch something EVERYONE THINKS IM GOING TO BREAK IT OR TELL ME I DONT KNOW WHAT IM FUCKING DOING. FUCKING EXCUSE ME?

My mother was bitching about her laptop she uses for college about how something was not working and she was on the phone with a guy that told her "Its a JavaScript error and he told me I have to redownload windows" and im just like "MOm THERE IS NOT A DAMN NEED FOR YOU TO REINSTALL AN OPERATING SYSTEM FOR AN ERROR ON YOUR BROWSERS SIDE OR THE WEBSITES SIDE" (i didnt get to see the error)

I pick up the laptop and unplug it and she yells at me because the IT man told her it wouldnt work if she unplugged it. So i told her im done helping her with all her bullshit she can do what she wants. and comes in says it works now and she doesnt know why. then goes out and buys a new laptop bc she cant process moving her files on the cloud or a flashdrive.

my entire fucking family is like this.

S E N D H E L P .

Every day I feel like Dr. Leonard McCoy.

"I'm an automation expert, not a ..."

* DBA
* ElasticSearch administrator
* Kafka Architect
* Email marketing specialist
* SEO Analyst
* Front end developer
* Doctor
* Project manager
* Accountant

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?

The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ

I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.

I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."

Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.

Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.

Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).

Where's the Tylenol?

So...

I'm looking for my first job as a web developer. I kept seeing these rants about how horrible and frustrating job searching is, all of which I thought were greatly exaggerated. They're all just jokes and memes, right?

Nope.

Every fucking meme seems to be true.

- Junior developer with +4 years of experience, expert in their field - check!

- Listing requirements for 6 different jobs under "Full-stack developer" - check!

- "Expert developer required ASAP" - $10/hour - check!

- 100% remote ... *scrolls all the way down* ... for 2 days of the week - check!

- Entry level font-end position - must be an expert in Vue, Angular, React, AWS, Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Python, ES9+, OOP, TDD, BDD - check!

- "Cool" description written in js code with no indentation - check!

And I'm not seeing these every once in a while or something like that. No. Most of the posts are like this. I thought I may just be underqualified since I've never had a real job before, but this just seems crazy to me...

Don't lie in your resume or in the interview.

People know you're not an expert at everything, nobody expects that from anybody (and you should really avoid working for anybody who does)

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.

I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :

1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.

I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.

Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.

Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS

They want me to be a speaker at this event , I wrote them this

Regarding this statement on the speaker form “Presentation rooms are set up theatre style with a lectern, lectern mic, screen, laptop with Windows XP Office

2007/Vista XP and a projector.” – is it just an old form?

I do have one question what does this mean exactly?  Are you actually using windows xp? it’s not supported by Microsoft anymore, so it’s quite dangerous to have unless it’s not attached to the internet what so ever and never has been. Vista… is not much better. Windows 7 is 2008 you should at least be using that I would of thought? I mainly ask because if I am going to speak about technology and computers I can’t exactly say I’m an expert when I’m using tech as old as that. I mean I’m 20 I was 7 when xp came out, I know how to use it but it’s ancient, in computer terms It’s as old as Aztec times and I’d rather not be sacrificed to a sun god (seriously if anyone who knows tech at all sees me I’ll be embarrassed and taken the piss out of majorly).

Could I just use my laptop? If needs be?

Sorry to be a pain

There's no such thing as an expert programmer. With time you just get different kinda errors. As long as you're not getting same error, you're making progress.

This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3

Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.

Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.

In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.

Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …

Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!

Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.

First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.

I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.

Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.

Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.

What a fucking nightmare.

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

I think the worst work culture you can experience is nepotism and corruption in hierarchy. What do I mean? Well, this happened (and I think is still happening) in my last job. It was a huge logistic/delivery company. I was an intern, working as assistant developer of the only developer of the site. There was also a guy that was the technician, his assistant, a DBA and that's it.

Well, my partner and I were working on a system that managed almost all the operations of the company in this city.

Well, I supplied the dev two weeks when he was on vacation. I knew almost all the system. what happened? the manager from other city came with another Dev, and I'm not saying that I was an expert or something like that, but that dev from the other city was an incompetent. He couldn't even make a small GUI change without messing it all...

Guess what? The company paid him weekly round tickets to come and go from his city to ours (two hours of flight).

I was too disappointed I started searching another job. A week after getting my degree, I left my job and started in the one I am now. Before leaving, I asked my boss if there was a realistic chance to grow up. He answered no. To be honest, that didn't surprised me :/

The thing that makes me angry about this is that a lot of companies give chances to people that come from other cities, even if they don't know anything >:v

Oh, I almost forgot it: The last five months I was working there, they quit our office and send us to trailer-offices :/

After 30 years in IT industry, I am not sure if I'm a novice or an expert. I don’t know anything.

WTF!!!!! I officially have someone trying to extort me just had this in my email box this morning!

--------

Hello,

My name is [name removed], I'm an IT security expert and I found a security issue on your website.
This email is personal and in no way related to any of my employers.

I was able to access to a lot of files which contains sensitive data.
I attached a screenshot of the files I found to this email.

I would be happy to give you the method I used to access these files in order to let you fix it.
Would be a monetary compensation possible?

Please forward this email to the right person, if your are not responsible for the security of the website.

Best Regards,
[name removed]

---

He can basically see the contents of my wp-config.php. How has he managed this?

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

What the fuck??!?!?
I wanna say :-
Fuck!!! What the fuck a sex robot is?!?? Fuck???
Lets leave this planet here humans are thinking to make a sex robot(fuck! ) who can say no fuck?!?!?! Later they will file rape case for humans who tried to force their robot. FUCKING FUCK BRAINS?!?!?

Full answer: -
A lot of ethicists and psychologists think that yes, they should learn to say no. Here is an interesting article about it:

Should We Program Sex Robots to Give Consent?

I agree with Kate Darling, Ph.D., a research specialist and robot-human interaction expert at MIT Media Lab, told Inverse in a discussion about Westworld, when she says she isn’t concerned about the robots, but with human behavior.

However, when I’ve expressed these feelings on Quora, about this controversy I was downvoted and my answer collapsed because people got offended that I made the claim that an object (the robot) could be ‘raped,’ even after I clarified exactly what I meant by that- that no you cannot rape an object, but just as an object cannot consent, you may be enacting ‘rape’ or torture fantasies, etc., on the robot. I think I was downvoted because my point of view wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear, was too blunt, and the people who downvote opinions that may look more negatively at the sex robot industry typically aren’t feminists in the slight.

It seems a lot of people want the right to use sex robots and also that a lot of people haven’t really thought about it too deeply. Some people say that the robots will relieve women from sex work or protect people from sexual assault, I think these are very bold claims. Some people compare the sex robots to vibrators or other masturbation tools, but this is simply not accurate because sex robots are designed to be much more. They are marketed as companions that do not cry, nag, etc. People that own them often may dress them, tie them up, have marriage ceremonies, etc., a lot more activities than they would if it was a simple masturbation tool.

This is how Pokémon Go shows errors to its users. It says a generic „Error“ in German with different numbers for different errors.
I am not an UX expert, but isn’t this a really bad practice? The error number has no meaning to the user, so why displaying it? I think it is just confusing and looks ugly 😐

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

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

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.

I'm not an expert but if you site takes 5 seconds to navigate a step BACKWARDS, consider it inefficient af.

Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.

I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.

Maybe in special dedication to @kiki.

I cut the unit tests down in LOC size by roughly 50 - 60 % in most projects.

It's really easy once one sees unit tests not as a dunking pile of copy pasta wild west, but rather as a code base that needs architecture and design.

Some extensions, some annotations, some good old helper classes.

Pooooof.

Why I did this? ...

Because it's fucking annoying when you read a PR with tests and need a fucking diff tool to spot the difference between two tests cause they're 80 % the same.

Yeah. Thx for giving me brain cramps, motherducker.

I'm not an expert in unit tests, but if all test codebases look like the "usual stuff" in our projects...

It's no wonder bugs exist...

It's a job description for an entry level Software Developer role at Apple.

Basically they want
- A Front end dev
- A back end dev
- An iOS expert
- A Gimp/photoshop designer
- A streaming data expert
- An Oracle/Teradata expert
- A Kafka expert ( Not shown in the picture)

And on top of that the guy should be able to learn new tech faster.

Do they want a developer or a fucking terminator?

"The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do. " - Charles Willson

Fucking facebook researcher that make underfitted neural nets and fuck Mark that it's a marketing genius, the only idiot that can make news from a failure. The CEO of Tesla knows it and said Mark is not an AI expert. Bug not feature, it's only a poorly trained and poorly designed neural network having a bad representation of concepts, not a new language and not the fucking apocalypse. Google faced and solved the same issue when start ed using neural nets for zero-shot translations without using english as a translation bridge.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

As I was browsing pornhub, I started reading articles about AI, dick still in hand, and went down the rabbit-hole (no pun intended) of self referential systems and proofs. This is something I do frequently (getting off track, not beating off, though I have been slacking recently).

Now I'm no expert but my neurotic DID personality which prompted this small reading binge DOES think it is an expert. And it got me thinking.

Godel’s second incompleteness theorem says that "no sufficiently strong proof system can prove its own consistency."

Then utilizing proof by contradiction, systems that are "sufficiently strong" should produce truth outputs that are monotonic. E.g. statements such as "this sentence is a lie."

Wouldn't monotonicity then be proof (soft or otherwise) that a proof system is 'sufficiently strong' in the sense that Godel's second theorem meant?

Edit: I WELCOME input, even if this post is utterly ignorant and vapid. I really don't know shit about formal systems or logic. Welcome any insight or feedback that could enlighten me.

Sooooo

First of all sorry for lack of ranting
But this people started to behave.

UNTIL YESTERDAY. You gonna love it.

Junior coding front end. HE NOT TOUCHING BACKEND THANK GOD.
He realises his suggestion made him to do some changes in the code. Apparently that is the end of the wolrd "a developer proposing a change and then the code must be changed??? No no" that's how his brain works. Check this.

He decides not to do two pages for creating models so he combined two models in one page. TWO MODELS IN ONE PAGE. Sooo modelB depends on ModelA. Fine. front end:" so backend has to change because im doing this in one page"
Me:" mmm no, you said treat them as separate entities besides they are on the same screen"
He:" ok, but then if I create all together the modelB is going to raise an error"
(Let me tell you he says this with expert voice, because he said "raise" and "error" so he got technical now)

*my boss said some white noise irrelevant to the conv but he is happy because he contributed and is involved*
Me:"the way data is sent has nothing to do with the way data is shown"

He:" whatever crap he can say trying to prove his point desperately "
Me: "yes, but the backend is not going to change every time a form/page changes the way to display data"

He"i dont think u understand "
Me:" i think i do"

after beginning to learn numpy , i believe these packages were really created by some clown of a circus xD.
Everything is sooooo entertaining!!!

i learned java 3 years ago, but today if i had to crap out some crazy java or c++ expert , i would tell him about numpy's arrays...
Like , "hey dude python has this cool data structure in the numpy library called arrays, which can hold any datatypes in a kind of arraylist like fashion, and you can convert them from 1 dimensional to 1000 dimensional in just 1 line , and also do you know we can select any column with just array[position]? and even this position does not needs to be an integer, you can use a list , like array[[1,2,3]] will give you elements at array[1],array[2],array[3], and...."
wait, why is my friend dead ? xD
HAhahahaha

I like coding. I am a professional coder. But I feel I am not very good at it. My colleagues are so creative and fast with their solutions. And here I am, always in awe and never seem to feel like becoming an expert in coding. The thoughts are tiring 😪

Do you know what really bothers me for no reason? Developers that have bars on their portfolios displaying a percentage of their skill. WHERE ARE Y'ALL GETTING THIS NUMBER FROM? This really shouldn't bother me, but it does. If life was a video game, you'd be able to open your stats UI, and get these percentages, but where are they getting these numbers from? I've seen some websites that people put SUPER specific number (87%, 36%). Are you 87% of the way to being an expert in NodeJS development? I don't understand. I'm not hating on these people, please don't get offended if you have this on your website :)

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

tl;dr version: I now hate Windows​.

<background>
I installed​ Ubuntu in dual boot on my PC and I was sceptical.
After one month everything is working perfectly. I'm loving this OS although I still am not an expert, and I doubt I'll ever go back to Windows.
</background>

Now. Today at school we were drawing using a CAD software and, for no reason at all, Windows crashed. This is not a terrible thing, as I usually save often, but this time it also corrupted the file and I had to start from scratch again!

Why Windows, why?

So you heard from that awesome tool that apparantly everybody uses.

Go to the web page:
One single continuous page in 90ies style with random blahblah targetting expert users and various edge cases without context. Some lines about arcane build commands in an unfamiliar language.

Not even a single, comprehensive line, what it does, what it is good for, no minimal example or hint even how to run it.

So you write thousands of lines of dense code, but are not able to drop some first lines of plain, understandable english for people just visiting the first time? How hard could it be? Fuck you, srsly.

How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.

And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.

Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.

tl;dr I know that I know nothing

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

So we've got a gif that doesn't show up in our React Native application. Of course, the designers assume it's me: "are you sure the gif is in the codebase? how are you using it in your component"? yeah ok boomer. I'm like, look at this other gif, works fine. "oh" So I tell them, double check the export options on how you are building the gif, maybe there is something there. so now they are asking ME for those export options. I'M A DEV, NOT A DESIGNER, DO YOUR JOB AND FIGURE IT OUT. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT PROGRAM YOU ARE USING

oh as an aside, I was putting up a website for a client and they are like "my logo is quite similar to many others, is this something to worry about legally?" OH, SO NOW I'M A LAWYER TOO??!!?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE GOOGLE IS LITERALLY IN FRONT OF YOU

why do people continually think just because we can code we are fucking designers / lawyers / astronauts
/ god?
man this pisses me off - i think of that draw red lines with blue ink expert video, in the end, just smile and nod: "i can do... absolutely anything... trust me, I'm an expert"

I sometimes feel like some people's comments on devrant are enough for a mental health crisis diagnosis. I wonder, how can we diagnose people through text? And can, let's say, ML do any better.

I mean; let's say for example abusive behaviors. This may be an online community but that doesn't stop some from abusing others, right? But the only form of communication here is text, right? What if you could diagnose... Not even that. What if you could inform a mental health expert about a toxic behavior online? We do have a lot of "internet policing" but we have no "internet mental health help" for toxic behaviors and attempts to mitigate that. I don't mean banning people. I mean literally in simplest form tag a psychotherapist in the convo.

Just thinking. :)

Being a junior and part of a small team at a startup, working with a new software architecture, even the team lead is a beginner in it. It feels like I'm at an echo chamber, there's nobody expert enough to look up to if stuck, decisions seem to be based on opinions rather than an architectural design kinda point of view.

Ugh, I hope I'm not the only here ever feeling this way.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Okay so i graduated last year and got a job working for a place that sadly disappoints me in their web development practices. This place uses a dead technology(my opinion)called Cold Fusion by Adobe. They do not use any form of version control like Git and their sites are very shitty and the design and development is implemented very poorly honestly. It honestly makes me sad that i feel like im smarter than my department vp. That being said i do not feel challenged here and am looking to collaborate in some open source projects via Github preferably.I dont consider myself an expert in this field but i would say im about intermediate level in web development. Im pretty comfortable with HTML,CSS/SASS,PHP,JS/JQuery, and im pretty comfortable in the PHP framework Laravel. So if anyone is interested in collaborating or starting something up, id be so down for it. :)

!rant

I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.

A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.

With that way too long prologue...

I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)

I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.

I thought that was it.

Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.

They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.

I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.

My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶

And I wish us more companies like that.😉

every fucking time I use Javascript.
(yes, I'm no expert, but I can pick up ANY LANGUAGE and do this task in FIVE FUCKING MINUTES, NOT AN HOUR!!! FUCK!)

"Gee, I think this button should probably list the total recipients of the mailing, looks like I have to get the total of a column in an object, no problem, hell, i'll do it frontside just for the fuck of it'

yeah, seemed like a good idea.. AN HOUR AGO

ARRRGGGH

fucking javascript scope can take a flying leap off of a tall building, and then NOT FALL to the fucking ground because it will fucking tell me that OOPS gravity doesn't exist for javascript!
UNCAUGHT REFERENCE ERROR
right?
FUCK YOU
die from gravity like you deserve motherfucker

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

Content strategy expert: How long would it take to program an SVG animation intro video

Me: I'm not sure I've never programmed one before.(still teaching myself)

Content expert: iS it even possible?

Me: yeah all things are possible in programming ;)

Content expert: so then how long would it take

Me: no.

Content expert: but wouldn't it be easier if...

Me: no, go away

I'm working on a codebase that is terminally ill. It's split so badly into microservices that no matter what you do, every one of them talks to every one of them over and over. If there's any way they can avoid just invoking a method on a class and send themselves a message or make an HTTP request, they'll do it. One of the services just sends messages to itself for no apparent reason. Except it doesn't even send messages to itself. It sends an HTTP request to a controller in another app, and that controller sends a message which is received by the same class that made the request.

The point is that this application is screwed. The defects pile up and there is literally no one who can understand what it's supposed to do in any scenario. I'm good at this. I can follow confusing code and document it. But not this one. It's overwhelming. It's insanity.

When these defects come in we're told to just run the app from the UI, see what HTTP requests it makes, and start tracing the code manually. Running and debugging it locally would be a nightmare but it's impossible anyway.

They decided that we all need to understand the application better so we can work on it, so we were each given six poorly-define five-hour tasks to "understand" various things. Those things don't make any sense. It's like if someone gave you the source code to Excel and told you to spent five hours understanding columns, five more understanding rows, and five more understanding cells.

Here's the thing: I'm okay with learning and understanding some code. It's part of the job. But I'm not going to abandon my career as a software developer so I can become an expert on debugging their awful code. I didn't make this mess. I'm not going to live with it. I'm moving on as quickly as I possibly can.

I've tried to explain to them that if they want the situation to improve they need to improve the code. They need to learn how to write tests. If your plan is that people will study your code, know it inside and out, and then spend all their time debugging it, that's a plan for failure. Everyone who can will leave and take what they know with them.

These companies just don't get it. They need their software to work, but the types of developers who can help them don't need that software to work. No one capable of doing good work is going to spend several years debugging their awful code unless you pay them a crazy ton of money.

Just don't make a mess in the first place. Hire developers who can do a good job. If you hire the cheapest people you can find you won't be able to get someone else to fix it later. It's not personal but I wish failure on those projects or even those companies. I want them to fail because failure is so expensive. I want them to fail so that others learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes.

As an industry we're a bunch of genuine idiots. We just keep doing the same things over and over again no matter how much it hurts.

!dev

For a long time, I thought that the most annoying people on the ski slope are kids overestimating their abilities on a difficult piste or speeding down the slope ignoring others. Boy was I wrong; those kids are nothing compared to all the fucking morons who think that buying the most expensive gear at a local sports store makes them better at skiing.

For the love of god, if you ever consider skiing, just buy some reasonably cheap all-mountain gear, and if you think you need something better, do proper research or find a fucking expert. I'm not talking about those "experts" they have at your local sports store, I'm talking someone who provides gear and support for actual ski clubs and teams, or at least someone working at a dedicated outdoors store who actually owns some of the gear they're selling.

"Oh, but I'm an advanced skier" - right, then why don't you tell me what turning radius, width profile, and flex would best fit you? Thought so.

Look, it's clear just by looking at your $1000 "racing" skis that they have a way shorter turning radius than any competition-level skis, and if you were really going as fast as you think you are, you'd probably spin out on every other turn with such a short radius. Your curved skiing poles aren't fooling anyone either; professionals only use those in super-g and downhill because you need to go insanely fast to notice any advantage over regular poles. And people who race that fast use way more protection than I can see on you.

Okay, it's your gear, it's your body; if you're going to buy overpriced stuff that doesn't make sense or neglect protection, that's up to you. Do you know what's not up to you? Being a fucking moron and ruining skiing for everyone else. Just because you got the most expensive "expert-level" gear, you can't just use it for powder, park, or moguls when you feel like it because you don't fucking know how to ride any of these, even if your gear claims to be good for all types of skiing. And let me tell you, that expensive gear you have is much less forgiving than some entry-level gear if you decide to try other styles of skiing.

I'm fucking tired of people like that. If I go to the resort with lots of powder, I want to ride the powder, not spend most of my time avoiding groups of morons who clearly don't have the right gear and skills for the powder. If I go to the resort with a huge park, I want to ride the park, and I can't do anything if the place is covered by dipshits speeding past the objects and braking in front of the jumps. And if I want to race down the piste, I want to race, I don't want to have a bunch of morons constantly switching side in front of me to avoid "rough" parts they can't ride on.

I tried to go for a job as a ReactJS junior dev.. I got my first interview and they liked my prototype.. but..

A week later they reply: "We decided not to go with you because we hired an expert in ReactJS".

Err.. really? You're hiring expert-level ReactJS developers for a junior position?! What the frig.
You want to know what I think? This whole "It's ok that you don't know everything, you'll learn on the job" thing is a hoax. No, the job market doesn't want novices. With every single interview, I'm met with: "but you're not an expert and we can't afford that".

This reminds me of the best advice my professor (seasoned expert in the field, real engineer with more than 20 years experience) once gave me:

"The job market doesn't have the time nor patience to mollycoddle you. When you enter it, you have to already know things to an expert degree because companies want value. They're hiring you because you have these skills and knowledge.
You have to already know what they ask before they ask it. You're required to know things by yesterday, so to speak. It is an exigent industry out there. This is why we bring you the foundations - so that you go further on your own and you can take on any problem"

I am so sick of a senior developer that has no idea how to be a manager. I've been a manager before and it is not that hard. I came into this job thinking that it was going to be a fresh start, but instead all the haunting projects from incompetent developers that worked before me followed me to this team as well... (we are in the same company, just different teams) My boss thinks I'm an "expert" in everything, and everyone else on the team has no idea what is going on. I have to spend all of my time babysitting every other developer, and I don't get any coding done myself, yet I'm still expected to make my deadlines.

I need a new gig so bad I'm sick. The stress level is getting pretty bad. I've already had cancer once. I don't want to go through it again... Plz hlp

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

Sh*t. I think I'm going to lose my job bc the CEO thought I was an expert on React even thought I specifically told him I wasn't. I worked at least 12 hours everyday, sometimes including weekends for 4 weeks now. And still got yelled at for not being an expert.

If you tell your manager: "I only used this tech in my spare time", would they expect you to be working at expert level?

I'm very confused and seems like noone is understanding my side.

Feel like sh*t rn because I really need this job because I'm broke but I dont know how to say to the CEO that I warned him and the team lead that I was not an expert. And yet, they treat me like one....

Any other IT company is like:

* Task -> Designer -> Markup coder -> Backend -> Finish

Our IT company:

Act I: "Art of setting up contact with idiots".
------
Items:
*Cave scripts (aka "typical task")

Designer: -- "DAFUQ?"
Customer: *gives another interpretation*
Designer: -- "Erm... really? White text on white background?"
Customer: -- "Make a decision by yourself. I was expecting much more independence from you. You are an expert after all."
Designer: -- "Well. I'm making decision by myself. The text will be placed *here* and will be gray-colored, because *bla-bla-bla*"
Customer: -- "I disagree."
Designer: *1 hour of silence later* -- "Well...k."

Act II: "Design meets ar(u)tist"
----

Items:
*Something, that was drawn by dumb kid while smashing his own head against desk. (PSD layout)
* Salt (to pour it on open wounds)

Designer: -- "I'm seeing this task *this way*"
Markup: -- "And how do u think i should get this done? Have you even seen what you made?? This is bullshit!"
Designer: -- "It's not bullshit! It's a sci-fi themed layout!"
Markup: -- "With gameplay elements and graphics from Alien Shooter??"
Designer: -- "Well, I don't care." *brings new edits and changes*
Markup: -- "????"
Designer: *smug face* -- "!!!"

Act III (7 days later, 9 hours till deadline): "Short story about boy, who was trying to hang himself, but instead fell out from window."
----

Items:
*Markup, smelling like it went through hell and back (x1)
* Markup coder with fried butt (x1)

Backend: -- "What. Is. THAT?"
Markup: -- "It's a work we should complete in 9 hours."
Backend: -- "WE?? I know u mean me, but that's a nightmare. What the f*ck were you doing all this time?"
Markup: -- "Well..." *finds out that he was only watching films and sleeping* "I was making this thing up..."
Backend: -- "You mean "f*cking" *this* thing "up"?"
Markup: -- "Not without it"

(*3 hours of edits and changes of color from white to white later*)
Backend: -- "Well, let's do this."
*Picks PHP and tries to bundle it up with MongoDB. After some time tries to rewrite everything to JS and starts shouting something like "F***CK" and looking for window to walk through. Figures out that he is on first floor. And that he is too lazy to go upstairs*

Act IV (3 days after deadline): "Pain and misery":
-----

Items:
*Something covered with insul(t)ating tape. (Final product)

Customer: -- "Really?"
Team: -- "Kinda."
Customer: -- "Well, thanks for your work anyway. It feels like it's going to disassemble right in my hands but it just works. Oh, also, you didnt made this in time, so your payment will be over9000 times lower. That's all"
Backend, on fluids: -- "Well...yeah..."
Markup: -- "Don't look at me like that. I really was doing my job."
Designer, with twitching eye: -- "Huh, I see. You worked so hard that we have nothing to eat now. Thanks for that."
Backend: ...

You want me to be an expert in advanced data structures, algorithms, dbms, Oracle, python, machine learning, J2EE just to develop apps for you? If I had been a master of all trades, I would not have come to you in the first place.

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

I just remembered some of the "harmless" dev-related insults I've received over the years:

1) most recently, I shared a tool with an acquaintance cuz it bears the same name as something he put together a while back. Background: this guy likes to come across as having infinite programming knowledge and brags to his fb pals about being an expert in multiple languages. While trying to make sense of the cryptic docs of the package I sent him, he implies I don't know what the iframe or html5 canvas are. Claims not to elaborate what package does cuz the docs is meant for advanced desktop and mobile devs

It hurt because this is one of few people who know I built suphle, yet thinks so lowly

2) as you can tell from the first point, I share links I consider interesting with relevant contacts. I'm also quite vocal about my (mostly contrarian) takes on occurrences within the dev space that I'm familiar with. One day on the laravel board, this dude is reprimanding me and asks me to take the opinions I read on blogs and tabloids with a pinch of salt, implying I didn't form them independently but was influenced by what was written by some stranger online

It hurt because I expected him to know better. I felt I'd sufficiently proven to have actually built things that informed my school of thought

3) the oldest happened many years ago but I remember it now because the perpetrator called me out of the blue last week. I was teaching his boss, who managed an office but preferred to keep his student status hidden, to avoid being thought incompetent. This caller guy just so turned out to be learning js at the time. Fast forward some years, we all disbanded. He'd landed a dev job and was doing well. So I sent him one of those js gotchas, asking him to explain his answer

After he replied, I told him his answer was close enough but it had more to do with js passing closure arguments by reference. Dude responded that he knew that was the correct answer but wasn't aware I knew what closures meant. That stung me like hell back then. I missed his call and didn't know who owned the contact, so I searched my chats and saw that last interaction. Pain all over again

I can't recall one single person I can call a mentor, however...

When I first started as a developer I had a senior to work with... I knew close to anything but I was always good at research and learning on my own... But we used an asp.net framework, it was new and there was little to no useful information, only basics... When I asked the senior (let's call him Joe) for help he gave me a quick answer:
Joe: Go to file xx, there's an example of what you need there...
Me: Well, been there and that's great but it doesn't help...
Everytime I was stucked during my first week it was always some sort of the same, so I insisted this time...
Me: so, Joe... I'm really stuck on this one, can you give it a look?
Joe: I know, I've been researching a way to do it for an hour now and can't get it either...
Me: wow! Thanks... But I thought you were an expert on this...
Joe: not really, never used it before. It's as new to me as it is to you! :)

So, that switched me from "this fucking weasel won't help me for shit" to "well, let's help each other"

We became good friends, always challenging each other and from that day on I stopped asking for help, and asking where can I help others...

I had great and greatly bad colleague and seniors. Each one thought me something either what to do or what not to do, how to act or not, how to tackle problems, how to teach...

Everyone I have worked with, worked for or trained is a mentor of mine. Even those I feel like I failed training thought me how to do better next time...

Thank you guys for being grate... Thank you assholes for teaching me how to send a guy go fuck himself! Good luck for those who get stucked with me

Once again, due to poor management, I find myself exporting svgs from Figma, saving them as pngs, and importing them into our application... (remember I'm a developer, NOT a designer)

Don't we have a design team who can export the needed assets for a feature?

"Noooooo fullstackclown can do all of that himself! He's an expert!!!"

The fucks are lucky I dabble in digital art as a hobby and even know how to do this stuff...

FML

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

Lead: alright people what are your ideas and updates for this page refactor we've been talking about.

dipshit: Alright guys, I've done a quick awesome prototype that I really like...

dipshit: *starts to speak super fast* (I catch words about function composition, clean, no side effects, speed, efficiency. Basically a string of brogrammer buzzwords.)

me: what did you mean by that? How does it work?

dipshit: *basically repeats the same drivel*

me: uh..ok I don't quite understand

everyone else looks confused.

me: ok since you've done a prototype, we take a look at it later

*** After meeting, looks at code ***

It was COMPLETE GARBAGE. He used 1,500+ lines of js in 17 files to make what was essentially a simple 2 item list.

We were looking at a way to overhaul the entire page, he "refactored" maybe perhaps 5% of the page.

There was absolutely nothing clean / functional / composable about this monstrosity. It was as if he read chapter 1 of a book on functional programming and decided he understood enough to call himself an expert.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL HIRED?

HOW DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A DEVELOPER?

YOU ARE SELF TAUGHT, DISS PEOPLE WITH FORMAL CS/CE DEGREES AND YOU PRODUCE TRASH CODE?!

ARE YOU SO RETARDED THAT YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE HOW STUPID YOU ARE?

Please die in a fire, along with your jock attitude and unprofessionalism. Take this worthless junk unfit to be called code with you.

This is my first ever post on DevRant, and it will be more of a question: Is the tech sector more toxic than others?

I've been working for my entire adult life in tech, supporting tech companies of basically any scale. I've always worked in engineering teams, building the core software/product of the company. After years of passion and working hard, I believe I gained some skills in what I do.

However, every so often I reach a point where I feel burned out by all the chaos going on around me. I work as an "expert" in engineering and frequently I get the feeling that I'm not being listened to. Any feedback I give seems to be disregarded.

On top of that, I've met many people with a rather aggressive/abusive communication style. Engineers who truly believe they're far above and beyond everyone else, but with little to back that up. Talking shit about their predecessors, trashing junior engineers,...

I've seen behavior toward women that is grossly inappropriate. I've seen female coworkers cry more than once because they don't feel heard. I've seen coworkers being criticized for personal life choices they made.

In almost every company I've worked at, there was at least one engineer who was so stubborn that it became nearly impossible to work with. Just shutting people up, forcing the rest to follow their plan, and failing to provide any form of accountability when results don't pay off.

Here's the thing. I love developing products. I care about the people who want to use them. I really try to be nice to the people I work with. I started working in this sector because I really wanted to make a difference. However, all of that melts as snow on a sunny day, when I experience toxic behavior.

I am wondering if this is the same in every sector or if these problems are specific to working in tech. Is it maybe because tech is male-dominated and we've lost touch?

Every so often, when I lose my job or leave by burning out, I wonder... Is the grass greener on the other side? Would I be happier choosing another career?

In my experience, any BE dev or old architect/lead programmer that says they “can do frontend” does shit like writing Ajax calls in script tags directly in the html. They are the ones who add style attributes directly in html. They are the ones who google how to center a div and they still use float positioning because all of them are old, arrogant BE devs who get caught in a single framework who convince themselves they are an expert. They can’t give any good UX advice. They don’t know how to use a screen reader. They don’t know what WCAG means. They don’t constantly keep up to date on what browsers are supporting and what’s being released in the unstable versions. They don’t know what a web component is. They don’t know what a closure is. They don’t know anything about optimizing web perf metrics. They couldn’t tell you what web crawlers look for. They couldn’t tell you anything about design principles and anti-patterns. They don’t know how to manage a web application that will be seen by millions AND keep it nice, shiny, and refactorable on the code side. What do they really fucking know? how to write an MVC app? How to connect APIs and integrate code that other people wrote? I do full stack all day and writing anything not-client-facing is super easy.

Take that stick out of your ass and get over yourself you asshole. You haven’t written anything close to amazing even though you constantly act like you’re a god-tier programmer and your shit doesn’t stink.

Hit the books like the rest of us you fuck.

The Frontend is anything but fucking easy.

New day, new rant, same shit.

So basically, if you are following my rants you already know I'm working with a crappy framework forgotten by God and you should even be aware my manager is not an IT expert.

So anyway, we have this requirement to implement: a step-by-step process.

They asked us to make the UI design.

My big ass manager couldn't hold his expertise so basically he told us he would make the UI design.
He is a self-entitled UX designer, just saying.
I still don't know who he is, why he is there and why he is doing all this damage. (I only know he is a friend's ceo )

Today I got his UI mockup. It's a fucking nightmare. xD I mean, you would shoot yourself in the foot. If I was the customer I'd just leave the page. You may ask yourself: "How bad a UX process can be designed?" Well, a lot.

The interaction on the page is a clusterfuck.

I'd give you an example but it's so complex to describe I'm just leaving this rant as it this.

I'm implementing this... I'd like to say sorry to all our customers, it's not the devs fault.

What's the actual requirements to be called full stack developer? I do front-end, back-end, database, server, my own api's etc. I even have a t-shirt with "Keep calm and hug a printer". I've been doing this for 15 years and would not call me an expert in any part and certainly not privilegied for the full stack title. So what is?
If this was a humblebrag then please shoot me..

So, I'm going to apologize before I even start this rant...lol. I am the Senior level web developer at my job and have been there for around 12 years now. I have been there at least 2 times as long as everyone else.

I also want to say that my boss is a good man and I really like my coworkers and he has helped me through a lot over those 12 years and I don't want to sound ungrateful. However, I am so fed up with my job. I think the only reason I stay is the fear of the unknown of switching jobs and that I really like the overall work environment and my coworkers.

With that being said I have been with my boss almost since the inception of the company and I am the only original employee there. I have seen the company grow from 3 employees including the secretary there. We now have like 20 employees.

I have never complained and I have showed continual growth and loyalty over those 12 years. However, like a month ago they had me post a a job position and it was for a social media position and the job required only 5 years of experience and it was within 8k of what I currently make. That made me so angry.

I am literally capable of doing everyone's job at my job including my own with ease. However, no one else at my job is capable of doing my job at all and I have a bachelors degree as well and certified in many different things as well.

Again I am the most senior person at my job period and the most senior person at the entire company. Not only am I an expert in the programming languages we use at our company, but im an expert at analytics(certified in GA4, looker studio, tag manager, etc).

Additionally, a month ago I was reached out to on linkedin by another company and was offered a job for almost 30 to 40K more than my current job is paying and better benefits than where I currently work and it was fully remote.

Should I even bother asking my boss to match this or should I just walk and go to the other company? Apparently loyalty and knowledge hold no value anymore.

Is part of being intermediate/fluent in a tool, language or framework that you've just unwillingly memorized all the error messages you've come across?

'Hey I got error X' -> Just change Z and C and it will work
'Do you know what this stacktrace is trying to tell me?' -> Yeah you forgot a space
'What does this mean?' -> Just add the host to the hostfile

Not that it immediately makes you an expert ofcourse

We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.

The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.

Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.

Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".

The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".

God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.

Who else feels like your JavaScript skills are lacking? I have only been coding for about 6 month's and JS for about 2 1/2 of it but still I am not an expert and I understand. But still . . .😥

confession
somewhere deep inside me I know that despite I am programming in c and using linux from ages, still not an expert.

My biggest personal challenge as a dev is getting help. Sometimes I feel so deserted.

Now and then I have to do things that are not my expertise and I feel out of my depth. I think if I had an expert come in for a day they would be able to save me weeks of slow progress. There are dev things like updating frameworks, etc which I am fine to struggle through or read the docs, etc but things like setting up servers, enabling single sign on, database administration, integration with other systems. These are not really software development tasks but they need to be done. It seems every time I try to get help it is so much effort then the help I get turns out not to be helpful.

In my current role I have no budget or company credit card, etc. To make any sort of purchase I need to get my manager to write a business case to get approved by his manager signed in triplicate, buried in soft peat, etc. Even if I went through this process there are so many companies out there who want to get paid to do nothing and say they are experts in all things. It is almost impossible to know if we would get competent help or if I end up just wasting time explaining issues to people in phone meetings who are no help.

Any Symfony expert here? I've got quite a tricky question, that I'd love to disqus with another dev.

It's about twig within symfony. I'd like to add a custom node parser, but not for an own tag, but to set some value on each template if it's not set (which can't be done with globals in this case!). I've thought about using a visitor, but from my understanding it gets executed to late, as it requires (probably) to modify the twig AST at compile/parse time.

My job is decent, but now I've got one developer who's been there a few months longer than me who pushes back on stuff that's considered standard, good practice.

We have a domain with lots of business rules. He's opposed to any sort of domain-centric architecture that puts business logic in one place. He doesn't give any coherent reasons. He can't describe his alternative clearly. He just wants to put stuff all over the place.

If I don't cite any references he says it's just my opinion. If I do, I'm talking down to him.

Then he decided that the database shouldn't have concurrency checks. His reasoning is that as the application grows we'll have more and more concurrent updates, and they all have to succeed.

What if that corrupts our data? He mentions "eventual consistency." which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

The idea that our code should carefully ensure that our data is correct is "extreme." What are we going to tell people when bugs happen? That expecting the application to work correctly is extreme?

He's not a terrible developer. He's an advanced Expert Beginner. He's convinced himself that whatever he doesn't already know isn't worth knowing. That's fine if he wants to stop learning, but this affects the whole team. He makes such a fuss that it everyone gets stressed out and eventually I have to back off.

The problem is that someone with a reasonable degree of competence can pass off his experience as superior to all knowledge from outside sources.

I've been doing this as long as him. I don't claim to be a rock star genius, but I do keep learning. I don't tell myself that I've reached the pinnacle. But all of that learning goes to waste if I can't use it.

A tech as well as a life question (actually more of a useless sleepless thought) : What do you think is more important? Exposing yourself to multiple technologies, career paths and life experiences or diving deep into a single technology, career path and life experience?

I feel like being an expert in 1 tech might pay off in terms of job life , and it would be bad for a person who is constantly switching between career paths, but sometimes i feel like i should have tried other paths too. Not just the life of a techie, like people who are deep into media and journalism, accountancy or those film industry jobs ; politics or finances , etc.

Its like, we found an apple to be a tasty fruit and now we have to be the apple guy forever. The better i am in being the apple guy, the more i will have to eat apples and the more i will earn. Why can't i try pears or oranges?

Just because i can write computer programs does not mean I'm an expert in anything electrical from surround sound systems, TVs and any other kind of device!

Suppossing that you're a very capable professional my advice is to NOT UNDERESTIMATE YOU. There are a lot of crappy programmers that feels like an expert because they did a hello world.

MFW I, a junior dev who just started have to explain what sql injection is to a senior IT person... It's not like I'm an expert in the field, but a little bit of expertise would be nice

Crystal ball!
A timeline until the first NBE-Citizen is elected president of the USA.

2031 - BlackRock launches their new large scale financial product, the "Robotic Business Development Company" (R-BDC), in which an AI is given billions of dollars to acquire, create and manage companies, replacing their C-suite executive bodies. The "Chief Executive Robot" (CER) is supervised by a board of human industry experts hired by BlackRock.
It is important to say that the employees, middle managers, accountants, lawyers, etc in an R-BDC are all human - it's only the CEO, CFO, COO and the rest of the gang that are overgrown chatbots.

2032 - R-BDCs are mostly focused on high-bureaucracy, non specialized but people-intensive legacy industries like steel mining, food services, urban transportation and government services like water and road management.

2033 - For the first time an R-BDC company is included in the S&P 500 index. If it's CER were human and paid the same as CEOs of equivalent companies, it would have become a billionaire.
Later in the year, two more R-BDC companies are included in the index. One of them was created by Apple and the other by JP Morgan.

2035 - An R-BDC company makes headlines for convincing BlackRock to dissolve it's review board. When finally given free reign, the CER immediately slices it's dividends and vastly increases low-level employee compensation. The company share prices crater, but BlackRock stands by its decision.
Later in the year, as a recession hits the entire market really hard, that company shows solid profits and fantastic sales. It becomes the first trillion-dolar R-BDC.

2037 - Most Americans' dream-job is in an R-BDC company, says ProPublica.

2038 - Congress passes the "Non-Biological Entities Liability" (NOBEL) Act, following a high profile case of employee harassment perpetrated by the CER of an R-BDC.
The act recognizes NBEs, for all legal liability purposes, as USA citizens.
This highly controversial legislation is upheld by the supreme court, and many believe it was first introduced by lobbyists as a way for large investors in R-BDCs to avoid legal responsibility.
Several class action lawsuits are filed against CERs that are now liable for insider trading. A few SCOTUS decisions set legal precedent that determinantes what exactly constitutes the parts of the same Non-Biological Entity.

2040 - As a decade ends and another begins, 35% of all companies in the US and 52% of the entire stock market are part of a R-BDC company or another. The McKinsey consulting group now offers "expert CER customization services".

2043 - Inspired by successful experiments in Canada, Australia and South Korea, the american state of Vermont is the first to amend it's constitution to allow municipalities to have Non-Biological Entities as city and government administrators. City councils are still humans-only.

2046 - The american state of Colorado becomes the first to allow unsupervised NBEs to assume state government executive positions. Several states follow soon after. Later in the year, the federal government replaces several administrative positions with NBEs.

2049 - The state of Texas passes legislation requiring the CERs of all companies with a presence in the state to be another entirely contained/processed within the state or to be supervised by a local human representative while acting within the state. Several states, including California, Florida and Washington, are discussing similar legislation.

2051 - Congress passes the SUNBELT Act (SUbmission [of] NBEs [to] Limits [and] Taxes) that vastly increases the liability of NBEs and taxes all manifestations of such entities. Most important, it requires
CERs of hundreds of companies manifest disagreeance, most warn that it might hurt employee satisfaction and company sales. Several companies disable their CERs entirely.

2053 - Public outrage after leaked interactions of human supervisors and company CERs show that the CERs tried to avoid the previous year's mass layoffs and pay cuts, but board members pressed on, disregarding concerns. Major investigations and boycotts further complicate matters, and many human workers go on strike until the company boards are dissolved and the CERs are reinstated.

2052 - Many local elections all over the country see different NBEs as contenders - and a NBE is expected to win in most races.

2054 - The SUNBELT Act is found unconstitutional by the supreme court, and most of its provisions are repealed.
This also legitimizes the elected NBE officials.

2058 - For the first time an NBE wins a seat in Congress, but is not allowed to keep it. Runoff elections are held.

2061 - Congress votes for allowing NBEs to hold federal legislative positions, as already allowed in the least populous states.

2062 - Several NBEs win Congress seats. In Europe, there are robot legislators since the 40's.

2064 - The first NBE presidential candidate loses the race.

2072 - The first NBE president is elected.

Received my first recruitment message on LinkedIn today. Generic as fuck "hey your profile looks nice, we have dis thing for you, come take a looksie".

Went ahead and read the whole thing, started laughing while reading requirements:
- own a degree in CS or related field: re-starting college next week
- extensive experience with automation processes: uuuh... I can write bash scripts and gulp tasks, how's that?
- extensive experience with Java, Angular, Selenium and Protractor: sure. Spent two weeks tinkering with those tools. Pretty much an expert already
- two years of experience: not even 6 months into my first job
And some other nonsense

Job would be in a very nice city, extended family lives nearby, actually a nice position. Too bad I am not looking for a job and my classes start on Monday 😂
But hey, at least people are looking at my profile! Yay!

They made me pretend to be an expert on an enterprise-level job with only a few days of study. It was for a role not even related to what I do....

!rant or at least not dev related

I work at a school. Sometimes we get some weird training and shit we have to attend to. This time it had to do with what to do in the event of an active shooter.

Because you know. The U.S IS full of angry white kids with guns that if fucked up enough will just take fire on people.

Well, as a military veteran. I feel pretty confident in knowing what to do when some asshole is trying to get his expert marksman badge on me. So i requested not to waste my valuable time on such bs. I was promptly denied and encouraged to attend the bs training.

The first dumbshit thing they tell you to do is to turn the lights off and hide(if you decide to not fight) for which I mentioned that it would not work.

You see. Our entire buildings have motion sensors on each room which would TURN the fucking lights on if you move........ and even though you can turn the switch on..some offices would still work through the motion sensor....exhibit A: my office.

Fuck this. Couldn't i just keep one of my guns with me?? It would just take about 2 shoots really....and I promise they would stay in.

This sucks man. I need to move to Canadia. I don't want my kids having to hear about "mandatory active shooter training"

That fucking bullshit should never be a norm.

10 bucks and a life says i have better aim than some crazy kid.

Thank god for Git. I fucked up my webpage beyond repair and I am not an expert in html div alignments. I pulled in a commit I did an hour ago and at least got the page back to normal. I don't even want to imagine what devs did before the days of source control. D:

Tomorrow will be spent learning how to better follow closing </div> tags. :(

I'm not there yet, but hopefully, someday, I'll be an expert in making clean, maintainable code. I want others to look at it and say, "ah, I get it" without staring at it for a long time.

rant && what do you think?

so one of our ISP (Orange Slovakia) had troubles with service for like two days. Their DNS servers translated domains to IPs reaaally slow or not at all. So when i saw the dns error in chrome (yes i use chrome and not quantum) I changed my dns to google dns and ignored it.

Two days later when the service was back up and running, this ISP went to the local media and made a statement "we had a DDOS attack, no user data were harmed, blabla" that was when my BS radar went bananas... so somebody DDOSd your DNS server ... for two fucking days straight... this is probably a lie or they have really noob engineers (or both).

I'm not an expert on network services or routing, or servers but, how about turning off this server, IP and setting up a backup on a different IP ? Possibly anyone here with experience how to handle DDOS? Whats the chance of this happening? i'm really curious

So I have this "idea", you know how normally most sites have the usual backend functionality, like profile, profile edit, CRUD of some thing... Well I was wondering if there is not a way to make it "granular" kind of like models that can be reused by the backend with a noSQL approach... That if selected for a site it will implement it without too much hassle... I'm not an expert here so pardon any incorrect terms... Not sure if I'm being clear insl my question... Any suggestions welcome, I don't mind researching any suggestions or guidance from someone who has accomplished this.

Background: I am working on task x. On successful completion of task x, task y may be given to me. Task x is haaaaaard. My group is not the only player and any fuck up will break my group and at least two others. Now here is my story:

Me: Yeah I am doing this hard thing and that hard thing and getting ready for these hard meetings.

FormerCoWorker fcw (): wow that sounds hard.

CurrentCoWorker ccw (): yeah he's working on task x and task you.

Me me (): what? No I'm not. I am working on task x. Don't go randomly assigning me tasks like that.

ccw: well if you finish task x you will be an expert in section z of code. So it is only natural you take on task you.

me: yeah but task x sucks and task y is why several engineers have quit the company. You never know. You could be assigned task y and quit. Why do I have to take on task y and quit?

NGL, I will do it of they promote me. I may be a whore, but I am gonna get paid.

I was asked to pretend to be an expert to solve a temporary solution for a client in my company. I agreed because I thought it would be a simple solution.

I was wrong.

They only gave me 4 days to train (Including my f*cking weekend) and the project requires a much more experienced consultant since I'm struggling even with the simplest of tasks. Also, the person who was suppose to help me it's not always available. And they are not actively searching for a new expert.

Today I'll talk to my team lead and the person in charge of the project and let them know that this task will require someone much more experienced.

I may get fired but at least my conscience will be clear.

I just feel bad for the client. They are such nice people.

I don't know maybe it's me. I'm sure that at booking.com they have hundred of GUI/UX/UI experts, product owners, A/B testing and whatever.

So, please, can you explain to me in a professional and scientific why, why the fuck, when I search for an hotel in a place for a date, by default, they show me UNAVAILABLE properties?

Like, "hey sorry, there was this great hotel, right in the center and very cheap, but you missed it!! hahahaha, you poor moron"

And every time I have to ACTIVATE the fucking filter myself "only show available properties".

Excuse me? Who want to see in first position the hotels that are NOT available?

Are there some users out there who wants that? If I were hired at booking.com as Product Owner or UX/UI expert, I think the first thing I'll propose is to quit the fucking filter whatsoever or at least to enable it by design.

So why is that? you want to show off? slap me in the face, with your hard cock-list of hotels you have anyway, but not for me?

This got me fucked up. Listen yo.

So we have this issue on our modal right. The issue keeps poppin. It's a hotfix because its in prod. So my senior and I were on it. After a few hours, I showed him the part of the code that is buggy. It's 50 lines of code of nested if-else, else-if. And so we're still fighting it. He redid everything since we're using angular2 he did a subject, behavior-subject all that bs and I was still trying to understand what's the bug, because it's happening on the second click and so I did my own thing and found the cause bug and showed it to him, its this:

setTimeout( () => {}, 0)

the bootstrap-modal doesn't allow async inside it (I dont why, its in the package). So he explained to me why it's there. So I did my own thing again and find a workaround which I did, a one-line of angular property, showed it to him he didn't accept it because we'll still have to redo it with subjects and he was on it. I said ok. Went back to my previous issue. The director came in and ask for a fixed, my senior came up to me and told me to push my fix. Alright no problem. So we good now. Went back to our thing bla bla bla, then got an email that we will have a meeting, So we went, bla bla bla. The internal team wants a support for mobile, senior said no problem bla bla bla, after the meeting he approaches me and said (THIS IS WHERE IT GOT FUCKED UP) we wont be supporting bootstrap4 anymore because of the modal issue and since we're going to support mobile and BOOTSTRAP4 grid system is NONINTUITIVE we are moving to material design because the grid system is easier. I was blown away man. we have more than 100 components and just because of that modal and mobile support shit he decided to abandon bootstrap. Mater of fact its the modal its his code. I'm not expert in frontend but I looked at the material design implementation its the same thing other than the class names. OHHH LAWD!

hello guys
I recently learnt the django and im not an expert . I pushed a repository on my github
"pouria03".
and i just started to learn DRF(django rest framework) .
do you have any advice for me to help my progress?
I'll be thankful

Okay, my first serious rant.

An acquaintance of mine when needed my help always explain his problem equivocally. Like, he would explain laboriously of the method to achieve what he needed when the thing he only needed is just a simple API call. Im not saying im an expert in this area but his explanation doesnt help me to understand his problem. If i do not understand his problem, how can i help him? At least if i know what his problem is and i cant help, i can seek help from others.

And hes not even working in the same company as me. And he wants it solved ASAP. I dont know your problem, yet you want me to solve it? I dont even know if im capable of solving it! And I have my own job to do..

He always try hard to explain it. He tried to sound professional. And he always ask for my help first because I knew he doesnt want others to know that he doesnt know how to code. Why do you apply for the position if you know you cant handle it?! Everytime. He's been fired before. And he did it again. I cant. We are fresh graduate. Apply for a fresh grad position. If you dont know anything, just said you dont know unless youre very quick to learn..

I remember once we need to submit a linux commands or something homework. We need to code it during the class and submit it by the end of the class. He asked me to code for him while mine is still half done. "Quicker please!" he remarked. There were still plenty of our classmates still doing it and some even havent done it yet. What the f are you rushing i felt like slapping him in the face with the keyboard at that time but because i am a matured adult i did not do it.

Hes not even a bully he just always get panic without reasons. He wants things done early and then he can post on social media. "Oh so tired this program is so complicated" or like "Oh damn, they want me to lead the group again (roll eyes emoticon)"...

Please somebody run over him.

Hes making me bald everyday and i think this is unhealthy. If he wants to get bald, get bald alone. I was just starting to work but my hair has been falling everyday.

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.

And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?

"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.

"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.

"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.

What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?

What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?

What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?

What if you've used more languages than you can remember?

What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?

What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.

What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?

How do you do your CI/CD pipeline? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just wondering how the tests and deployment usually runs. Is it on a per team basis? Is it the whole release getting deployed to Test many times per day? What happens if too many automated tests fail or there is not enough coverage, does it abort the deployment? If so, how can every team get delayed by every issue - is that actually a good policy?

My pipeline is very slow and requires a team of 12 people working in shifts to complete it. I’m not an expert but I know it does a lot of steps and never completes without manual intervention. I would like to help but I’m not sure how bad it is.

People say using GPT4 as an OCR is not a good idea. But damn that formatting GPT4 vision does, is outstanding.. and I have realised proper formatting does well while prompting to get precise output.

I gotta say, test for ur usecases rather than relying on expert opinion blogs!

I feel a little sorry for all illustrators and gig-creators of visual things out there. And yet I feel uplifted in spirit at the same time with the new era of midjourney that has just started.

It’s incredible!

Maybe you don’t understand if you are not in software.

It’s a giant leap of such magnitude that it is impossible to comprehend the entire scope of this revolution…

Small gig:ers get their money from very small and small businesses who can’t afford anything else. They are expert digital artists. The excel in being productive and can conceptualize a thought or idea in hours…

These hours have now been removed. Not all. But some. For the entire industry, this is billions of dollars I am sure.

So, they need to adapt to this new realm that we are entering.

It’s just… I mean, I can’t even realize it myself and I have played with prompting now for weeks and months… And it’s just 2023. /imagine what will be possible in 2030. 2050. If we survive.

I created a man (a hedge-fund manager) out of thin air. He stands in the super-market, looking tired, it’s evening… He has had a long day at the office…

And-he-does-not-exist.

And it took me five minutes. A rendering of such sort would probably take at least a day for an expert illustrator in photoshop or whatever.

Now, everyone will use this. You got this everywhere very, very soon. Including the gig expert illustrators! The thing is… I can’t draw a straight line but with text I can conjure up pretty much anything.

It’s magic.

That is what it is. I know it isn’t but it feels like it. For people without software skills it must feel even more like an illusion…

Need twelve icons of bumblebees illustrations to be used as icons on your new web site (as images)? Takes five minutes. An hour at most until you are satiesfied. In specific color ranges? You got it…

That shit cost like $99 bucks before if you needed to own them. And it took a week.

A revolution!

What fantastic times we live in!

And sad times and great opportunities for all visual artists out there.

(I am not at all worried for the dev industry. This will be SO fun!)

I've been working for over a year now in this remote job as a sysadmin for a local client. I personally find this job quite intimidating at first with all of the infrastructure and all of its many microservices running in high availability set up. I enjoyed learning everything about them and why it's been set up this way, which gives me ideas if I were to build my own app (not competing with my current employer, of course).

But now I don't feel comfortable managing this beast in its many environments.

From time to time, I would hear from my old colleagues at my old sucky company for help in their work and that they know I'm an expert in. I help and it makes me feel good.

Now I'm at a career dilemma. I don't want to lose my current job because I feel "uncomfortable" with managing and administrating the tech holding the whole infrastructure. And I don't wanna go back to my old job with the sucky pay and the feel of being unchallenged. And if I try to find another job, I might be as lucky as I do now, especially good difficult it is for me to find a remote job to begin with.

Objectively, I just need to clear off my debts (at this rate, in 4 years), and have a side income to support my family. But I don't think I can follow through on that plan. Should I look for a new job or do better with the current job that I have now?

You work in a team, for a team to move forward successfully the team should work in sync. A team always has a goal and a plan to get to it. There are times when the team needs to take a different direction therefore the set path should always be available for change because our environments dictate it.

We all have different styles of working and different opinions on how things should work. Sometimes one is wrong and the other is right, and sometimes both are wrong, or actually sometimes both are right. However, at the end of it all, the next step is a decision for the team, not an individual, and moving forward means doing it together. #KickAssTeam

The end result can not come in at the beginning but only at the end of an implementation and sometimes if you’re lucky, during implementation you can smell the shit before it hits the fan. So as humans, we will make mistakes at times by using the wrong decisions and when this happens, a strong team will pull things in the right direction quickly and together. #KickAssTeam

Having a team of different opinions does not mean not being able to work together. It actually means a strong team! #kickAssTeam However the challenging part means it can be a challenge. This calls for having processes in place that will allow the team members to be heard and for new knowledge to take lead. This space requires discipline in listening and interrogating opinions without attachment to ideas and always knowing that YOUR opinion is a suggestion, not a solution. Until it is taken on by the team. #KickAssTeam We all love our own thinking. However, learning to re-learn or change opinions when faced with new information should become as easy to take in and use.

Now, I am no expert at this however through my years of development I find this strategy to work in a team of developers. It’s a few questions you ask yourself before every commit, When faced with working in a new team and possibly as a suggestion when trying to align other team members with the team.

The point of this article, the questions to self!

Am I following the formatting standard set?

Is what I have written in line with official documentation?

Is what I am committing a technical conversion of the business requirement?

Have I duplicated functionality the framework already offers?

I have introduced a methodology, library, heavily reusable component to the system, have you had a discussion with the team before implementing?

Are your methods and functions truly responsible for 1 thing?

Will someone you will never get to talk to or your future self have documentation of your work?
Either via point number 2, domain-specific, or business requirements documentation.

Are you future thinking too much in your solution?

Will future proof have a great chance of complicating the current use case?

Remember, you can never write perfect code that cures every future problem, but what you can do perfectly is serve the current business problem you are facing and after doing that for decades, you would have had a perfect line of development success.

Started attending a fairly well-known college online a few months ago. I'm not an expert in programming (ironically what I'm going for) but I know bugs when I see them, and holy sh*t does their learning environment have bugs. Everything from failed automatic posts to failed link embeds. Even their assessment site will lead you to a colorful error page. Clearly reputation isn't everything.

Can a React.JS expert help me to understand something?

In short, I would like to know what are the main differences between react version 15.6 and 17, in terms of browser issues, and component compatibility?

We have a legacy code base that is in version 15.6 and the team wants to upgrade it and I am attempting to argue with my dumb CTO to upgrade to version 17. However, I’m not versed in react, I'm just a PO and the CTO doesn't know anything but for some odd reason is adamant about staying on an older version. The developers gave me their opinion but I'm interested in an outside opinion.

I am feeling a lot doubtful right now.

I am an average undergrad student who has been dedicating efforts in java/Android for most of my college life.

As of now i have decent command over java , launched 2 simple apps on playstore, worked as an android dev intern in 3 companies and make decent medium complexity apps. I will say i am 40-60% down the path of an expert native Android dev.

However apart from Android, am dumb as a stick. I know shit about ai,ml, web dev, js , react, hybrid stuff, and am not very good with competitive programming and system topics ( os, Algorithms, networking, etc)

So this closes a lot of doors for me. I can't apply to some top tier companies as they would either want expert competitive skills or expert Android dev skills.
I had bad experiences with startups which are usually willing take rejected students like me for the post of a droid dev... there is usually low packages , high pressure, and treatment like a slave

So i am very unsure what to do next. I have tried to learn web dev/ ai-ml-data sciences. They are not very interesting to me, but again, what is interest really :/

What should be my focus now?
A) I could be learning competitive and other interview related topics so that i could crack interviews of top companies , and later try to get a position of android developer there.

B) i could focus on become better in Android and start learning things that i don't know like rx, kotlin, etc. I could then hope to crack interview of medium sized app dev companies which would mainly focus on my android knowledge in their interviews

C) i could increase my skill set and learn web dev or ai/ml topics to increase my recruiter pool. It would be like option B, but i will have more medium sized companies willing to take me.

Currently i am in a shit storm. I am about to go into a mass recruiter company in which i have heard would be doing more or less data entry work

[Prestashop question / rant]

Yes, it's not StackOverflow here, neither is it prestashop support forum - but I trust u people most :)

Proper solution for working with big(?) import of products from XML (2,5MB, ~8600 items) to MySQL(InnoDB) within prestashop backoffice module (OR standalone cronjob)

"solutions" I read about so far:
- Up php's max execution time/max memory limit to infinity and hope it's enough
- Run import as a cronjob
- Use MySQL XML parsing procedure and just supply raw xml file to it
- Convert to CSV and use prestashop import functionality (most unreliable so far)
- Instead of using ObjectModel, assemble raw sql queries for chunks of items
- Buy a pre-made module to just handle import (meh)

Maybe an expert on the topic could recommend something?

I want someone to appreciate and get my idea and if it is not a good one suggest some expert opinion or best practices to improve.

I am currently stuck as I have done multiple personal projects now. I have completed them but UI sucks. I started studying using YouTube tutorials but I feel that I only know the surface of each tech. I want to deep dive on each of the tech I have used but do not know where to start.

But I think this is just my burn-out phase. I am currently resting from trying to build an everyday coding habit. I'll still try again when I feel better. I think it is not only me that felt this.