Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

Legit considering quitting my job and going back to my old workplace.

Fucking getting real tired of fucking around with html and css on the daily.

The school is fucking crashing down on our shitty as web services. But my manager (as much as we love her) is forcing everyone to double time on a rather stupid project that keeps constantly changing on the daily.

I am so fucking tired of it

Just wanna to share my story:

I just quit my job 2 months ago to ramp up my own startup. I will be funded with 2k Euro per month for 1 year to prepare the founding of my startup. Basicly that means i got one year to build backend/frontend/app. I have a friend that is doing some nontech related stuff like business development and shit. Sounds good until now i guess.
But:
Developing all that stuff in a one man show as a junior-like developer is really hard. I did not find another dev who wanted to join me as a sideproject or something.

Do you guys think thats even possible to ramp up all this by myself or am i to optimistic? I mean, i learn a lot atm, but i am a bit scared to fail too.

That should not be whining or shit, just gathering some input of you guys.

(excuse typos and stuff as i am not a native speaker :) )

Since this post was too long for devrant's 5k sign limit, I split it in several parts. I will try to make each part comprehensible as a standalone post. This is part one of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU? saga. A tale of empathy, competence and me being a dick, even though I didn't really want to be one. The part one is titled: "Bad times, good times". It may or may not have any value. It probably won't be funny.

I dedicate this to every single junior or entry level dev out there, struggling to find a job in their field.

=====

What do you think, how long does it take for junior with 6 months of commercial experience to find a dev job? If your answer was "idk", you're right. If your answer was "3 montths maybe", you're also right. At least this is how long it took for me. I am writing this at 2am, couple of hours after I managed to get employed. I am happy. My employer probably is happy too. My recruiters certainly are. The guy whose offer I had to reject after we were almost ready to sign the contract, on the other hand, isn't. He probably hates me. We'll get to that one post at a time.

Let's move back in time a little bit. It's December 12th, 2019. It is third month after I left my family home. I don't ha0ve a job, I was living first in my older brother's apartment for a month, then I started to rent my own. I have literally no money, I'm in debts. I moved out because reasons that would make up for another couple of posts, and for said reasons I refused to get 'any job just to pay the bills'. You can imagine that I was in pretty bad situation, and my psyche didn't really take that shit too well either. My daily meal was a bowl of rice with a little bit of self-hatred on top. Gourmet.

At that time, my daily routine would consist of practicing music, practicing programming, trying to get a job and surviving. Some of my friends just turned their backs against me. I did a small rework of my contact list as well. It was a *hard* time. I had sent my CV to around a hundred different companies with very little to no response. Some of them required at least bachelor's in IT for their frontend dev. Some of them required experience I didn't have. Some of them just didn't care to answer me. And then that one day happened. Three different people wanted to meet me and talk about internships/job offers. I will share what happened next in next posts, but here's a quick spoiler. I got a job. Yes, I am hyped.

Dear fellow Dev. This is a small reminder. If you're having bad times, just remember that if you focus on what you need to do, you will be just fine. Sometimes it may take days of struggling, sometimes it will take months of eating mostly rice. We all... Most of us have been through this.

Next posts will be less inspirationalstufftelling and more storytelling. Let this post be a setup, a small context to keep in mind upon reading my next stories. Because it is quite important. For me and for the story.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Fire your whole fucking web team Bethesda

* Your design is a classic ipecac. Whatever the fuck you are doing doesn't in frontend doesn't justify the 4Mb of bandwidth I wasted on a single js file. Why the fuck can I see the whole fucking node_modules directory when looking at the sources?
I know this is supposed to be a webpage for a game development studio, but I'm seriously wondering if your budget would even get me a prostitute.
I'm a greedy fuck and want a free game. apparently your servers are only good enough to register me, but login is apparently too much to ask for. Yeah sure. Oh and also thank you for choosing an "incorrect username and password" error message by default, even though your fucking gateway timed out. Please be kind enough and punch me directly into my face next time. Not like I'll ever access that shit ever again

I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.

After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.

The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.

They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.

I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!

If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.

---

I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"

Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

How is coupling backend + frontend as a single nextjs app a good idea? What the fuck is this?

What if you have to create new replica sets of a backend because of high load pressure? What about load balancers?? What if i want my backend to be a microservice? How do i unit test the backend if its cluttered with frontend? WTF IS THIS

WHY DID NEXTJS THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY DO SO MANY DEVS LOVE THIS IDEA AND GLORIFY NEXTJS?

Nextjs seems like the type of framework that was built by a frontend web developer who just refuses to learn backend technology at all costs.

---

its been a few hours and the concept of nextjs is bending my mind rn. I thought nextjs is just another frontend framework. A react killer. Only to find out its both a backend + frontend framework.

Cluttering backend stuff into frontend is gonna get messy no matter how much you try to modularize the code. Am i lost or am i right???

---

Scratching my head over nextjs. Looks like a great framework for small-mid project but definitely not large project. The more shit the project needs the more messy shit become. Angular has modularized all of this in separate folders -- components services guards interceptors (now new stuff coming called Signals) etc. All of it is separated in individual folders and kept frontend-only. Simple enough. No backend clutter

---

Can i even use nextjs strictly as a frontend framework while it uses my custom backend built in java spring boot? For example use nextjs /api/ folder to handle custom routes built outside of nextjs framework?

Am i insane here

I can work with Angular, even though it's pain in the but.
My current Angular job is actually the job with the first manager that had decent human values and ethics, I like my team, and yeah, what we building is shit. But it's only 30% shit because of Angular, another 30% are due to SAFe, and the rest is the usual stuff.
Still enjoy my job and respect my team.

But please do not expect me to pretend Angular is on a comparable level to React. Angular hasn't brought any actual innovation in most major versions but releases those breaking major updates still at least twice a year.
Ivy might be awesome, but only because Angular told the world 3 years ago also to have Ivy compatible compile targets for their libs/packages doesn't mean everybody cared.
And the ngcc, the awesome compatibility compiler, mutates node modules in place. So ne parallel stuff, no using yarn2 or pnpm.
At the same time, React brought so many innovations into the frontend world but is basically backwards compatible.

Not sure how the Angular partial compilation and whatever needs to go on works, but it seems like there's hardly anyone that really knows, so you can't use Vite or whatever other new tool.
And sure, if you're really good, you can write Angular without producing memory leaks.
But it's really hard. Do you know what's also quite hard: Producing memory leaks with React!

And for sure, Angular Universal, which isn't used by anyone, it feels like, will still be on a comparable level to an open source product that's used all over the world, builds the basis for an open source company, and is improved by thousand of issues day by day.

And sure, two kinds of change detection are a great idea. And yeah, pretending Angular comes with all included makes it worth it that the API is fucking huge and you're better of knowing nothing, because you have to read up things, than knowing quite a lot, since making assumptions and believing apis work in a similar way and follow similar contentions...

Whatever... I work with it. Like the time. Like the company, even my poss. But please don't expect my lying to you this was a good idea, or Angular is even remotely the same level of React.

Started porting one application written in php to:
Golang(and some libraries to make certain sht simpler like GORM and Gorilla amongst a couple of others, most shit is STD shit already built in)

Java Spring(I know it well, but wanted to try this particular app in it, lots of boilerplate although the coded is solid AF)

.NET Core API, which I separated in a series of modules for the domain interface, the persistence logic, the actual api etc, I really dig it. It has a basic React frontend in Typescript whereas the other 2 versions are using the standard Go html/template package and the Twig interface for Spring.

My favorite thus far is Golang. I find it extremely easy to extend, the language reads good enough for a retard like myself to make sense of it fairly easy, really easy to test and experiment with it, any idea I get for something to add(say users and stuff) took me less than 30 mins to figure out while reading the actual documentation, as in the base documentation or just the source code.

I know the language is retard proof, and I am highly enjoying this. Not to say that the other two are bad, not at all, been using C# and Java for years now, but I highly appreciate being able to concentrate on functionality rather than all the fucking architectural boilerplate needed to run basic shit in the other two frameworks. Thus far Golang has been a breath of fresh air the likes Clojure gives me, while not even being a profound or mind blowing language in terms of features(since other than the interface{} and goroutines i can't think of shit) and have not reached a scenario in which I am stuck or dying to have generics one bit for the overall business logic.

The app is growing like crazy in terms of code since the original php application was huge to begin with, but dear me this shit is as simple as it can get without being too technical. Might move it to production once all usability tests pass and force the rest of the staff to learn it. I have one lead dev that damn near refuses to touch anything other than php, and a very eager to try shit out content administrator that comes from a Java and C# background.

all I want to say is how much I love go haha

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.

I have good knowledge frontend/backend web development but i didnt know php cause i heard so much shit about it. I finally made up my mind to learn it.

I fucking hate php

>>> MAMP doesnt fucking work when i installed it
>>> After it finally works, I change the sql password. WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED TO GO TO LIKE 10 FILES AND CHANGE THE GODDAMN PASSWORD IN EACH ONE.
>>> php doesnt work if the <?php tag isnt at the top -> this shit wasnt even mentioned
>>> why the fuck would you use '->' for everything when a simple '.' would suffice.
>>> useless class system (more like a pseudo class system)
>>> foreach ($list as $item) dafuq that is not even correct english, what is wrong in "foreach ($item in $list)"

i hate php

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.