3 years ago.....

*lunch break. In a table with 2 other co-workers*

Me: "I am going to quit today!"
Co-worker 1: "What? I am going to do that today too!"
Co-worker 2: "Are you serious? I was planning to do that too today!"
Me: "Holy cow! Let's do that today the three of us, but I am going last one. I want to see his face (our CEO)".

After couple of minutes and disagreement, we agreed to do that.

When I told him (I was the last to tell himm), he was sweating and his face was red. Started to throw offensive words towards me. I was expecting that and came prepared. BUT, in the middle of his words saying "I hire you because no one would hire you" etc, quietly and with a smile on my face, I interrupted him saying, "Look, is this going to take long? Because I gotta go somewhere and I am not in the mood to listen to you!"

He started to shake from that rage he had inside him. I know he wanted to punch me. But nothing happened.

I still remember his face like it was yesterday. :P

Epilogue:
My aunt's husband and him were best friends. He called him saying what happened. Of course, I was the one to blame. Since my parent knew what kind of guy he is, they told me "You did good for being quiet, not screaming and not acting like a child!"

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

Another one, teach secure programming for fucks sake! This always happened at my study:

Me: so you're teaching the students doing mysql queries with php, why not teach them PDO/prepared statements by default? Then they'll know how to securely run queries from the start!
Teachers: nah, we just want to go with the basics for now!

Me: why not teach the students hashing through secure algorithms instead of always using md5?
Teacher: nah, we just want to make sure they know the basics :)

For fucks fucking sake, take your fucking responsibilities.

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

*has a 94% in information security class*
*teacher gives us study guide for final exam*
*heavily take notes in the margins and study the packet obsessively for four days*
*come in to take the final*

*exam doesn't mention a single thing on the study guide*

*makes a 78 on it*
*final class grade drops down to an 87% (a letter grade lower than before)*

"Congratulations, Miss Meowijuanas! You had the highest score on the final!"
*hands me a candy bar like I'm a child*

"Maybe it's because you gave the class an extremely poor study guide which emphasized on material that wasn't covered on our actual exam? You shouldn't be congratulating me on a 78."

*teacher says he used the study guide from another teacher and must not have looked at it thoroughly enough*

*shakes hand and thanks him for having me as a student this semester*
*kicks a trash bin outside of the university 6 or 7 times*

I'm not even mad about my grade. An 87% is nice, although I know I would've done better otherwise. It's his pure, unmasked and unashamed laziness that makes me feel so violent. It's showing students like me that an educated individual like yourself couldn't be bothered to take five minutes or so to read over a fucking document for his students to make sure they're properly prepared for a major exam.
How the fuck can you be hired as a university professor and be this obvious about not putting effort into your work.
Fuck you, sir.
And fuck you again for all of my other classmates who did poorly because they followed your inaccurate study guide.

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

PM in daily: your turn. what have you done yesterday?

me: so i finished my PR for feature x and now i'm only waiting for review feedback there, so i can close this ticket today if no major rework is required-

PM: this is not what i asked, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: uhh... okay, also i started working on task x
[note: task x, a task per definition involving a large amount of research, was very coarsly defined and it wasn't even clear to the PM what he exactly expects from me, and we agreed that the scope needs to be refined in the process],
so as a first step, i started doing some general investigations to get an overview of the topic and learn about concepts a and b-

PM: again, i don't want to know what you did, i want to know what was done.

me: okay well, i have DONE basic research on topic xy and collected information-

PM: this still does not answer my question, what's the deliverable?

me: ...so uhhh.... i read papers? i researched info online and collected and prepared information and links in a presentation which i'm also planning to present to the team-

PM: okay, can you please split your jira task in subtasks so everyone knows exactly what you're working on? otherwise we have no idea what you're doing.

for fuck's sake, shut up. just shut up

Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.

Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.

I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.

Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.

Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.

Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

Monday morning, went to the local grocery store to get myself some croissants and 2 bottles of wine.

Cashier: "Already at it in the morning, you sure about that?"

Me: "Long story short, I've got a Wi-Fi driver from Intel to debug and rewrite, and it's a fucking piece of shit.. can't go at it without hitting or preferably exceeding the Ballmer Peak... Also I'm awake since yesterday evening already."

Why even ask? Yeah I'm a fucking alcoholic, and guess why that is.. stupid nontechnical fucks, certified enganeers like that motherfucker at Intel who wrote this pile of garbage called ipw2200, and technology that can't be arsed to work properly on its own unless I build the fucking thing myself, just to name a few reasons.

You know what, fucking piece of shit from Intel, whoever it is? How about I let you choke on my dick while fucking hanging you with a sharp metal wire that's carrying 2kVAC from a microwave transformer, just to see whether I'd nut first, or you either choke, get electrocuted, or get your fucking throat slit first. Certificates aren't an excuse for committing this fucking pile of shit and calling it a fucking product!!

Now, it's time to dive into this giant stinking fucking turd I guess.. first glass of wine to get myself prepared for the shitstorm that's a giant 20k LoC C file with barely any comments, to look what the fuck causes this fucking pile of shit to disconnect and ask for WPA credentials after a while, despite having them stored.. and not reconnect after that, because why the fuck would you?!

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.

I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.

The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...

About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...

I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.

Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.

Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."

That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.

PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.

My Love I am writing to you from the front lines roughly 1 month into Microsoft Access. I hope you are doing alright and no harm has found you.

You might have heard the news that it has not been going well for us. The truth is we were not prepared in any way for this. We are constantly facing problems with the code and when we understand one function another two are referenced inside of that function.

The high command does not provide us guidance, truth be told I do not think they know what their application is doing. I am surprised we got this far. Our new objective is to focus our primary forces on the if/else and cases. The name for this assault is "Operation Logical Function" and I fear for my life as I do not know what is in those cases or where the road will lead.

Morale is very low, many of the soldiers spend time writing letters to their loved ones, recreating their blog for the 5th time or just daydreaming when they were free from this tyranny of legacy war.

For now , I long to be in your arms and smell your lilac and gooseberries cologne I love so much

My love and thoughts always with you , your John

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

See, static typing? that shit is for putos. You think you're so cool with your advanced intellisense being able to tell you "yo....dat shit ain't the type you think it is" or your compiler telling you "yo dumbass, you fucked this parameter up in here, you are doing <x> when in reality you should be doing #@$@#$@!<X at line !@#@#$#>"

pfffft static typing. Such a pansy ass thing to worry about.

Picture us, working outside of the safety net of static typing, as jungle explorers, walking slowly, with a machete in hand and our other hand clutched tightly at our hip pistol, not knowing what to shoot at, but eagerly prepared for when shit fucks up because whatever the fuck you did was not properly safeguarded by a compiler to tell you that you fucked up, even if the compiler message is unintelligible (looking at you C and C++)

We is men here, we is brave retarded adventurers.

As our sanity blips into oblivion and we look at our code that has no sort of type checking expecting our shitty intellisense extensions to protect us....

Edit: if you can't understand the sarcasm in here and the plea for sanity then you are obviously a retard and have no place in the world of development

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

Just wanted to leave a little encouragement that can be hard to find on a 'rant' board: As a 40 year old dev doing this for 16 or more years... I'm not jaded, I still have a burning enthusiasm for software dev, I'm lucky to be able to pursue this career. Have I been in some shitty situations and health damaging levels of stress? Yes at times, and I've ranted about them here. This career isn't an easy ride, ultimately there's a reason it's well paid - for all of its physical ease it's mentally and often emotionally hard. But, I still find the highs match the lows, there's still thrill in the chase to make the project and product work right. Only advice I would give is be prepared to shift down a career gear for a while when you have kids. That shit is hard. Keep having fun people, we work with machines that extend and force-multiply our minds, what a time to be alive!

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

is it just me, or do some people just make life difficult for the fucking sake of making life difficult?

now, lets ignore the lack of sanitised data, lets also ignore the lack of prepared statements, and for the love of god... lets ignore some magic numbers, because I still don't know what they mean yet....

but why! why would you create an array, implode it, smash it into a database query on the fucking fly, instead of just adding the data into the query in the first place.... it's not like you were doing this right to begin with, but this... this is next level!

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

For my job interview, they asked me to write simple Java code to check if the string is palindrome or not! Like sir, I've prepared for advanced quick sort and all algorithms and you ask me this!! 🥺

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

I might lose my job this week

I'm part of a team of 2 tech people
We were hired as programmers. But over these past 10 months we've done everything from helpdesk to fixing network infrastructure, i setup a backup server for the company, started properly managing the companies passwords,and a host of other things not in my contract.
But my boss is changing the deadline again and she refuses to listen to anyone's concerns, she doesn't understand the complexity of what she wants and since the best we've done so far can be considered at best a prototype in my opinion shes going to be disappointed

So at the next meeting me and my coworker are going to politely list our grivences point out all shes had us do at the same time and the impossible deadlines.

I've seen herpitch a fit for less so I'm fully prepared to be fired in rage in which case I'll compile the documentation and information on what we've done to email her.

But I'm pretty sure she won't find anything long term for the 40k salary shes expecting. Especially with how slow she is to do work herself. I was supposed to be on company health insurance since October 2020

In a way I'm kinda relieved at the potential of being fired.

!rant I pity anyone who may have overheard my interaction with a gecko that managed to sneak inside my house when I went to get a package on my doorstep last night around midnight

“Hey little guy, let’s try to get you to go back outside, okay? Nonononooo not that way, fella. Down the wall. DOWN. DO NOT CLIMB BACK UP. Okay. Yeah, see, there you go. Good job. OH MY GOD DO NOT DO THAT. Listen, I think you’re fucking cute, okay? BUT IF YOU CHARGE AT ME LIKE THAT, YOU TRIGGER MY FEAR RESPONSE AND YOU MAKE IT REALLY HARD FOR ME NOT TO KILL YOU. Hooooooly shit, little dude. You were so almost dead. Okay. Okay, yeah, go out the door. Door. Yesssss.”

closes door, only to realize little dude’s tail is still on this side

“OMG LITTLE DUDE, are you okay?!!” opens door, little dude sneaks back inside

“Noooooo you need to go outside. Come on, you know you want to go outside”

Finally managed coax him out the door and confirmed he’d cleared the doorway before closing and locking it.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Ok might as well share my misadventure on a phone screen:

It started pretty normal, the guy talks about his background, the position, and asked me about my background.

Move on to the language trivia; I’m not good at memorizing language features, but I guess it’s what people want, so I’ll be working on that down the road… Anyways it didn’t go well, and the guy somehow made me feel like an idiot even on the questions I got right.

It’s really awkward at this point… but let me tell you I was not prepared for what I can only describe as the fucking coding portion of the phone screen…

No computer. No pencil or paper. No whiteboard. Over the phone I’m saying: “class Dog with a capital ‘D’ colon newline tab def space bark open parentheses close parentheses….”

what the actual fuck

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

Donate to Wikipedia one time and they haunt you for life. They’ll send you email after email and they are all rather ridiculous. On top of that be prepared to be hounded by phone as well. They are the equivalent of a roadside bum that keeps asking you for more, and each time you give he says, “Is that all you got?”. Frack whoever put this strategy in place, they’ve annoyed me to the point where I’d rather not give again.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

I tought I'll buy a new laptop last week.

Went to the mediamarkt. I've choosen one with hdd. That was cheaper and I have a nice ssd at home, so I tought I'm gonna change that so I've asked the salesman about the hdd. I mean if I take it out and replace it with an ssd, it'll invalidate my warranty? Said yes. But they gladly change it to me if I bring my ssd in for a dirt-cheap €79. I said you are defenetly lost your mind. It takes 5 screws and around 5 minutes.

Anyway. I've choose an another one with ssd. But there was a sticker on it too, means it is prepared to use out of the box. It means as always, the windows is full with advertises, demos and annoying settings. And I don't use windows anyway. Ohh and it costs €29. I wanted one without this thing. Said ok, he'll check it. Comes back and said these modells are all prepared with this. I've asked him to show me a product which is 'clean'. He replied "actually all our laptops came prepared".

So I went mad and left them. This whole procedure takes more than an hour with one lesson: never go there again to buy a computer.

But at the end I've found a solution. Configurable laptops with 2 year warranty even if you upgrade it. Thats what I'll buy soon. I've had enough of big brands bullshits about unnecessary features and other bullshit. I'll buy what I need, not more, not less.

I'll write down the brand if anyone interested.

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

== Internship Interview Rant ==

This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"

He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?

So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !

Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.

And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Holy Fuck Shit!!!!!!

Being a developer
Being a technical assistant

Soon to be a father;

Shit

Not really prepared for this

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

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

God... FUCKING damnit, chromeOS.

Get ready for a awesome conspiracy theory/ WhatsApp forward :D i like how people are coming with new stuff every minute of their boredom . Makes you ponder:

====================================

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

How to dominate the world quickly?

THE GREAT CHINESE STAGE

1. Create a virus and the antidote.

2. Spread the virus.

3. A demonstration of efficiency, building hospitals in a few days. After all, you were already prepared, with the projects, ordering the equipment, hiring the labor, the water and sewage network, the prefabricated building materials and stocked in an impressive volume.

4. Cause chaos in the world, starting with Europe.

5. Quickly plaster the economy of dozens of countries.

6. Stop production lines in factories in other countries.

7. Cause stock markets to fall and buy companies at a bargain price.

8. Quickly control the epidemic in your country. After all, you were already prepared.

9. Lower the price of commodities, including the price of oil you buy on a large scale.

10. Get back to producing quickly while the world is at a standstill. Buy what you negotiated cheaply in the crisis and sell more expensive what is lacking in countries that have paralyzed their industries.

After all, you read more Confucius than Karl Marx.

PS: Before laughing, read the book by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America”, on Amazon, then we talk. It's all there.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Worth pondering..
Just Think about this...

How come Russia & North Korea are totally free of Covid- 19? Because they are staunch ally of China. Not a single case reported from this 2 countries. On the other hand South Korea / United Kingdom / Italy / Spain and Asia are severely hit. How come Wuhan is suddenly free from the deadly virus?

China will say that their drastic initial measures they took was very stern and Wuhan was locked down to contain the spread to other areas. I am sure they are using the Anti dode of the virus.

Why Beijing was not hit? Why only Wuhan? Kind of interesting to ponder upon.. right? Well ..Wuhan is open for business now. America and all the above mentioned countries are devastated financially. Soon American economy will collapse as planned by China. China knows it CANNOT defeat America militarily as USA is at present

THE MOST POWERFUL country in the world. So use the virus...to cripple the economy and paralyse the nation and its Defense capabilities. I'm sure Nancy Pelosi got a part in this. . to topple Trump. Lately President Trump was always telling of how GREAT American economy was improving in all fronts. The only way to destroy his vision of making AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is to create an economic havoc. Nancy Pelosi was unable to bring down Trump thru impeachment. ....so work along with China to destroy Trump by releasing a virus. Wuhan,s epidemic was a showcase. At the peak of the virus epidemic. ..

China's President Xi Jinping...just wore a simple RM1 facemask to visit those effected areas. As President he should be covered from head to toe.....but it was not the case. He was already injected to resist any harm from the virus....that means a cure was already in place before the virus was released.

Some may ask....Bill Gates already predicted the outbreak in 2015...so the chinese agenda cannot be true. The answer is. ..YES...Bill Gates did predict. .but that prediction is based on a genuine virus outbreak. Now China is also telling that the virus was predicted well in advance. ....so that its agenda would play along well to match that prediction. China,s vision is to control the World economy by buying up stocks now from countries facing the brink of severe ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. Later China will announce that their Medical Researchers have found a cure to destroy the virus. Now China have other countries stocks in their arsenal and these countries will soon be slave to their master...CHINA.

Just Think about it ...
The Doctor Who declared this virus was also Silenced by the Chinese Authorities...

'nother "teacher" story here.

Little background knowledge: I'm repeating the things he told us about at home and try to learn them by myself. I use the newest Visual studio and .NET framework version.
In school we have pretty old PC's and even older .NET framework. But let this insanity begin...

As normally i entered my classroom a little late (I have a dangerous habit of ignoring my alarms) and sat down on my chair. We were only 3 people including me at that moment so everything was pretty chill. I ask him what our task was and something along these lines occurred:
Me: what's our task?
Teacher: you remember your shopping list program? I want a textbox in it next to the listview and I want it to show every listview item
Me: that doesn't make sense
Teacher: yadda yadda just do it
Me: kaaaaay, anything else?
Teacher: actually yes! Please use inheritance.
Me: *baffeld* that doesn't make any sense at all. We have 5 different fruits; you tell me i should make a class per fruit!?
Teacher: yes of course! This is how professionals do it all the time. Please give them a distinct attribute, too.
Me: *angry* I'm. Not. Gonna. Do. This. This is total bullshit and also really bad coding style. I'm not going to teach myself something that doesn't make sense at all.
(Note: i know how inheritance works and he knows that too)
Teacher: You have to do it, you won't be prepared for final exams otherwise!
Me: leave my exam prep to me. I won't do this.
Teacher: *grumbles* fine

Later that very same lesson i got a .NET compatibility error. I couldn't work because I wasn't allowed to change anything on the installation nor to install a newer framework. So basically he told me I should've used 'sharpdevelopment' (which is not able to do windows Forms, but hey who cares) and this would not have happened. I was so furious at that moment i just took all my stuff, told him that I work 'from a place where i got decent software and space to think' and left the room.

Why did this person decide to become a programming teacher?

Me: *Chilling a little during a stressful day*

*Receive an email, because thankfully I am logged in and checking emails continuously as I am on job hunt*

*Click open*

Recruiter: I am over running a meeting, will join our connect in 10 minutes.

Me: *Trying to recall when did she schedule the call*

*Quickly check and figure that I shared my availability but never got a confirmation or a meeting invite*

Me: Apologies, but I never received any confirmation. I was waiting for your invite.

Recruiter: What? When did you reschedule?

Me: I never did. I never got a confirmation. Anyway, I am free so can hop on a call.

Recruiter: Oh! Sometimes the confirmation goes into the spam box. Here's the link, please join..

I join and she grills me with difficult questions that I am evidently not prepared.

I try to answer and be honest with everything.

But what the actual fuck! She lied to me and grilled me unnecessarily when she knew I wasn't even prepared.

And this is one of top global companies. Definitely not a great experience.

Stop lying and finding a reason to blame me for failing me because you are an incompetent fuck.

Ok. This is not a rant.

My company invites our customers each year to something like a exhibition. We have a very complex business software which is installed on the intranet of our customers. So the customer representatives are very used to us.

After the presentations we all joined an event prepared by our Marketing people.

That was so great and fantastic. Honestly.
The best part - if you once drank with a customer, the comunication is much different than before 😵

I'm still having a hangover. So sorry for typos....

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

After I received my laser eye surgery, I knew it would become painful after the effect of anesthesia would decrease so I got painkillers in advance.

It was nimesulide.

Even in 2008 ISDB raised a concern about the liver damage and asked for it to be withdrawn worldwide, but I didn't knew it.

So the terrible pain started and I took the pill. Just. One. Pill.

This all started in like fifteen minutes. Eye pain won't go away, but it didn't mattered anymore as I felt really terrible. I never experienced that kind of feeling before and I don't even know how to describe it. It felt like a terrible sensation inside my stomach mixed with an urge to vomit. "This is probably what a liver failure feels like. This is it, I'm going do die here", I remember thinking about as I collapsed.

This whole incident led to an investigation about why the doctors "forgot" to give me proper eye anesthesia drops. This got several doctors fired.

This all got me really interested in how different medications work. I started casually reading popular medical literature and when my depression came, I was prepared, as much as you can even get prepared to a mental disorder.

The thing that probably nearly killed me helped me not to lose my sanity later.

People at work found out Teams in a nightmare and really screws with your normal email address processing. They also found out it isn't free with the shit tier of Office (or wherever it is bundled). So for everyone but sales there is no Teams. Whew... However, for the tech dudes: electrical and software we made a custom Discord server. Of course my avatar is "trolling DiCaprio".

Some technical and some not work stuff has gone on with this server. Kind of gives the tech people a place to talk and joke.

devdude: Apologies that I saw this (some question I had) too late to prevent you from walking upstairs.
me: oh, the exercise trauma!
devdude: it's 2024 and we still have to walk up and down stairs
me: I was expecting flying chairs like on Wall-E
devdude: Me too! that's why I put on this much weight so I can be prepared for when the chair finally is here.
me: That is the exact opposite of helping this tech along.

Another thing I noticed about my work place. The BMI of employees seems to increase the closer to a break room you get. The company is fond of bringing donuts periodically. Coincidence I am sure. The problem is I am right next to the break room... Yes, my BMI went up a bit when I moved to my new desk. Before I was much further away. Now I am on a low carb diet. I am going to break the stats damn it!

!tech

recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.

i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .

I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).

I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.

the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)

I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.

shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.

then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?

i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.

i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Completely fucked up replication of MySQL servers.

Remote: 2 different database Servers
--> made sense.

Except the misconfiguration. Or better: No configuration at all.

So how to solve the massiv delays and make everything even more crazy?

2 remote servers - 2 readonly slaves for reading data remote (master - slave)

2 local (internal) servers.

Remote - Local Master Master.

Unfucking this cluster fuck was a real nightmare.

It had to be done at night, cause everything needed to be ripped apart.

And the servers were the backend of a warehouse with supply chain and multiple selling channels (Amazon, eBay etcetera).

So. It had to run the next day at 05.00 clock so the incoming orders could be packaged / prepared for shipping.

That was fun. Not.

And the clusterfuck died spectaculously on my first work day - the old DBA was gone (fired....)

:)

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

Renaming a file is just too difficult for this piece of shit software.

Fixing bugs? Fuck no.

Fixing crashes? Fuck no.

Fixing the unnavigable IDE settings? Fuck no.

The IntelliJ platform is a bloated piece of shit at every level.

JetBrains cannot produce software that isn't held together by duct tape.

I can't name a single item of software they've ever produced that isn't a bloated piece of shit.

Even if you are prepared to waste a lot of time trying to file a bug report – which they usually just ignore or pretend not to be reproducible – you have to use another in-house heap of shit called YouTrack.

Have you tried using this piece of trash that masquerades as a bug tracker?

These people are fucking clinically insane.

While your IDE becomes unresponsive and crashes without warning, or your keyboard shortcuts just mysteriously stop working in the IDE, or indexing just stops working for no reason, why not check out their TikTok and Twitter accounts?

They've got an excellent PR team that knows how to polish a turd for public consumption, and to make money out of it.

So I got my first Dev job as a Junior!!!! It is in a big company that seems to be full of energy and ideas.
I am really excited and hope this all go well.
I'm just lost about how to be prepared for the first day and afraid to not meet the expectations I think they have on me.

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

It's been 3 busy weeks. Had so much to rant about, but I could lurk at best.

We had 2 big features coming to 2 different projects. I told my boss it's take 3 weeks for the one I was working on. The guy working on the other one, said he only needed 1 for his. Guess who got labeled as negative, worrying too much over nothing, and so forth? Especially since a "much more complex" feature would take just 1 week!

Whatever. Fast forward to this week. I was done by tuesday, including testing of both features and deployment. By wednesday, I had even a good looking documentation. Everything was ready. EXCEPT. The 2 features have to go live together, due to various reasons. Guess who ia still a ling way from completing his task? Gueas who asked to postpone his deadline by 2 weeks? Guess who's gonna have to work on weekends for no extra pay?

Guess what? I know how to give an eatimate, and I rather be "negative" and schedule 1 or 2 extra days to be prepared for hiccups and what not rather than having to waste my free time for nothing.

FFS.

So one of the PMs arranged a meeting last week for today, where he was going to "talk to us about a project we're currently working on".

Today the PM was off, so myself and a few other managers attended said meeting. Once everyone was in, one of the managers looked around, then at me and stated: "Have you not prepared your handover for this meeting?". I was just sat there like "WTF? What handover!?"

Apparently the PM decided to raise a meeting saying he was going to talk about the project, but then told all the other managers I was going to give a handover. He told everyone, but me!!

No wonder he didn't show up for it -.-

tl:dr
i fucking hate that professor for whom i have to work on laboratory project right now.

reason#1
the project is using a stack full with java. JavaScript. react and some weird facebook api of which i have no clue about. not to mention the server side of this application which uses tomcat (ok its java after all) and sql.

well that wouldn't be not so bad if...

reason#2
we wouldn't have to fucking debug his mistakes he put into the fucking prepared code AND his fucking useless instructions how to set up the project for eclipse the first time. not to mention his fucking requirements which make no sense

oh yeah im a student. i can always go and ask him for help if i need any...

reason#3
i have another 70% mandatory course at the same time and that fucker refuses to upload hos sheets in moodle and answer even one fucking question via mail. not to mention no support if I am there unless i have eclipse setup. even through the projects should be build using gradle...

reason#4
oh. and have i mentioned that this course is only about design patterns? uts not like we could see several of them in a java only application. no we literally have to learn java itself. gradle. nodejs JavaScript Extended for react which i have no clue about at the moment... and yes i especially mentioned gradle and nodejs beccause we have to set shit up and not only use a script.

reason#5
and all that wont even give us a grade. no ita simply a pass or fail part of the module which the course is part of.

have i also mentioned that the whole shit should be done in 20 hours according to the schedule

I have a lot of fun during crunch time.

It's like running a marathon. It is both physically and mentally taxing, and I get a rush out of seeing how hard I can push myself.

But like a marathon, it suuuuucks if you are not prepared, or you otherwise didn't want to do that.

You hear that bosses?
Crunch is like running a marathon. That thing that people, who prepare for years to do, still causes them to piss and shit themselves while their nipples bleed. And that's when they are fully prepared. That is what you are asking your team to do without any notice ahead of time.

"Ok Derrick, I know you wanted to visit your family in the country this weekend. But we need you to run uphill, fuled only by diet dr pepper and fear of loosing your job, untill you pass out and need an I.V. to keep you from stroking out. '

Otherwise a lot of fun.

We have this guy at the company who always presents good ideas and always suggests new projects. One day he suggested a great project, our boss really liked the idea and gave me the green light to start creating it.
The guy, seeing the opportunity to promote himself, and without consulting me about the deadline, set up a meeting to present the application to the directors, and only then informed me about the deadline. At that moment I did my part, told him that it would not be possible to meet the deadline with all the requirements, something had to be withdrawn, and that's what he did, took a lot of things from the project and we went on like this.
While I was implementing the application, he was always pushing, asking me to do it faster, asking my boss to put me exclusively in his project, and things like that, the boss was always saying that there were not enough people on the team to devote someone exclusively to the project. The guy of course did not agree with that.
At the end the application, without a lot of the initial requirements, was a really mess but ready, he presented to the directors, who in turn liked a lot, and consequently asked to do all the initial requirements and some more. But now those initial requirements had to be made on top of a mess because of all the rush and adaptations.
A few months later, with the change of the board, the guy turned up being my boss, and I've prepared myself to go back to his project with exclusive dedication.
Then came the surprise, when the guy, in the boss position, realized the limitations of the team, instead of putting me to do everything he wanted in that project, he canceled the project entirely and for all the reasons that had already been said to him by the former boss.
Please, don't be like that guy!

This was shit funny.

One morning, one of my colleagues got a direct call from project architect that he has to setup a meeting to explain in depth the project he has been taking care of for months and prepare a presentation and send an invite. Two weeks later we are all invited to this meeting. This colleague acting as host of this meeting prepared for few days on the PowerPoint and also a well crafted demo. Then as the architect joins, this colleague starts speaking about his role and the project. Within a minute, the architect interrupts him and says 'shut the fuck up, I don't think you are ready yet for this meeting maybe we need someone more learned...so hmm....let me explain it'. And this architect then uses his PPT for sometime and then pulls up a whiteboard and draws birds and spiders telling every time to see system in it.

My colleague is screwed to shit and is incapable to speak when closing the call.

Later ahead 4 weeks, his PPT is retouched and recoloured and attached to a Wiki page created by a unknown fucker who happens to have direct mobile calls with this architect.

Who's is faulty or not or what happened it still shocks most when this architect joins the scrum call daily. Fuck him.

- have/share an agenda as soon as possible
- each talking point should identify a problem. Make a list of strategic questions answers to which would make it perfectly clear what and by whom has to be done to resolve them.
- plan meeting duration according to the list of questions. Make sure you meeting room reservation gives you enough time
- take notes
- be prepared for a need for another meeting(s), if during that meeting it comes clear that:
> more/other people need to be engaged
> some things are not clear and need more investigation before going further
> you have run out of time
> there are other problems tgat need to be worked out and it might cobsume too much time to do this in a current meeting
- do not turn the meeting into a chat. It's counter-productive, tiring to the listeners and a waste of time
- do not try to cover many topics. The less, the better. Unless they are very tightly coupled.
- do not invite people you do not need or there is a very slim chance you will need.
- only schedule meetings when the situation needs to be DISCUSSED among multiple parties
- that being said, do not schedule meetings when it's more convenient to communicate otherwise, like email, chat, etc.
- after the meeting make a summary and send it our to all the participants. They might reply and clarify if you have misunderstood smth or missed some important point.
- during the meeting assign tasks to each other. Verbally. Make notes. After the meeting reflect them in jira, rally, wtv.
- while assigning tasks nake sure the assignees have no blockers to work on them and make sure they understand what, when and how should be done. Some tasks might be dependedt on each other, work the sequence out.
- while assigning tasks ask "for ETAs. They might be as silly as 1-hour-to-2-weeks, but they still let you know what to expect.
- offer your assistance to the task assignees if they need any while working on their tasks

- work on your language, grammar, syntax, etc. Reading texts with typos/mistakes is repelling

- be a leader, an authority everyone is looking up to. Not a boss.
- avoid saying NOs. Be more of a "do we really need this; can we do this some other way/time; I can't promise anythibg but I'll see what I can do about it" kind of person.

(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.

All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.

TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?

Okay, so, my company does some stuff around blockchain. I had source for smart contract prepared before and it was on 'todo' queue. So, time for it, time to deploy on Kovan, time to test it on actual chain. Riiiight? Okay compiled no problem, deployed, no problem, i plug into several gui's ABI provided by compiler, and... Well..

I still do not understand why each and every gui prompted me to send view transactions (external view), instead of, well, eval them locally, i checked the ABI manually, it is correct, i stripped it down, it is correct, all up to spec.

I try older version of offline MEW, to have older web3.js with no success that thing works properly.

Every
Single
Web3.js based client
Behaved
Differently

And none behaved correctly.

I would, like, understand, if I didnt use official compiler, but official compiler should for F sakes be compatible with official client.

Today this stole 6 hours of my life, I didnt manage to solve it, and I am legitmitely pissed.

Im getting close to re-implement segment of web3JS to be able to do the tests I need to do.

Its not like I havent done it before....

Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.

i just went out with a new girl

shes so beautiful irl omg

much younger

starts her first year of college on 1st october and goes to same engineering college i graduated from

shes so fun to talk to

her face so beautiful i could look at it for hours

her eyes too

she even prepared a list of questions for me

one of the questions is what brainrot terms do i know

what the fuckj, how can a female be this much damn cool?

she also mentioned she wanna become a mom at around 24, so asked if i can cook, what music i listen to, etc

she has a very strict father figure but she loves her dad (HIGHLY IMPORTANT SIGN OF A NON-WHORE FEMALE)

and also asked me where do i see myself in the next 2-3 years.

i didnt realize it at first but i just did now--she was testing to see if i can be the potential father of her kids in the next 2-4 years when she turns around or close to age 24!!! holy shit.

this means i need to lock in and get fucking rich cause having a girl this fun smart beautiful and respectful (all of the traits my ex whore does NOT have), would be a fucking tragic waste if i dont lock her in❗️❗️

she was fixing her hair putting lipstick on and i knew she was into me

so i hugged her, then i tried kissing her she said "next time", so i said lets do a quick kiss at least, and we kissed.

then she held my hand barely letting me go.

just met her for first time ever.

what the hell just happened

how did i pull a 10/10 like this, with an 8 yr age gap, and she doesnt even care about my materialistic stuff

1. God opened my eyes to show me how my blonde ex was whoring behind my back

2. I dumped my whore ex

3. God helped me buy a brand new beamber

4. God sent me this new girl as a reward for my suffering from the previous whore

this girl has made me requestion if all women are whores--perhaps i may be wrong

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

A dedicated team has built an "infrastructure" for creating UI for c++ developers in the company. What looks like a poor attempt at recreating what Microsoft did with XAML at first glance, it actually is a horrible exercise in force feeding people the stinking pile of shit that their code is.
The idea is to make it easy to create UI for developers who aren't used to front end development. They should just need to declare the layout. Very noble.
But.
If you want to do anything more than show a checkbox or a radio button, if you dare to define relationships between the UI controls or worse, if you get ambitious with creating a simple UI that uses a lot of similar controls and similar relationships with dynamic content... be prepared to eat your own barf from eating too much of their shit.

Not only do you now need to write front end code (including JS among others), you need to do it with limited or poor support and you have to make sure that it sits well with the house of moist, crumbly cards the team proudly created. Or resort to some very stupid and performance costing "bypasses" that further cripple your application code. Usually you have to do both of these things.
To think that scores of other teams have welcomed this amazing enhancement with full support without any resistance. It's sickening.

I waste too much of energy (and good jokes!) with these people.

It was the worst local Hackathon. It's not even a Hackathon either, where the whole event spanned over 2 months.

It was a group entry with me and 4 teammates. Each of them did contribute:

Guy A: criticizes what is built and designed
Guy B: offered financial tips on how to make this thing feasible
Guy C: did UI but in graphics. No CSS file, just bits of graphical elements.
Guy D: family commitments

And then there's me, writing documentation, built the entire project, wiki, drove the project, prepared the presentation slides, tests the framework, unit tests, stuck with stupid problems like SSL, localhost, Google Maps Key and the likes.

And we didn't even win, let alone launch this thing, whatever it is, to anywhere. Never doing group projects again.

I'm flying solo for now

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

Not prepared at all for this Assembly exam I'm about to take. Wish me luck!

Have you ever found a infinite task? Well, I did.

So, the software that I'm working now was under responsibility of another company for development and maintenance (I'll call them X) from 2014 to last month , and the company I work for was handling only with the business part. Now we took all the development for us as well.

This software has a lot of reports , so it has a lot of templates for this reports.

When X was handling the software, they asked the client and the old project manager if they wanted the templates to have the client's products dynamic (no need to change the template when adding a new product) or hardcoded for some products they already had, they choose hardcoded because it would be faster. Butterfly effect.

Fast forward to this week, the team leader designated a task for me, It looked easy at first, just fix 2 templates, easy.

Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I fixed the first template, discovering in the process the hardcoded things, had to add the product reference in a lot of places.

So i went to the second item, a super template that they use to put together some smaller templates.

It was really weird, I couldn't find all the templates that it was supposed to use, and I didn't really know the exact problem, the only thing I knew was that it was not being generated, the reason could be the super template itself or one of the 15 smaller templates, that could happen to have sub templates.

So I called the team leader and explained to him wtf was happening, he called the senior business analyst, that called the PM, we agreed that it would be infinite because of those fucking hardcoded things, they prepared a excel sheet with this and a lot of other problems and will send this to the client, explaining that we'll need a lot of time to put this new product up and running.

Now I'm in the middle of this shit storm seeing a time of darkness in the future.

Ps: This new product was supposed to be inserted in the software since last November, when it was under X responsability, and they analyzed it and said that it would take 190 hours to be completely done, the client refused. It was the first rain drop of what would become a shit storm.

Am I the only one who when studying for an exam has the urge to copy all the slides by hand? And I mean not typing, good old handwriting. Then scrible in them and add own notes, write a summary and then try to recall it all.
It doesn't seem very efficient but I do not feel complete or even remotely prepared if I haven't done this. Although I did pass exams in the past without doing all of this...

Hey all, just wondering what it was like for you when starting out your career.

I'm a newish dev, been full time for about a year hired right after my internship. My role has a bunch of hats ranging from DevOps/sys admin to software engineering, sort of a weird mashup of skills so it's not pure software engineering. I mainly work with python, Ansible, and some terraform.

However I still just want to say I'm sorely disappointed in my undergrad classes.

I have a "concentration" in software engineering. I did struggle in classes as I was working full time to pay for classes without taking out loans, but I don't really remember learning a whole lot that was useful in industry.

Overall I just feel like just paid money for a degree that didn't teach me very much useful stuff. Maybe I'm just lacking experience? Maybe what I learned I just don't notice myself applying because it's subconscious?
My coworkers have taught me so much, and I'm very thankful they invested that time into me. I still get ripped to shreds during code reviews lmao (definitely not as much compared to when I first started but I'm also still learning and will always be)
Plus our company docs are pretty good so I can always read through them or search our codebase for examples on how to utilize in house tools etc.

I definitely hit the jackpot with this job, just feeling like I should have been prepared more.

!rant
I didn't know that working with React will destroy my confidence like this, I know that coding is hard but being tasked to build a front end for a large project with React and use React Boilerplate (which is not for beginners) just a month after starting my first job as a front end developer is nowhere to be the perfect start to one's career.

the quarantine did not help, it made it worse, I have so much fear that I can't even see my code, I even wanted to write some simple side project to retake some confidence but I can't, I want to tell my boss that I can't continue but he's very nice that I don't want to worry him, and here I am having panic attacks and fear, not a fear of being fired, because I am prepared and I deserve it, but fear that I can't code any more, I am not a good developer, but it's the only thing I know.

I had low confidence before but not as much as this time, this time I feel like it's the end of everything, I keep staring at the screen for hours and I can't think straight.

I am lost and I don't know how to handle this, I became a bad father and a bad husband, I don't talk to anyone, not even my kids ...

as always thanks for reading me, I only have this community that understand me.

!rant

Ever find something that's just faster than something else, but when you try to break it down and analyze it, you can't find out why?

PyPy.
I decided I'd test it with a typical discord bot-style workload (decoding a JSON theoretically from an API, checking if it contains stuff, format and then returning it). It was... 1.73x the speed of python.

(Though, granted, this code is more network dependent than anything else.)

Mean +- std dev: [kitsu-python] 62.4 us +- 2.7 us -> [kitsu-pypy] 36.1 us +- 9.2 us: 1.73x faster (-42%)

Me: Whoa, how?!
So, I proceed to write microbenches for every step. Except the JSON decoding, (1.7x faster was at least twice as slow (in one case, one hundred times slower) when tested individually.
The combination of them was faster. Huh.

By this point, I was all "sign me up!", but... asyncpg (the only sane PostgreSQL driver for python IMO, using prepared statements by default and such) has some of it's functionality written in C, for performance reasons. Not Cython, actual C that links to CPython. That means no PyPy support.

Okay then.

So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).

So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).

Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.

Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).

So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.

So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.

So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:

var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:

function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");

output: undefined bob

So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.

No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.

I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.

Client. Should. Die.

Large table which needs to be filled with data - data needs to be prepared because there can be gaps in the data (data represents orders of supplier per day).

So layout is like this:
supplier1 supplier2 ...
date orders
date orders
date ....

Which already is fun. Not. Fetching data with several filters, prepping
data and assuring ordered output without gaps was painful...

The number of suppliers can be anything between 1 or >300 - limited is only the date range. there is an click event on every mofo column for enlarging the whole column and loading additional data via ajax.

Now in all this cringy mess.... I had to make it scrollable.

Horizontal and vertical.

wasn't much fun either.

Can someone please kill any client with the task : make this gigantic shit pile of dynamic table behave like Excel?

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

Need advice. I run all my development on a desktop that I have been happy with for years. Now it keep crashing (probably due to forti client which I need for a contract).

I am frozen in looking for a replacement. Will a laptop give me the freedom I want but not enough power and USB options? Will I be wasting 1000k buying one?

I do all sorts of dev: visual studio, eclipse, PHP, c#, Apache, IIS, SQL server, MySQL.

I pretty much have to be prepared for anything.

But I keep thinking a laptop will give me this mobility that I may never use.

I probably should stick with a desktop.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

Again my anxiety hiting me bad.
I had an internal meeting today with this team where my new project depends on. The goal was to understand about the impacts we can have on thier services.
Instead everything was different, everyone just went on talking and I couldn't understand. There were seniors in the call but this is the part of the project I am responsible for.
I was the junior but still have 3 years of experience and expected to do these things, at least I expect it from myself.
I don't understand everyone around me is so normal, no one's like me. They work, people trust them, people ask them for help. I am on the other hand just a below average person trying to do things I don't understand.

I prepared for this meeting, but the things that were being discussed, I couldn't understand although they were simple.

How do people not feel anxious? Should I not think about this meeting at all? If I think about what went wrong then it ia only me, I couldn't understand things well. How to deal with that?

I literally want to cry but I am a big girl now, it's hard for me to cry. :( I am too sad and habe no confidence. My senior muat be thinking she does know anything, she's incompetent. :(

Warning - Not IT related.

Long ago, I had a chemist professor who told us a story. She worked in a laboratory where they have studied cristal formations, so basically made a liquid highly capable to form cristals, and they watched them forming, doing tests and so on. In the meantime new building of the campus opened and they had to move the lab to the new location, which was a fourth floor of newly made building. Few of them started to work there even before they moved the old materials and equipment and they started few cristalisation studies, the interesting part is that the cristals didn't formed. She said that at the end they had many cups with prepared liquid and apsolutely no cristals for weeks, but one day the lead researcher arrived with the old, already formed cristals, from the old lab, and toon those inside of the room with prepared cups all the cristals started to form at the same time. After telling us a story she asked us not to tell this to anyone because the science currently doesn't accept this phenomenon and we will be demonised and looked fools it the scientific community.

This story made a hole in my brain...
It was like 10 years ago, and as a problem solver I still have sometimes some weird ideas about it, and strange explanations comming from nothing, and without any deep understanding of quantum physics or even cristalisation. :D

My best mentor was at my first tech job. I’m pretty sure he’s a big reason why I got the job. Not me specifically, but he advocated for hiring out of a bootcamp that represented minorities.

I was just out of bootcamp. I was very sure I was not prepared. No, this was imposter syndrome. As evidence, I was offered a lesser role than what I had interviewed for. I was pretty sure I was only hired because the company was trying to fill a diversity quota, they could get away with paying me less, and I would take training well.

He was assigned to be my mentor. He was very helpful with teaching me the team’s practices and overall tech practices. Mentoring is hard and he was great at it. He almost inspired me to mentor, but I know I’d be shit at it.

When I was job searching, he wrote my recommendation. He helped me in so many ways.

Oh yeah ... Java is cool in an utterly sick way even that i can't seem to find a non-retarded built-in stack data structure
Call me a racist, but java.util.Stack has a removeIf() method in case you want to remove odd numbers:

import java.util.Stack;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Stack<Integer> s = new Stack<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.removeIf((n) -> (n % 2 == 1));
System.out.println(s); // [2, 4, 16]
}
}

Stop using java.util.Stack they said, a legacy class they said, instead i should use java.util.ArrayDeque, but frankly i can still keep up being racist (in a reversed manner):

import java.util.ArrayDeque;
import java.util.Deque;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Deque<Integer> s = new ArrayDeque<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.removeIf((n) -> (n % 2 == 1));
System.out.println(s); // [16, 4, 2]
}
}

The fact that you can iterate through java.util.Stack is amazing, but the ability to insert element in a specified index:

import java.util.Stack;

public class App {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int arr[] = { 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19 };
Stack<Integer> s = new Stack<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
s.push(arr[i]);
}
s.add(2, 218);
System.out.println(s); // [2, 4, 218, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19]
}
}

That's what happens when you inherit java.util.Vector, which is only done a BRAIN OVEN person, a very brain oven even that it will revert to retarded

If you thought about using this type of bullshit in Java get yourself prepared to beat the disk for hours when you accidentally call java.util.Stack<T>.add(int index, T element) instead of java.util.Stack<T>.push(T element), you will probably end up breaking the disk or your hand, but not solving the issue

WHY THE F*** CAN'T WE HAVE A WORKING NORMAL STACK ?

Partial thoughts, are thoughts that sound like they should have more to them. However they are intentionally left short to create a sense that more is to come. This creates a state of anxiety in people and their desire for closure. The sentence is more effective if you say the last part of the sentence with an increasing pitch. This indicates there is more to the story. When in fact there is no more to the story.

Here is an example:
"I saw this guy walking down the street..."

People will automatically assume there is more to this story. So they will say something like, "And then what?" The response is: "That is it. That is what I saw." This is the peak time of frustration. They may even argue with you or storm away. Be prepared to be called names.

There is actually some history behind this.

...

Hehe, no, I am not going to leave you high and dry. In high school a dude I knew would always make fun of my friend. So I started doing these partial stories to the dude. He would get mad and storm off each time. I would do this several times per day. So it can be a tactic to deal with difficult people.

In a country, a long time ago there was a programmer by the name of Alex. He was a programming genius and apart from a few hours of sleep, he was busy developing unique programs for new generation technology firms. Alex was a bachelor and he happily and proudly lived the way he wanted to. He did not have duties, authority over him, bosses to report to, children to take care of, and distractions. He could sit and code for the entire day without getting any break or feeling a bit tired. However, he had no idea that everything in his life was soon going to turn around. Before Marriage: The Bachelor’s Life Alex was the epitome of a modern ‘Play Boy ‘ or every man’s dream. He was fairly dressed, had a classy house, a snazzy car, and a good-paying job. He was in the habit of spending his mornings drinking coffee while browsing through the different coding topics. He comes in the afternoon and spends the evening part of the day with his friends. Life has never been this good. Alex was able to work hard and the more he was innovative, he enjoyed it. It illustrates how a young person would sit for many hours coding at night and not bother about other people around him. He was alone as a bird and as per him, that’s what he wanted to be. He had no peer to tell the truth to, no wife to prepare meals for, no maids to babysit his mess. A man could chow down a pizza for breakfast, lunch, and supper with not even a raised eyebrow from onlookers. He was profiting from living the best life he possibly could. After Marriage: Married Life: Alex & Sarah The climax for Alex is when he marries Sarah on a sunny morning on a fine day. Young people met, and after becoming enamored, started a family and got married to find a new home. Sarah was friendly with people and it was very easy for her to make friends; however, she had little knowledge of technology. Alex had it in his mind that marriage does not change the life you lead and how wrong he was. It was a fairy-tale to have such a perfect life for several days after the marriage. Their nights would be spent in front of the television set with their arms wrapped around each other, eating takeout. Despite this, when the number of days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months, Alex felt the beginning of a shift in his behavior. The Coding Cave That Transformed into A Home Office Due to the pandemic the coding cave Alex used to have became a home office. Sarah had made up her mind to open her business from home, therefore, she required a home office. Thus, she moved inside the cubicle that Alex had created as his coding cave and left him with no space to code. He now had to code in the living room, because Sarah would incessantly request him to either lower the auditory input of the keys he was typing or to switch off the LCD screen. The Once-Clean Apartment Turns into a Mess Alex was a neat freak, and he adored tidiness, especially in his apartment. But after marriage, his once clean and neat-looking apartment was changed into a dirty one. Although Sarah was not very neat, she used to litter her things anywhere she felt like without being conscious of it. Alex was a programmer and his coding notes were mixed with Sarah's business papers, it irritated him so much. Alex’s to-do list before marriage The to-do list before marriage only comprised coding-related tasks. At marriage, however, he seemed to have developed a longer list of things to do than ever before. Instead of just going to the grocery store to buy some food, Alex seemed to have endless tasks to do mostly around the house. He had to cook for himself, sweep the house, and wash the dishes among other things. This was a new world as far as he was concerned. The Pizza Days Are Over Gone there is no more time for Alex could eat pizza in the morning, afternoon as well and evening. Sarah was very conscious of what she took as food or what her family took as food and therefore ensured that Alex took healthy home-cooked foods. He could not have the pizza anymore but the meals prepared by Sarah were really tasty. Conclusion Therefore from a life before marriage to the life after marriage, it was evident that Alex led two different lives. He went from a playful man with not much responsibility to a man with more responsibilities as a husband and a father. Still, he wouldn’t have it any other way, despite these changes. Later he cherished Sarah and the life they had, and nothing in this world could make him exchange what he had now. Essentially, it was a tricky business being married, but a blessing, and an addition of love, company, and much hilarity too. Therefore, if you are a bachelor reading this, embrace your coding cave and your pizza days because once you utter the words ‘I do,’ all those will be things of the past.But trust me, it's all worth it.

Yesterday's was fucking stupid.

It all begins with a fucking online clothes shop that "cancelled" my order from a week ago because "PayPal detected strange account movements". I logged into my PP Account and no notice or whatsoever of that.

Then they tell me I'll have to wait around for ~30 days to get my money back. Are you fucking damn serious? First you delay my fucking order a week then you cancel it without contacting me to "reassure" I put the order and then you say that I'll have my money back on 30 days? Fuck you.

Thereafter, I was going to buy a new phone, which two weeks ago I already went to request a quotation and they told me I was ready to go with paying 50% off.

Well... fuck me, because I went yesterday and they told me that I couldn't get the phone becase "The system says you already have three lines with our company, and all of those have money due" What? Fucking shit, I went two weeks ago and everything was fine, and now this? I don't even have an account in that stupid company and now they tell me I have three with late payments?

FUCKING HELL!!

As if everything wasn't going bad already, I went off and said I'll come back today to see "if the system has been corrected", so I went to grab a burger at McDonalds that's on my way back home.

I make my order and the cashier is like "Hurr durr.. The card terminal doesn't work, do you have cash? If not, don't worry I can cancel the order and switch to the other station so i can charge you"

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? I mean, come on dude! If you know that the shitty card terminal doesn't work and the station that it's fully functional it's literally three fucking steps next to you, WHY THE FUCKING FLYING FUCK ARE YOU USING THE WRONG ONE?

Then I wait for my order, that I saw they prepared and was ready like in 5 minutes, but the guy went and stood looking at the void. Then he realizes and begins to pick my food and set it up. He puts it on a tray and stands there, I stand there looking at him.

"My order was to go" I said... then he's like "Oh, yeah" and begins to pack.

Dude... the order is in the fucking screen, I said the cashier that It was to go... jesus.

Then I tell him "Can you put some sweet mustard packages?"
"Yeah" he says... but I looked away. When I arrived home, I opened the bag and... FUCKING HELL, NORMAL MUSTARD.

I told him twice, even said "please" and "thank you", but hell no, he had ONE JOB, and he didn't do it.

Seriously guys, stop this fucking mess, somebody call `kill`

you know one should tread very carefully when getting a business dealing out of friendship.

if their is a boss-employee dynamics in the business, as in you are the boss and they are being paid to work for you or vice versa, then during work , be prepared to take criticism constructively. as a friend, the relation is different, we say each other anything and it is laughed off, but during work, there is a matter of respect, seniority and professionalism.

another kind of dynamics are the freelance/favour relation where friend is giving you free/paid service/advice or vice versa. this is even more shittier situation and is almost always bound to fuck up.
- the guy receiving service will try to negotiate a better deal because friend factor ('you will take so much money from your homie?')
- the guy providing service will try to offer a bad deal because friend factor ('i know he trust me. let me offer him a bad quote as he don't know anything of this domain')
- the guy providing service may not consider the service/advice as priority because friends factor ('he is a homie. he can wait')
- the guy receiving service may not be satisfied with the product/offerring/guidance because friends factor ('you could have added this x feature too bro, i paid you')

overall friend factor sucks. somehow the boss-employee factor worked for me as i was careful after 1 bad attempt

my most daring adventure of 24 yrs day -1/3 (this array goes -1,0,1,2,3)

read my previous 2 rants for context. tomorrow the journey is going to start. the organisers dont count that day (aka day 0 ) as its a bus travel night , but i would disagree since am sleeping away from home.
if i survive this i will probably add more comments on this thread about how i felt each day.

currently having the worst thoughts due to every constraint being a variable. have i packed enough? have i packed too much? will there be rain there? will there be sun ? will there be snow? am I prepared for the harsh weathers? its a mountain area and there have been heavy rain in my urban city, what if their is a cloud burst or landslide? am I prepared to run? am i prepared enough for the trek? will my cellphone die? what if my bus is captured by decoits in night? what if am travelling with kidnappers disguised as passengers/ organisers? will they cut my limbs or just ask for ransom? if they are not decoits, are they going to be lovey dovey couples interested in bursting condoms in mountains nd not helping a fella. WILL EVERYTHING GO OKAY? is this the last time am seeing my parents?

fuck fuck fucking fuckak fuck.

the only good thoughts am having is looking at the reels of organisers. theybhave smiling faces, beautiful mountains, people are dancing in buses and having fun in dormitories. can those be me? all i want is my mom to not get a heart attack from this trip.