I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

This is fucking annoying with some clients.

Client calls:
Me: Hello, how can I help you?
Client: *explains problem*
Me: *tells possible solution*
Client: you sound young, could you connect me to a more senior person?
Me: Sure.

Collegue: Hello, how can I help you?
Client: *explains problem again*
Collegue: *gives same solution as me*
Client: Oh uhm but that's the same solution the boy I had on the phone before you told me.
Collegue: Yeah......?
Client: well he sounded so young...
Collegue: Being young does not equal being inexperienced/less knowing about something.

Best office prank: I was pretty young and naaive. Senior dev comes to me and says that it would be hilarious to slide a note under the women's bathroom door saying, "I know what you're doing in there". He says that the woman in there will think it's hilarious too. We work with her, she's very funny and laid back, so I go along with it, expecting to get a laugh. A few minutes go by and a different older women enters my cube. She's got the note! She works on the other side of the building so I don't know her too well but I can tell from the look on her face that she's pissed. I'm frozen with fear as my career flashes before my eyes.
I apologise perfusely and try to explain but she's not having it. After a while she goes back to her office not having accepted that it wasn't meant for her and that it was just a joke gone wrong. I spend the next two days apologizing every chance I get, hoping she won't go to HR. She remains stone cold until late on the second day. She couldn't take it anymore as her mouth reluctantly begins to crack a smile. At that point she drops the serious expression on her face and busts out laughing.

It turns out that the three of them planned the whole thing and executed flawlessly. I've never felt so relieved to be the butt of a joke.

So I just got rejected for a job for being too introverted.

They were very impressed with my advanced and broad technical knowledge but they said I'm "too introverted to hang out with cool, young people". That's ageism and that's illegal. Anyway.

I have more knowledge than most senior specialist devs (I've worked with them and I know them) but just because I'm a reserved and thinking person, I'm not welcome in this society of idiots and I don't get a job.

Two words: fuck society.

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

So that high level prank from yesterday.

Senior Linux engineer, the fucker.

He somehow installed shitloads of cron jobs onto my system.

Every few minutes it would create a new user with a freaking complicated password. Then it would install openssh server in case it wasn't installed yet. After that it'd set all iptables rules to allow incoming AND outgoing connections on port 22.

That was one badass ansible script though!

I'm not sure what more there's to it because sometimes when i removed crons, they'd magically appear again later AND i forgot to check the boot scripts so i might be fucked again when I get to work today!

Plus side, i finally fully understand cron 😅

I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF BUSINESS MOTHERFUCKERS USING TECHNICAL FUCKING BUZZWORDS LIKE THEY KNOW SHIT ABOUT TECH! THEY TRY TO BE FUCKING SMARTASSES AND ARGUE WITH DEVELOPERS LIKE GOD KNOWS WHY THIS FUCKING DOUCHE IS NOT THROWN IN /dev/null YET!

Ugh. He try to sound smart and argued with a unity game developer why the dev is not using "react" and "redux" in his game, purely because "since its the hype in 2016"... I was like really nigga?? FOR FUCKS SAKE Do some research before you say! Then he argued with a senior full-stack web developer on why they're using ES6 and not ES7, purely because he heard that ES7 is newer. When we try to explain we're not using decorator syntaxes since we use pure functions in our codebase, or how we haven't installed any ES7 babel plugins to transpile our code, he kept saying ES7 is newer and cooler and we must use it somehow... More to rant but i am fucking tired right now...

So today this Mother F**ker get HR to back him up to accuse me of not communicating well in the team because I consistently asked him (the code owner) why he kept coding not following the coding guideline.

How is it not communicating? He literally ghosted me and blocked me every time I ask him questions. Which I somewhat don't understand what he is trying to do. HR lady told me that a senior software engineer should have the knowledge to understand everything and all the code.

But the code looks like this :

Had this recently with a client, mysql server of one of our shared hosting servers went down:

Senior engineer 1: heads up guys, mysql of {server name} is down, working on it! *calls second engineer in*
Support people: thanks for letting know! (in case clients call about it)

*triiiingggg*
Me: good afternoon, how can I help you?
Client: this site which we manage for a shared customer says it can't connect to the database...
M: is it hosted on {server name of mysql problems}
C: yes.
M: there's a mysql disruption there right now, we're working on it!
C: *starts guilt tripping me about thy they chose us for stability reasons and now this happens*
M: sir, I can't change this situation so you can go on and on about that but it's not going to help anyone.
C: okay, so what can I tell my client?
M: you can tell that we have a mysql server disruption right now and are working to fix it as soon as possible!
C: and what am I going to tell my client if they don't accept that answer?
M: you can tell that we are fixing this disruption as soon as possible.
C: yes you said that but what if they don't accept that answer, what am I going to tell them THEN?!
M: Listen, sir. We have a disruption right now. It's not fun but whether I tell this by writing it to you in a fairy tail or shout it at you, it's not going to make a difference.
We have a disruption and we are working on i....

*click*

Well, fuck you too.

Senior Dev: "Be mindful of what you email to the team, some may be rubbed the wrong way."

Me: "I'm going on a year, I figured it was okay to send a meme when appropriate like [the other guy]."

Senior Dev: "Well, [the other guy] has been here for 17 years, so it's sort of expected from him."

Me: "You know what would be weird? If I was here for 17 more years and then 'started' having fun with the team."

Senior Dev: "Yes, but [the other guy] is the only one doing his particular job, which makes him important, so he tends to get away with more."

Me: "No, I get it. If you're a linchpin you can reply with cat memes, but people like me need to mind their place."

Senior Dev: "It's an uncomfortable conversation, but it's all bureaucracy."

Me: "Duly noted. But could you please forward me the specific email I sent that caused the concern?"

Senior Dev: "I'm not sure what the exact email was, when it was sent, or specifically whom it offended."

Me: "Okay, because that would be like me walking up to you and saying that you have a problem that needs to be fixed, but I don't know what your problem is or why it needs to be addressed."

Senior Dev: "You're right, but just be mindful of the emails you send outside of the group."

Me: "I've never group-emailed anything outside of the team."

Senior Dev: "Well, I'll let you get back to work..."

[FML!] 🤦‍♂️

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

At my previous job we had the rule to lock your PC when you leave. Makes sense of course.
We were not programmers but application engineers, still, we worked with sensitive data.

One colleague always claimed to be the most intelligent and always demanded the "senior" - title. Which he obviously did not deserve.

multiple times a day forgot to lock his workstation and we had to do it for him.
My last week working there, I've had it. He forgot it again... So I made a screenshot of his current environment. Closed everything. Set his new background with the screen shot and killed explorer (windows). Then finally I locked his PC.

When he came back he panicked that his PC froze. He couldn't do shit anymore. Not knowing what to do... 😂
Which makes him a senior of course.

But seriously, first thing I would do is open the task manager and notice that explorer wasn't running... Thus my background with the taskbar isn't real.... My colleagues must be pranking me!

Nope... The "senior" knew little

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

Yesterday Mr Senior told us that "it's not possible to do that".
I (30 years younger) replied I read about that possibility in the manual.
So he challenged me to do it, laughing at me.

Today I went to the office really angry, I put the headphones on, with the song "Suicide Silence - O.C.D." in loop, and after 5 hours I solved the "big problem".

So, go fuck yourself Mr Senior, and RTFM.

Damn, I'm still listening that song.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

I didn’t. I went for an interview and quizzed this multi-million £ business about their architecture: it sounded awful.
I made some diagrams on how I would’ve done it, how it would scale etc and why. They were blown away and wanted me to implement this structure including the job they wanted to hire me for.
They sent a contract over: had the wrong name on it
They corrected the name but I noticed the salary was incorrect
They sent a third and by this time I was offered an interview elsewhere so I went

The hirer then called me to say he was frustrated I hadn’t signed a contract yet making it sound like it was my fault for not wanting to sign an illegitimate contract. he then went on to say that the salary had been reduced, I asked why and they said they felt I wasn’t a senior developer.
So I took the other job and they kept their shitty architecture 💁🏼‍♀️

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

I was expecting a 4th interview this afternoon for a position as a fullstack elixir developer.

Got a response from the CTO.
'Even if you pass all the tests with success, we could not go further because you're a junior and we're looking for a senior'

Well, dude, you've seen me 3 times and didn't understand that I was a junior ? My CV is not enough explicit ? It's written at the top of it...

So after a motivation interview, technical test, technical interview and Phoenix framework interview, they only realized yet the plot.

Good luck for your seniors to pass their knowledge to other seniors.

Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

So yesterday one of the "senior" python developers woke me up at 1 am (we work in different time zones, and he knows how many hours I'm ahead) asking why isn't his code working. The error message was:

[ERROR] Runtime.ImportModuleError: Unable to import module 'app': xxx is not installed, run `pip install xxx` Traceback (most recent call last)

I am at lose of words and patience. Not only idiots who can't google simple stuff are seniors, additionaly we went from "DevOps is a culture" straight to "hey I'm developer in my silo, if it doesn't work on my machine it's DevOps problem, plz fix".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=======

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

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

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

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

===

* For another Rails position

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

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

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

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

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

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

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

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

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

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

So I worked on getting a server ready for about 30 hours last week to be ready for a deploy on Monday Night (last night). Not only did I work on it for 30 hours, we had two other architects and a senior engineer working on it too. We got everything done Friday and it was ready to go with a simple cutover on Monday night.

The only thing left to do was deploy a link change Monday night on the existing landing page. My part was the backend servers and application that had the complicated SSO system and the other part was just a link to get to the SSO. I asked the person responsible for deploying the landing page's link if he was ready about a dozen times. He kept saying he was deploying X (the code name for the project deploy) and that is all he was doing.

Now jump to that night. They have decided that a single landing page wasn't enough and they were going to deploy a full CMS. Well no one knew what the hell was going on and they didn't realize that the landing page was hosted externally on another host. After arguing for two hours they delayed the deployment for multiple days. 24 hours later they are still trying to figure out the CMS on a host.

30 hours and four senior engineer's time wasted to get everything done for the deadline all to be canceled because of on jackass's lack of planning. WTF

When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:

Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...

Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.

Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.

Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.

Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.

Random dev: People will use search anyway.

😥🔪

Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...

Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?

Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂

Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰

expect([
row[‘blah’][0][1],
row[‘blah’][1][1],
row[’blah’][2][1],
row[‘blah’][3][1],
row[‘blah’][4][1],
]).to contain_exactly(
a.name(user), # “John doe”
c.name(user), # “John doe”
e.name(user), # “John doe”
b.name(user), # “John doe”
d.name(user), # “John doe”
)

(Note: The comments are mine.)

See the problem? No, not the ugly code (which is actually worse than what i posted here).

It’s using the same ridiculous getter (if you can call it that) that pulls a name out of the passed user object, and then expecting each row to have that name, in order. Not that order matters when they’re all the same.

Upon inspection, all objects created by the spec have the exact same name, so the above test passes (as long as there are 5 rows). It passes, but totally not because it should: those aren’t the objects that are actually in the table. All of the specs — all 22 of them — only check for that shared name on various rows, and no other data. And it’s not like this is the only issue, either.

Fuck me these are bad.

And this guy is a senior dev earning significantly more than me. Jesus what the fuck Christ.

Yes, senior developers get stuck just as much as junior developers do, the difference is that they get stuck in places that junior developers can’t even access. That is partially because senior developers are expected to do so much more than just simple coding, they need to also grasp and untangle client requirements, communicate clearly and thoughtfully with the team, be some sort of guiding/mentoring/leading figure, make sweeping architectural decisions, and so on and so forth.

A junior developer is struggling with making relevant columns of a table a nice shade of purple. A senior developer is struggling with making sure that implementing new client requirements will not have a destructive impact on the current infrastructure, there will be no regressions elsewhere in the system, tries to pinpoint what prior assumptions the new stuff breaks (it inevitably does), and how to reconcile everything.

tldr:
everyone got the same hardware because senior dev liked it

So my project team was allowed to buy some hardware (monitors/keyboards/mouses etc.) so teamleader asked what we want.
senior dev: i need 1 monitor because i like to work with 1 monitor. i prefer this 27' zoll 4k monitor for around 1k dollars. since i work with multiple pc's i like this bluetooth keyboard and mouse because u can pair them with them and switch witch a click between the pc's costs around 300 dollar (1 setup of this costs 1'300 dollars)

me: so i like to use 2 monitors because i tried out multiple setups and this works for me the best (also what i have at home). but they dont need to be fancy. 2x 24' zoll montitors for each 200 dollar are enaugh (together 400 doller)
i also only work with 1 laptop and would like to have just a simple keyboard and mouse with cable because everytime they dont respons or battry runs out im fk triggered. so for me its okey if its this 30 dollar keyboard and 20 dollar mouse. it would be cool if i could get this mechanical keyboard for 80 dollars but not really needed. i only prefer mechanical keyboards a little bit more. and also i would like this mousepad i really like. it makes the mouse super responsive it's also just 10 dollars (this setup cost 510)

so at the end the teamleader was like. ah u know what senior dev has more xp and knows whats better for coding so we only buy this for every dev. but that 10 dollar mouse pad is okey u can get this extra its not that expensive.

WTF why u dont give me the cheaper setup which i more like. and why u even ask.

So my marketing dept request us to perform a SQL injection to someone's bank account. I refuse to do it.

1. Most bank no longer use Relational Database , they use something like NoSQL Database.

2. Even if the bank Use Relational Database system, I assume their security must be high, validating my session maybe...

3. I am not going to do shit like this for illegal purposes, well this task sounds super illegal to me

4. Hacking is not a part of my job description. I was hired to be a Senior Fullstack Mobile App Developer.

This is screwed up !

Company wide ban on headphones at desks, because how can people be working if they're listening to music? Never felt so miserable in my life.

Fuck fuckitty fuck, with a side order of bollocks. May the senior management of this tight arsed tin pot cowboy outfit of a company all sleep soundly at their desks until Doomsday while the rest of us keep them in business. See, I'm not bitter...

"Mature codebase"
"Our entire team are senior devs"
"Almost everyone that worked on the project is still here and available, so nothing's lost! We can ask whatever we need to."

You would think this would mean the code was clean and easy to read, and you could ask the person who wrote it for help. But. no. It's kinda the opposite.

Here's an example:
I'm trying to write a mailer, and I have no freaking clue how to get it working. I talked with two of the more senior devs, and both assured me it was very straightforward, and then walked me through the quite complicated mailer structure and got lost. The first pretended not to, but glazed over a few holes in his tour, and said I could figure the rest out. The second one ended up admitting that he's totally unfamiliar with it -- his last commit on a mailer was from about 8 years ago -- and doesn't know how to get it working anymore.

So, I'm on my own.

I wrote a super basic mailer for debugging (no idea if/how it actually sends a mail, but I think I can construct one?). But whenever I call the mailer, it gets run twice? Somehow? Apparently I need to start a bunch of daemons to get that part of the system to work. Which is cool because they don't work fresh out of the repo. Got some further help, and now my ostensibly working code throws errors for an undefined var that i'm not even using, and to make it easier: without a backtrace. joy! There's so much inheritence and extending and including going on that it's going to take me hours to track this down. ugh.

I'm keeping my paystub in front of me for some desparately needed motivation.

A senior developer come to interrupt me.

Senior developer: blah...blah....blah about this concept...... that concept... So, any new things you learn lately that you would like to share?

Me: I am learning back C++
Immediately he stop me and said, "Why did you learn C++? It is obsolete, no one use it anymore"

Me (in my head): But, you just said what I learn. It doesn't matter if its obsolete or not. Infact you are wrong, C++ is not obsolete anytime soon. I was about to share on webassembly.

Senior developer: So, would you like to join me in a short sharing session this afternoon.

Me: No thanks, I am really busy (just want to avoid at any cost)

*Me explaining how to use npm to my colleague (senior dev)*

M: So from the command line you just need to move to the directory with the package.json first

C: Uhm right
C: *types ‘move dir’*

M: Aight just give me the keyboard

How does a senior developer not know how to use cd in a command line?

What the fuck!!!!!

Never thought I'd have to rant so soon joining my new org.

Guess the honeymoon phase is over earlier than I anticipated.

1. This company is awesome and employee friendly. They made me kickass deal which I couldn't refuse. However, upon checking glassdoor, I realised they still managed to low ball me. Lol.

But I have no complaints and I am pretty happy with whatever they are offering as of now. My next point is the primary reason I disabled my app blocker to rant out.

2. A junior is leaving and so is my lead. Damn! Fuckkkkkk!!! My lead is super awesome. There's so much dependent on her.

Entire organisation is watching the product line she and I am working on. It's the heart of the entire product.

It's just been a month I joined and so much responsibility on me already. Well, I am not fearing that.

What I am afraid of and rather uncomfortable with is that they are going to hire someone else in a different time zone who'll lead this entire thing and they might map me under that new person who'll be a senior level executive.

Fuck that shit. I don't want to leave my current manager for she is awesome too. With departure of my lead, it's just me and my manager that are left in the team.

I am not sure what the future will be but I know that there are lot of learnings coming my way.

One thing I wish for is that they relocate me for short or mid term to UK or EU. Then a lot of things will be solved for me.

For now, I am just keeping my head low and doing what best I can, which is focusing on work.

Hope they promote me with an amazing salary hike.

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

So, Today was the last day of my internship.
and it was a great last day but everything was fine until.

I started my computer and for some reason it got caught up in boot. It didnt start Nautilus.

So i asked a Senior Dev for help. Nice as these Devs are, he helped me look for reasons. And we found them. My ubuntu hadnt had enough disk space to start. (On a side note there is nothing but Atom Firefox and a few files on there.) So we looked for the biggest files in the system and found them. Syslog was 40 Gb big. And if you think that is shocking behold. Because Syslog.1 was 290Gb big.

Not really a rant but a Story.

HR, why so stupid?
I'm currently living in Sweden, want to move to Austria (significant other is studying there, I'm finishing my studies over here)
Me: *Applies for a Junior Java Dev job via company's online platform*
HR1: We like your CV, be here for an interview in person in 5 days.
Me: That's expensive, can we do it via Skype? I'm still in Sweden.
HR1: How are you planning on working in Austria while living in Sweden?
Me: I'm not. I'll move to Austria in 2 months. That's when I'd like to start working with you.
Me: *wonders why they skipped that part in my CV/cover letter as it's clearly stated there*
HR1: ....
Me: Hello?
Me: Helloooo?
HR2: We're sorry to tell you that the position of Senior Database Engineer has been filled. May we use your CV for other potential openings at our company?
Me: No worries, I applied for Junior Java Dev anyways. You may use my CV for other openings.
HR2: Oh, sorry for the confusion. I just mistyped the job title.
Me: *WTF? That was a machine-generated answer. Your system filed my application in the wrong place. You didn't mistype shit.*
HR1: Oh good for you. We've suddenly found out we need a Junior Java Dev as well as a Senior Database Engineer. Do you have time for a Skype interview this afternoon?
Me: ....
HR1: Hello?
Me: ....
HR1: Tomorrow then?

Once went for an interview for a senior web developer role. The first interview was a coding test ( not a problem, been coding for years and know I can do it). The company boasted that it supported pair programming.

I was sat at in an open plan office In front of a machine and given a question sheet of 10 code questions/puzzles and asked to solve them. Then out of nowhere 5 other senior devs appeared and stood behind me and proceeded to comment /question every single line I typed (so no pressure then).

I did questions 1-5 (fairly easy tbh) but all the devs behind me critiquing every single line started to drive me crazy so I asked if it was normal for them to interview this way and was told 'yes' and that after a year of trying to find someone they had been unsuccessful.

I told them that I wanted to leave the interview at that point; I don't mind my code being critiqued just prefer it when I've at least finished the line. Forcing you into a pair programming scenario in the interview really didn't feel right.

To this day (2years later) I still see ads for that very same job

At my previous job I was told by "senior" devs that my interest in learning new things and knowing more is not a good thing. And that I should learn to increase my depth in the programming of the product that was being used.
As part of my job I was asked to analyze the product's architecture. I found out that it was needlessly complicated and performed horribly. The senior devs that were on that product for a while had been hiding their mess from the rest of the teams. Needless to say, my report didn't make me very popular with them.
I was asked to help come up with a strategy for testing.
A guy who had just joined our company out of college and me worked really hard for a few weeks and managed to bring testing down from 3 months to around 3weeks. Our reward: he was fired(albeit for different reasons. The company was trying to restructure)
My yearly review was terrible and I was put on 2 months probation. So I quit.
It sucked. And made me question my ability as a programmer for a while. I've floated my own firm and though money is hard sometimes, it so much more rewarding.

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

I just had my worst hackathon so far and need to puke my whole toxic hatred, the rant will be full of hate so be warned. (I just don't want to let it go on my girlfriend, but I need to shout it out loud somewhere)

First of all, it is alright to be a beginner at a hackathon. It is also alright to not know that much about coding and want to learn. But it is not alright to lie about your skill, pretend to be a senior programmer and waste my fucking time.

Don't even fucking dare to say your are "fit" in Android development if you just have done some foobar tutorial on YouTube, don't even bother to read the document and have literally non existent knowledge about computer science.

Why the fucking hell do you need to pretend to be a seasoned programmer if you are just a bloody beginner? I mean you are in a hackathon full of computer nerds so soon or later your impostor ass will be debunked so what is the point?

And the other guy. Why the fucking hell did.'t you say that you just begin Python for 3 months? You are not a fucking developer if you just started coding for 3 fucking months. Learn some fucking coding before starting with machine learning you fucking punk ass bitch script kiddie.

Alright, maybe I was too naive to not check my teammates' background before make a team with them. Fuck me and my fucking stupid ass. My dumb ass monkey brain fell for big mouths, I deserved the headache right now and none less.

Lesson learned!

We were already working overtime all Saturday. Boss came in the evening to demand some ridiculous shit. Me and senior dev agree it's ridiculous. It's already 1 am Sunday. I already explained to him why it doesn't make sense so he suggest more changes that doesn't even solve his initial problem. He asks me if I can do it by Monday morning. I can't. He suggested way too many breaking changes that I don't even agree with and I have to sleep like a normal human being.

I shit you not, he says he will do it himself. This guy barely even codes and has never seen a single line of code for this project. I didn't stop him. I went home and slept.

End of rant.

We have a developer that is known for rejecting PR during code reviews.

He sent me a message and asked me to come to his desk to discuss my PR.
He mentioned that he didn't like my solution and suggested to rewrite the code together.
So far so good, he is a senior developer and I'm sure I'll pick something from the pair programming session. He went with his approach and faced some issues that led us to my solution after nearly 2 hours.
I'm not angry because this scenario happened at least 3 times but how do you guys deal with senior developers that are stubborn?

Long rant...

*Designer Posted image of newly designed layout for our app on trello.

Dev 1 (me, being the junior, on ios) : so... What's the size for x, Y, z, a, B, C?

She: it's 9 for the small text, 10 for sub title, 12 for main title.

*shows her the design on app
Dev 1: seems too small

She: just make it to look not small.

Dafug?

*finishes the app layout for that screen.
*working on next screen

Dev 1: your new design is for the screen of 1920x1080. But our supported screen size starts from 320 width. So there'll be text overlapping each other and ui might screw up.

She: uh.. Just... Put those that will overlap to the next line.

*shrugs
Dev 1: ok
=======
2 days later
Dev 2 (senior, working on Android)
Dev 2: so... What's the colour for x, Y, z

*Dev 1 laughs on the inside because of the struggles we have with her.

Dev 1 to Dev 2: is it common for her not to follow the design guidelines?

Dev 2: yeah man.. We just have to adapt her design into our app guidelines.

*sigh

Dev 2: there's a new icon here on this screen, so you wanna change the icon? Can I have the icon file?

She: oh.. No.. Use back the old one, because I just copy and paste.

Dev 1: so... This progress bar of yours, doesn't show its background colour, because you filled it already. So what's the background colour if the bar isn't filled?

She : hmm.... Oh.. Well.. Maybe try x.. ? *doesn't look nice* how about Y? *doesn't look nice* how about...

Me : why not you try in your computer first instead of me changing it here by code, it's much faster this way.

*seriously, wth?

Dev 1 and 2: there's additional text in your new design, what is it for?

She : oh.. No no. I copied extra due to copy and paste. Just ignore it.

Dev 1 and 2: what's the spacing gap between x and Y? And how about the size of the box?

She : oh.. I just estimate it, and for the box, not sure either, you can follow old design, because I'm just putting a box there for illustration purpose.

Mother fickle, what fuck man.

Dev 1 and 2: *flips table.
*we didn't, but.. It's freaking annoying.

Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")

Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself

tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him

wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident

god damn rough few days man...

I switched my job about 2 months ago. This was my first switch after college (in 7 years). I was at a senior position and was not learning anything new for few months and got really bored.
I had asked for a 100% hike in new company, they gave me over 150%. Apart from this, they offer free food and snacks (or reimburse if you order your food from outside). Unlimited leaves and work from home option. No fixed working hours (I see people working for only 5-6 hours some days). No sign of politics yet. People are very humble and help you out even on silly queries. Company is growing at a very fast pace, it was named in fastest x growing companies about a month ago in some report with growth rate of about 1000%.
I see people around me with so less experience than me but so much knowledge. Feels like I am fresher again and learning so much from them. FYI, I had worked in same field (tech) for initial 3 years of my career. Looking at seniors I am finally able to set goals. 
This one time I saw CTO awake at 3 am collaborating actively in resolution of a production issue.
Having seen so much positive, I went over 100 reviews on Glassdoor to find out the only 2 negatives points ever written, one of them was slow Lift in building. The other a

Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.

I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).

Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?

Newly hired developer who calls himself ”senior” on linkedin has not contributed for 6 months. At least. I have been very helpful on many pair programming sessions. Directing him. Being extremely precise how things works and are working together. Small and big picture. He calls me and ask questions and I answer. Explain. Again and again. But it does not stick.

Nothing.

Extremely precise tasks. Written specifically for him.

Nothing.

He has like 10 commits in one year. It’s the worst I’ve seen in a developer role.

The other day in a zoom meeting he failed to declare a variable correctly. He copy/pasted a line instead and renamed the variable.

I saw this early. But I need not to work with him for a long time. It is now very clear that he will never contribute but in fact decrease the velocity of the team.

One year is a long time.

He is stupid. He can’t learn. Did he not tell the truth about himself when management hired him?

It so sad they hired him.

(backstory -> I have 10 years of experience as a software engineer)

Me: So I would like to develop myself to become "officially" a senior engineer

Manager: sure, you basically need to show consistent behaviour

Me: ok, but what specifically? on what criteria do you determine when it is time for promotion?

Manager: there isn't anything like that defined yet, we would like to work on a definition of roles and responsibilities, but we're not there yet

Me: ok but how did you do it so far?

Manager; well as I said, you have to show consistent behaviour that characterises you as a senior.

Me: ....

Today’s achievement: my phone didn’t autocorrect ‘fucking’ to ‘ducking’.

Clearly it’s as pissed off as I am about receiving shitty emails from the other team manager in my dept giving me and my team work to do and throwing us under the bus when he does jack shit all day except read BBC news and go on Facebook. On the odd occasion he does actually do work, it’s not good work, it’s riddled with bugs because he’s ‘too senior to need a code peer review’. Such a fucktard...

Oh, and the work he’s asked us to do technically sits in his team so I’ll be firing that straight back at him 😁

I’m all for being a team player and helping each other but I’m going to protect my team over helping someone. The gloves are about to come off....

I messed up. We have a senior executive that loves this phrase... "It's going to require all of us to make some sacrifices". 100% of the time he's talking about working 10, 12, or 14 hour days.

So after a few months of this I just chimed in with "this isn't church I don't give sacrifices to my employer. I get PAID for my work."

Honestly I can't say it slipped. I've been telling my wife the exact same phrase for a couple months now. Initially I wanted to discuss it with him directly. Maybe I could explain how making everyone work 14 hour days is not going to end well for us, short or long term. We already know the results short term. We got 50+ defects reported back in our first day of testing for a new project (I'm not on the project but we had a sort of "all hands on deck" meeting to talk about how we can "improve our process so that we don't make so many mistakes". I politely suggested move some people onto this project while we interview candidates. I volunteered to take some of the work items even. But that advice went ignored.

So that's why I asked to meet with the senior exec. He refused to even meet with me. Okay fine you're busy. I emailed him my concerns and suggested solutions. Never heard back. I knew he was going to pipe up with the sacrifice thing so I just blurted it out. It went ignored... So I guess we'll see if I have a job tomorrow or not.

When you spend a few days getting a monolithic LAMP app working in Docker so we don’t have to follow a 12 page install procedure... only to have your senior say “that’s not the way we do things around here”

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

Bloody hell I have been stuck for two hours on a problem and couldn't find any solutions. So naturally I asked my Senior for help. I was trying to export a js file like :

---------config.js--------
module.export = function (app){
//code here
}

-----------Index.js------------
var config = require('./config.js')

config(app)

but it would throw an error saying config is not a function. Wasted two hours only for my senior to point out that I missed an "s" in module.export 😑

Feels so stupid. bloody ass.

Almost 3 weeks back I joined a company as a React developer. For a week I had nothing to work on as they were already working on few projects.
So my senior asked me to take up a project(not yet live) which was developed by 2 interns, as the frontend guy's internship was about to end in 4 days I have to take over the front-end role.

So I talked to that guy for next 2 days regarding all the project scope, codebase and whatnot. But still not entirely convinced. As i got the repo access, I began to check the codes. God !! It was all spaghetti code. I was damn frustrated. And still I am.

This whole week I am trying to do the refactoring as much as I can, I completely lost interest.

I cannot blame the intern guy, he is smart and tried to do the best he could, as he didn't know about the company standards. Maybe I was too the same kind back then. Now he is gone and I am stuck building components over that code.

Bonus: He used some old react boilerplate.
-_-

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

Manager: I want you to make an architecture diagram for this system
Me, not sure what diagram but ok asking my senior then
Senior: You know those diagrams you learned in uni? Yeah, do whichever you think is suitable
Me, left to my own devices, makes a shitty use case and sequence diagram
Manager: We don't actually do diagrams like yours here. But I like it so lets stick with it.

😱 Ok. Cool.

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

First rant (hello everyone), just wanted to share my experience of my recent job search.
I had worked about 2 years for one of the bigger companies in my country when I decided I had enough with their bs (I have some decent rants from that company if someone's interested) and I wanted to move back to my hometown. I applied for a few jobs in smaller companies , one which I personally knew the lead programmer of, and he really wanted me to work there. One other company responded quickly and after a couple of interviews I got an offer from them. By that time I haven't heard anything from the first company, so I called them. The CEO was in a meeting but would call me when he was done about am hour later. Didn't hear from him. So I called them again, this time he answered. He seemed really interested and said they were just working some things out, so I said that I needed an offer soon since I already got an offer from another company. His response (without me telling anything about the other company):
"We're not going to be able to match the salary so if you only care about money you should take that. We want you to work for us because you want to, not because of the money"
Well that doesn't pay the bills, so I simply stated:
"I appreciate your honesty and good luck finding anyone"
I hadn't really understood just how bad that was until I told my wife and she pointed it out. The thing is, the company that gave the offer first was really for a junior role, but they increased the proposed salary when they saw my CV. The shitty company was looking for a senior dev. Yeah, good luck finding a senior dev wanting to work without getting properly paid.
Anyway, took the first offer and haven't been happier!

One day, I spoke to my team which yubi or nitro key to get.

Senior (s) : but what do you need it for?
Me (m) : for encryption. And securing our password managers. Stuff, I guess.
S : encryption is not gonna be a thing. It hasn't and it won't.
M : *leaves*

I've been so baffled I couldn't cope with the situation.
A few weeks later I left the company. There were too many of such people and those products.

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

My boss pays me well and treats me well, but he expects me to do project management (documentation, giving tasks to 2 junior devs, reviewing their code, helping them when they are stuck), coding, architecture and to finish the project in a time record time.

When I told him that this week I will not work on development but will start to do documentation because the project got so big that it is difficult to keep track, and also the other 2 developers are waiting for tasks for me to give them, he looked disappointed.

I noticed and told him that if he wanted to speed up development, he must hire another project manager, or another senior developer because I can not do them both and expect to finish in a record time.

He keeps asking almost every day, "When are we going live?"

Wasn't so much a question but...

Before WFH got so popular, I was interviewing at a place 50km from home, loyalty and stuff came up and the guy said something along the lines of "The only potential problem I can see is the distance. Now I get the sense you're quite a loyal person blah blah blah"

Half way into my third month they decided not to keep me after probation, after giving no negative feedback at any point prior to that then "we just need someone mors senior"

So yea, tune me about loyalty and then do that....

Also, if they needed senior why were they advirtising junior?

New country, new company, new team, new projects.
I'm supposed to be the TL of a team working on a React project.

A guy in his late 40s celebrates himself as "the senior", he basically just finished watching a youtube thing, React 101 crash course or similar. The other two juniors who did only Wordpress so far venerate him like a god.

The code, of course, is one on the finest pieces of crap I ever had the pleasure to deal with in my life: naturally a bunch of JQuery plugins for everything, no tests, no state management, side effects everywhere, shared state and globals like hell, everything written in ES3/ES5 style, no types, no docs, build and deploy totally manual, deep props drilling at every level... and not to mention the console.log() shipped in prod.

First day, already headache.
Full rewrite start tomorrow.
Hiring real devs as well.

After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!

I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.

I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!

Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!

Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.

I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.

So...much... rage!!!

900k+ deal with a huge customer.

All we need is a spreadsheet printed out

Two senior people could not figure this out for a solid hour

"hey you work with computers"

So I'm here printing spreadsheets...

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

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

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

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

Joined my current company as a Frontend Engineer 2 years back. They recently got funded and started hiring with a higher salary range. Not to brag but I'm pretty good at my job with 6yr of experience but my current salary makes me a lower mid-level engineer now and I'm the only frontend guy here.

So, now they're asking me to take interviews of the applicants who are applying for the senior position.

Why do people have to be such an assholes to the employees, man?

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

Damn senior guy from storage background worked for a big company, he wants to learn git and so I told him to install git from git scm portal.
Well he did and came back saying its not working. I wondered thats not possible to curiousity I when to.his desk and found he was using fucking windows xp sp3 on his laptop.

I told him can you install windows 10
Well he tried but his fucking hardware doesnt support.

Wondered seriously why on earth this guy still using windows xp

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .

It worked because I feel like a title noob today .

What I don't understand is why it is so hard for some seniors to just let me jot my notes down, I get it you're busy but if you just let me write down certain key words, I will never ask you this question again, I am nervous cause I had to bug you for help so my mind is not taking anything in, its freaking out cause you're making it so clear I am a bother! So I'm gonna go back to my desk without notes and no idea of what you just tried to tell me.... It was never a problem for my first senior, and he even became my mentor! In a question of 6 months he could go on holiday cause I could handle all his responsibilities until he came back with my trusty note book in hand... So why are you telling me to stop making notes!! It works for me so leave me be!! - sits at desk, pondering why I exist - 😖

Just left a senior position in a YC startup for a middle position in my local company.

I believe that this downgrade will relieve some of my stress and give me more free time to heal my depression.

After fixing my uncontrollable consumption issues I can finally stop being a wagecuck. I don’t care much about my salary anymore while focusing on health and happiness. I saved up a lot of money so I finally can afford not to live paycheck to paycheck.

I’m slowly shifting towards living off my side projects only.

So one year ago, when I was second year in college and first year doing coding, I took this fun math class called topics in data science, don't ask why it's a math class.

Anyway for this class we needed to do a final project. At the time I teamed up with a freshman, junior and a senior. We talked about our project ideas I was having random thoughts, one of them is to look at one of the myths of wikipedia: if you keep clicking on the first link in the main paragraph, and not the prounounciation, eventually you will get to philosophy page.

The team thought it was a good idea and s o we started working.

The process is hard since noe of us knew web scraping at the time, and the senior and the junior? They basically didn't do shit so it's me and the freshman.

At the end, we had 20000 page links and tested their path to philosophy. The attached picture is a visualization of the project, and every node is a page name and every line means the page is connected.

This is the first open project and the first python project that I have ever done. Idk if it is something good enough that I can out on my resume, but definitely proud of this.

PS: if you recognize the picture, you probably know me. If you were the senior or the junior in the team, I'm not sorry for saying you didn't do shit cuz that's the truth. If you were the freshman, I am very happy to have you as a teamate.

A rant about pretentious people:

So last week I walk into college and I find that a new "Machine Learning Crash Course" is being offered by a senior. Now I'm a beginner in this domain, and know the just basic concepts and math behind it. Naturally, I was super curious about this and decided to talk the student who was supposed to teach the course.

I asked him where he learned from, and mentioned that I'm an interested beginner. He just replied, "YouTube".
Okaaaaayyy?
Now I'm suspicious of this guy, so I asked him if he's worked on any related projects I could look into, to which he replies, "Not yet, but I'm working on some".

Now I'm SUPER suspicious. A guy that's got no experience with the subject, yet is teaching others about it?

Get this, at this point he rudely asks me if I have anything else to say. So I asked him a super simple question: "Do you know what gradient descent is?". He replies "Uhh, no, but I've heard about it".
I lost it.

HOW DID THIS GUY MANAGE TO CONVINCE THE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT AND SEVERAL OTHER PROFESSORS TO TEACH A MACHINE LEARNING CRASH COURSE?

People like him need to go away.

/rant

How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then said yes!

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

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

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

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

I got my promotion by forcing it. I work at a fairly large gov organization and have done so for 2.5 years. I had been asking for a pay rise for years but was always told there’s no budget. I was doing work way beyond my pay grade as many senior devs had left. Eventually I got really sick of it so applied to another company, took 5 interview rounds but I had an offer that was a 30% raise on my salary at that time.

I submitted my resignation fully thinking that i’m going to leave, but what do you know, my division not only found the budget but did so in 2 days to come back with a counter offer. It’s funny how when push comes to shove, money that previously didn’t exist just appears out of no where

Last year I went to a job interview. Companies senior developer was taking my interview. After few questions, he advise me that I should learn HTML 5.3. I thought he must be fucking with me so I said HTML 5.3 has not released yet. actually HTML 5.1 has not released yet. He looked so serious about HTML 5.3. I don't know why?

This wasn't an interview, but a massive rejection which I've never forgotten...

I was working beneath a director from hell. South African, very intimidating. If I was not able to dictate my work, he would give me an expression like I had just kicked his dog.

I think at the time, I had threatened the development manager when I had challenged the way we were running database queries and linked processes.

The director had pulled me into his office one day and said to me, literally, "not everyone can do what they want to do, if they are not good at it". Like seriously, what the fuck... I was doing a lot more than others even more senior to me, and I had just come on board learning the language on the fly (4th Dimension, don't ask...).

I digress... My heart just completely sank and I was left speechless. Two jobs later and I could give him the big finger.

These days in a development management position for a massive Australian company, so I know we all go through a lot of shit, keeps you humble.

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

Short rant.

My company isn't doing well because of the pandemic. I and several of my well deserving colleagues have not only been put on hold for promotions we were promised, but we will be taking a pay cut department wide.

THEN we get introduced to not one, but TWO new contractors we will now be working with. Additions to my department. Because we have "headcount".

I'm absolutely livid. Someone please explain how we have the money to pay for contractors (senior level) yet we don't have the money to promote or properly pay our existing folk.?? My department is extremely domain knowledge heavy, so I see little to no value in ADDING outside folks, especially when projects are getting cut.

Applying for jobs

Apply for anything that looks like I have any kind of shot

Get reply from one company

"Hi. What is your salary expectation?"

"x"

Nothing for 6 days

Reach out again "Hi. I'm guessing you've gone with someone else as I've heard nothing back"

"No your salary expectation was a bit high"

"Okay well, what are you offering"

"47% of X as this is a junior position"

Like...
Firstly, X is what I was making at my last job
Secondly, you can see how much experience I have. You know I'm gonna be asking for 2-3 year money not intern money.
Thirdly, all they had to do after my first email was reply with "That's bit much, here's what we can offer, are you still interested?"

So yea, in general, I hate the salary expectation question. I don't want to sell myself short but I'm also currently in the take what I get position. So if you ask me, I'm gonna tell you what I was last making. I think that was a reasonable number and I know everyone has been hit by the pandemic so I'm not asking for more.

Just advertise jobs with a damn salary range.

You know which jobs do have a salary range? The senior positions. You know who does know how to negotiate? Seniors

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

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

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

Sometime this year(what is left of it) or the next I will be promoted to the senior developer in charge of two schools.....

I already thought that the level of work that me and the current senior do is way too fucking much for two people. Can't really fathom all of it just being me without seeing a substantial increase in salary(there is one in place for it...but shit man I know myself and even then I am going to bitch about it repeatedly)

What sucks the most is that I can't wing it or just not give a fuck(my preferred technique) since I really like my department, my coworkers and specially my manager.

Its her fault. It really is. She is just so likeable and I really can't imagine not giving her anything other than my 100 .

And before everyone states that it should be 100 from the get go. I am not particularly fond of giving my all for a company/institution. Never.

The reason is that I have been fucked with way more times than I can count and normally feel that regardless of how much of a total badass I can be I will never see the full compensation of it. It has happened on every other job. So instead of working for the company I work for my team. If I don't like my team I don't give a fuck.

I am a good worker, was an excellent soldier and I am an even better engineer. But there is always this feeling that I am being taken advantage of that I just can't shake off everywhere that I am working at.

Even now, the reason why the lead is leaving is because of how he was fucked over during the reclassification process. It was a slap to him in the face. Now this glorious institution will lose someone that is really amazing all because they take shit for granted.

Everyone is a number, an id. As irreplaceable as we are they treated him as someone that would just take shit and be fine with it.

And trust me, where I am at, we ARE irreplaceable, this ain't cali where you flip a stone and you get 100 node/php devs. This is 0 man ground where devs are fucking wizards that no one knows exist.

Oh well.

Worst recruiter experience:
Recruiter sets up interview with a company. I get to their office - the most packed place I have ever seen - devs practically sitting on each other, and the QA guys are being used as chairs....

So I wait for 15 minutes near the doot till the interviewer gets to me through the incredibley noisy openspace, and shakes hands. We go into a mess of a meeting room - and he explains that they will be moving to a bigger office soon. I say - looks like you should have moved by now....

Anyways - he askes me to tell him about myself - and I explain my background, Focusing on Android dev experience - The recruiter told me this was a senior Android dev position. The interviewer has a huge question mark above his head, but waits for me to finish. Then he tells me: so... no backend experience? so Now I have a huge question mark above my head...

turns out he is looking for BackEnd devs - Not android devs.

First Rant here.

So I was working on some integration test issues when I found this by accident made by a professional level SW engineer:

@Test
public void testMethod() throws ApiException {
Response res = null;
try {
res = serviceToTest.callMethod();
} catch(Exception e) {
assertNull(res);
}
}

Was wondering why tests were being green after some code changes I've made cuz tests could have not been green afterwards.

Together with a senior (I'm also professional only) I've tried to explain him for a good 1-2hrs why this code is useless and he still did it. Good thing there are no errors in the real implementation from him after fixing the tests as it's code freeze here and we are having go live in a few days 🙃

Also luckily he isn't working on our code anymore and has only been doing so for a few weeks.

Wasted a day with it and gonna check all of his code now before I run in the next surprise.

why people around me act like dump. i have recently worked with this site, which is written in php.

customer: (yelling) my website is hacked, fix it immediately
me : ok sir, we will restore your site immediately

after finishing talk with customer. i have checked website, there is no sign of website being hacked. i have checked server logs and website for security breach, there is no sign.

me: your website is not hacked, sir. can you please tell me where you have seen hacked page.
customer: look at those pages

after seen that page i facepalmed myself. it's a bug, person who created that page just splitted string without using any multibyte function, so page is showing with corrupted characters. i fixed it and problem solved. i have told about that bug, to the person who created that page.

me: hey you have used this function which is not able to handle multibyte characters, you should use multibyte character functions for that one.
person: every characters are the same. we shouldn't need to handle that way.

he is actually a senior developer. who don't even know the difference between unicode and ascii characters.

We use scrum in our company.
And with scrum I mean we don't have a scrum master, our senior developer is the project owner, we estimate in hours and the estimate is binding, so you are not allowed to work longer on a task than the estimate.

So yeah.. "scrum"

The stupidest technical question I have ever been asked is actually more of a design question, but I think it'll appeal to DevRant people.

I had thrown together a logo for a new system that my team was making. The logo was basically a flat, solid circle of our corporate shade of blue, with the name of the product overlaid in Helvetica Light. It looked okay. Ish. Good enough, anyway.

Our junior-most senior manager came to have a look. She was the sort of person who always had to give feedback, on EVERYTHING. Everyone had given this little logo the nod, but she had to stare at it for ages, and then eventually asked:

"I like the text, but can you rotate the circle a few degrees?"

.
.
.

After an awkward pause I'm pleased to report that she realised her own mistake and we laughed it off, so I was not forced to stand up, point at her, and yell "DURRRRRRRRRR".

Senior developer just showed me a "competitor" that seems to do things waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than us on his web site and was telling me:

Senior: damn, I wish I could figure out how they do this. I've been trying for so long...

I write the URL on chrome with dev tools open and literally the first thing that comes on the console is a nice greeting from their devs with links to they github repositories, ends up they are open source...

And now I'm here thinking "WTF!!!! WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THINGS THIS WAY?"

Okay. So my dumbass boss took this project that had a steep timeline. I told him straight up, it won't work because we won't make the timeline. If we do this, I will be the one bending over backwards to deliver. I don't like to promise and fail. I got the oh don't worry let's just try. If we don't make it that's fine. Unfortunately that's not how I work. I refuse to deliberately fail. So I say okay and we begin. I suggested open source is the fastest way to deliver bit the fucked up part is, I am the only senior dev in the team. I will be expected to reverse engineer the open source app to connect our own deployment parameters. Use tech I have never used before. Connect frontend and backend. Handle dns bullshit. I have literally been working on Vibes and coffee for the past two weeks because ofcourse I ran into so many issues. Now I have an extension for Monday and I hate to fail. So I am not sleeping or resting just working on a fucking java app I didnt build and I am expected to make it work seemlessly on our production environment. I made some progress. Deployed frontend, deployed backend. Forgot to connect production dB so I decided to go with azure database for mysql driver since we have credits on azure. Now my java app is pissing itself over ssl handshake. I generate my keystore and add it and now java socket just times out. I want to pummel somebody or a punching bag that looks like my boss.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

How do you guys deal with "senior" devs that want to use you because they're not so "senior"???

Situation:

There's this SR Frontend developer that keeps asking me for "suggestions" to modernize the frontend.

This dev, was asked a very simple ticket involving some JS and CSS.

I had to do the JS and this dev modified a VENDOR CSS (that was all she did)

She logged 3d6h of figuring out the ticket and "doing a bunch of cross browser testing"

I logged 2 hours to see what to do and implementing the change.

Now she is asking me to join in a group so "we" can come up with a plan.

I hate how people bullshit their way up

Fucking incompetence

Senior level developer with 15 years of software development experience ...

ends up writing brute force search on a sorted data - when questioned he's like yeah well dataset is not that large so performance degradation will be marginal

He literally evades any particularly toil heavy task like fixing the unit test cases , or managing the builder node versions to latest ( python 2 to 3 ) because it's beneath him and would rather work on something flashy like microservice microfrontend etc. -- which he cannot implement anyway

Or will pick up something very straightforward like adding a if condition to a particular method just to stay relevant

And the management doesn't really care who does what so he ends up getting away with this

The junior guys end up taking up the butt load of crappy tasks which are beneath the senior guy

And sometimes those tasks are not really junioresque - so we end up missing deadlines and getting questioned as to why we are are not able to deliver.

Fuck this shit ... My cortisol shoots up whenever I think of him

Im getting tired of this fucking scrum team.

First of all let me introduce our backend team which takes 3 weeks to add one fucking column to database and in the end turns out they fucked up RabbitMQ RPC implementation so the column is not syncing with our app at all so now we have to wait 2 extra weeks until that will be working. Best part is that backend fucker who fucked up doesnt even feel like hes blocking a feature and would rather sit for extra few days and do nothing until he gets reassigned his pile of shit back to him than clean up his own shit.

Then we have business analytic who doesnt know how to define tasks properly so I have to record each grooming meeting so I would know what to fucking implement because he doesnt even bother to take proper notes. Which results in not fully defined tasks, which results in unexpected behaviours and MR's stuck in limbo for weeks.

Also lets not forget QA guy who doesnt even bother writing scenarios, I as an app dev have to write them myself just to be sure that fucker will test everything thoroughly.

Then we have fucking devs from consultancy agency who apparently have 6 years of experience (I have barely 2) and these fuckers are spamming me daily with the most basic questions. After each grooming they rush to assign themselves tasks which are not even defined properly yet and not even in this sprint, but fuckers are lazy so thy want to reserve easier tasks for themselves. Pathetic.

At least I have a decent senior on my team, but sometimes he patronizes me so much that I start asking me what I am doing in this team.

Fuck this shit, I asked for a 43% raise and if Im not getting it in 2-3 weeks im outta here. Fuckers.

Deep Thought Rant

It's funny how the world works these days...companies only looking for "senior *something*" developers to work...

Mentorship and internship also do matter. What's happening?...sure you can contribute to open source but having a mentor also helps. Working as an intern allows one to see not only tech bit but workplace environment. How to deal with deadlines, feeling good and wasted at the same time when one bug that took a 3 minutes to fix but 3 hours to find, presenting your work; well what's working only, being bashed when it's your fault or not (even though that sucks), learning from your mentor and so on

Are their companies that still do this?

Right so I'm new here. I don't really bitch much. Just want to see what it's like.

So I was hired supposedly for my java skills. I've been here 11 months. I've written exactly 0 lines of Java. On plus side I have gotten the opportunity to learn c# on the job but on the downside I spent my first 6 months fighting to get admin rights. I'm on my fourth company laptop (don't ask) and every time I have do the fight again. So I wound up doing a lot of not-programmer-stuff while I was waiting on admin rights. Apparently a lot of this is now permanently part of my job.

I was chatting to one of the more senior guys in another team here and he said he hated the first few years of his career, just doing "stupid front end stuff, move this box over there, make that button look pretty" meanwhile I'm sitting here wishing I could have the chance to at least be writing code

Can't stand it when devs who never bother to do anything / don't pull their weight etc. suddenly come out with:

"Ooh I'm really feeling the imposter syndrome right now, I feel like everyone around me is just leagues ahead of me and I shouldn't be here"

...then wait for everyone to tell them how amazing they are, how they're a critical part of the team etc.

No mate, imposter syndrome is a thing, but so is being a genuine waste of everyone's time. I'm not talking about having bad days, I'm talking about your work output being practically zilch for the past half a year or so because you're "not too familiar with the framework", then going after this pity party approach. As a senior dev, it's kinda insulting to all the great junior and mid level devs who do a better job while being paid considerably less.

So, yet another "senior" web developer employed by my contractor who utterly fails to understand CORS.

I mean, easy enough to config their servers to provide the headers. A good and quick buck.

But I swear the level of idiocy I find in so called "seniors" infuriates me. I swear, he didn't even figure out that

A) you can't make the browser omit the Origin header.
(But it works on curl 😭😭😭)

B) it's the *server* who must include access-control-allow-origin in the response, not you in the request. Like, what use would that be? I don't even...

😞

I guess if I ever need to hire web devs again my only question during the interview will be "explain CORS to me".

I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.

In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.

I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.

I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.

I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.

My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.

And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.

I am just waiting to complete my year here.

I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments".

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

So our main web server got ransomware'd.

By some miracle only a shared directory was compromised and not the whole server.

The server is on an end-of-life OS (Win Server 2008r2), no antivirus solution, no WAF, no log hardening or aggregation, so basically our Security MSP told us "lol good luck finding the attack origin, nuke it and rebuild it correctly this time"

Thing is IT leadership is like "Eh, no harm done, everything is fine" and want to sweep it under the rug and not report it to senior management.

How do i go about convincing them that this is actually important and for once in their life, they should give a fuck ? (This web server is the main moneymaker, it goes tits up and heads are gonna roll).

Welcome to this week's episode of "sudo-woodo tries to get a single Python script merged", starring...

•The software architect so senior they were working here while I was still in pre-school. Wasn't added as a reviewer and was completely absent on this project for two months but came in on this PR with a few questions, including questioning design decisions they agreed on the last time they saw the project.
•The QA lead with ten years of experience... in Java. Has never even touched Python and asked to review, only for every issue raised but one stemming from not knowing the language.
•The CI guy. A script guru who will find a problem with literally anything. Honestly the most helpful person of the bunch.
•My coworker. Hasn't said anything yet.

please send help

naiive idealism to the max:

medior+senior to junior: "hey, buddy, we need you to do this, here's the codebase, here's the button, here's what needs to happen when that button is clicked, here's the relevant files and classes, make it happen."

medior to senior: "so what you just said about how we should redo the whole order processing pipeline, na-ah, not possible. i've been in those parts of the code many times, and based on what i've seen, you either leave that thing mostly alone or nuke it from orbit and build a completely new module in its place, but these "medium adjustments" you're proposing... not feasible...

senior to medior: "okay, i've seen how slow your progress was on even the most basic-sounding bugs in those systems... looks like what you're saying makes sense."

senior to *EO: not possible to just do these changes with this budget and deadline, that wouldn't even cover the "unexpected bugs" overhead, either you let us do it properly as a new greenfield project, almost, or you're stuck with what we've got.

*EO: mmmkay, so that's 20 times more time and budget that is in the proposal?

senior: yup, something around those numbers.

*EO (with a pained but understanding expression) : go for it, imma explain to the rest of the EOs at the end-weeks's meeting.

http requests

literally the bread and butter of any software engineer building applications, you would ASSUME they know what they are doing...

and you're gonna write a seperate http get and post function for every type you have?

apparently stuff like this that is written by "senior" developers? you don't even have a basic understanding of software...

i'm won't do it that way, becuase i'm an adult, not a child

what i'm going to do is write a HTTP request util function that can be used for any type and HTTP verb. DRY, single responsibility, etc.

imagine making the http request itself a responsibility coupled to the type 😂😂😂😂

get a clue and come back later

i can't tell anymore if my thoughts are so outlandish compared to everyone else that no one understands them, or if i've been doing this so long that i just immediately understand what needs to be done and don't know how to explain it to anyone else anymore (or take the mental effort to)

peace out

oh P.S.: imagine thinking the SOLID principles are only applicable to OOP

stay safe out there folks, its getting more painful every day

Does anyone get the feeling that as they become more senior, they care less about meeting "best practices" and more of just "good enough"?

Best practices being everything in those books about TDD, unit testing, design patterns, design artifacts.

Good enough: enough so it won't blow up in prod, some tests but not 80-90%, some docs. Basically not like those public docs, open source projects/frameworks where function is covered

When I first started professionally, I was all about efficiency, good design, reducing technical debt, clean code.

But now, I look at problems and instinctively I may make these decisions but I don't really think about it much. First goal is to just get something working, clean it up later... Maybe.

As a junior developer it's frustrating to not have the skill yet of mentally mapping data models in your head, so that you can figure out bugs.

I see senior developers being able to quickly solve bugs because they can translate code into data models and they can figure out what's wrong.

Me on the other hand, I spend hours and days with my hands in my hair trying to figure out why my algorithm isn't giving me back what I expect it to.

It'll take experience.. I only have 1 year experience..

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

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.

When I was starting my programing adventures I was intern in a "java position" that sucked so hard that I quited about 2 weeks in....

We would actually not code any single line... It was a fucking bullshit code generator for some shitty thing that I really didn't get and all we did was watch video tutorials about how to use it...

I was going insane...

There was this "senior" php dev at the team that used to brag that php was the most awesome fucking shit in the world and once said something like "I mean... Come on ... You can do anything in php... What can you do in java that you cant in php"

Oh boy... If it was today I would teach him some manners...

This happened a couple months ago, but I wanted to share this one, since it still baffles me.

We were hiring and had this weird candidate. The team said no to the guy after the interview, management still hired him and pressured us to train him, which cost us tons of hours we had to somehow squeeze in during a hot phase of our project.

After almost 3.5 weeks training he had to hand in a small component. What he handed in was brainlessly duplicated, half of the stuff in there wasn't even used, the other half wasn't working properly. At the review we asked questions about the code he handed in - he could not answer one of them.
We then had a big argument with management to let the guy go, which they eventually unhappily agreed to.
The icing on that cake of a story: Turns out, the guy was hired as a senior dev with a way higher paycheck than most of the devs on the team. Wtf?!

Team Meeting with Senior senior manager(SSM) from headquarters.
Post lunch break (casual talks)
SSM: You all people in this office live in luxury. Each and every door has a security guard to open and close the door for all of you. HQ doesn't have these.
Me: So, does it mean that there are no doors or no security guards at the HQ?
Everyone in my team with a very big facepalm. Manager telling me not to get high after having the lunch.

Footnote: All my colleagues and my manager often tells me that I get high just by eating food.

!devrant

So today my CTO reigned, and I heard rumours that they probably will have me as the next CTO. Me personally, I'm not ready for this ... Even as a Senior Software Engineer , sometimes I have obstacles leading the my Juniors (6 of them).

Also, for the same pay, I rather maintain my current position.

I am not ready yet.

Dear [not so senior] software engineer:

Your strong opinions do NOT directly correlate nor contribute to your ability to influence and inspire others.

Be a mediating and conciliating force in your team.

Haven't ranted in a while so here it goes.

Head of product took me (senior dev) to a high value client workshop/demo session and over the course of two days found the reason behind why the dev team has been pushed to the limit as of late and sales/product team has been making promises to clients without checking with dev leaders on reasonable delivery dates on massive new features.

I tried my best to manage expectations by differing talking about delivery dates by saying "lets discuss that with the team" rather than giving out dates right now. But as soon as the meeting ends he sends an email to the client confirming delivery dates on features that we have done no research on or even specialize in!

Please tell me this is not how well established businesses work or is that the new reality of things. In either case I wanna find a new job :/

So... you are the architect, a senior developer, with no experience in maven.

I am a middle developer with a long experience in maven.

WHY THE HELL YOU DON'T LISTEN TO ME!!!

I am open to confrontation but dude... your thoughts and opinions are not automatically orders for me!!!

Let me recap everything i learned after graduating college with a computer science degree and entering the corporate world

---

1) College is a scam. Literally NOBODY EVER asked me on ANY interviews if i have a degree and if i had graduated university. Nobody cares. They treat me as if im a slave clown who didnt finish any school and thats how they view and treat everyone

2) By having a computer science degree, i do NOT have a privilege of getting hired, I do NOT have a privilege of getting more interviews, i do NOT get a privilege of having a higher salary, i do NOT get ANY benefits or privilege other than wasted time and brainwash.

3) Literally a senior technical software engineer told me on a technical interview "college is not meant to teach you anything useful or valuable, college is there just to teach you how to learn"

The FUCK? I was extremely shellshocked when i heard him tell me that in my face. I was in disbelief and too stunned to speak. if somebody told me that truth before i started college i would have never started college. I can do that on my own for free

4) I have applied to over 100s of interviews and nobody wanted to hire. Everyone wants a Google-Level Senior engineer in 2023 with 50+ years of experience and then pay him 600$ a month.

5) What is happening in this corporate world is absolutely fucking disgusting, sickening and immoral. This is no different than 1800s slavery. This is how modern day slavery looks like. And even when i accept working for 600$ a month i can barely afford to pay to live. I'd get like 50$ leftover every month if im lucky. This is SICKENING

6) "Engineering will make you rich" is a BULLSHIT saying that our parents and friends say. It is FAR from making you rich. You only get "rich" (but slave level rich) once you turn 40-50 years old. Is that success to you?

7) Engineering is so saturated that nobody appreciates this hard work anymore. You're a slave and you have to compete with other slaves by telling your master (employer) that you'll work for slave salary AND you'll work 10x more in exchange to earn 20x less. This is IMMORAL and DISGUSTING

After 1 year of working as android dev and coding in java, finally switched to another startup where everything is in Kotlin where I will be the only one maintaining that project.

Me: This code has almost no comments
Senior dev: Code is pretty self explanatory

FML

At least she spent 4 days with me and walked me through the code, so I'm not totally lost which is great!

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.

I kinda hate to admit it but they were right. Data structures and algorithms are kinda the shit and you should try to learn and appreciate them. Not just so you’ll use them. But in that learning them helps you become a better problem solver.

There’s a self taught dev that my company works with for really bespoke applications. A senior dev that works with him and helps manage the development process told me that the dev in question doesn’t really know how to implement the finer details. Very telling indeed.

A year ago I was hired as a Jr dev to assist the senior dev because he was so busy. Within 2 months he was pushed out and I replaced him. I thought maybe he just got busy with other things or found a new job.

After working alone this past year, I was told last week that since I am so busy with things outside the job, they were hiring someone to help me finish the project I'm currently on.

(for context : I work as a contracted dev for a small dev company of 5 or so people. One for each language/os.)

I can't help but think that I'm probably being pushed out and replaced. I flat out asked that, but never got a reply. Now I'm 70% through a project and disgruntled with everything. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel really.

If they want to replace me for one reason or another that's fine, I just wish they weren't shady about it.

I should probably be working right now, but I'm going to take my kids to the pet store to clear my head. I'll enjoy a little time away from my computer.

!rant
today at work i (frontend dev) had an argument about some scss mixins issues, with my boss (senior dev). Not going into detail, I really thought that my method was a lot more efficient and defended my argument strongly until the end. In the end of discussion I saw/accepted that boss' method was better and he said he's nevertheless proud of me for defending what I believed was right. (it's been 2 years since I moved into this country and its language is my 5th one, so I'm only level B2, most of the time I back up from having a deep discussion knowing that my language skill won't take me that far) I really appreciated that feedback from him and it truly made my day. Thank you boss! You're cool!

I'm struggling at work. I hate senior mgmt at this company so much it's actually affecting my ability to produce work.

Fuckers high up have been delaying performance reviews for like a year, but they get their fucking bonuses with no delay. I can't afford not to have a job, so I'm trying to work, but it's hard. I try to keep things in perspective that they're still paying me so I should just do my job.. but how do you do it if you hate those cunts at the top so much. I became so toxic because of all the resentment too.

Last week I got told by an incoming CTO, a week old to the organisation, that I'm good for nothing and unable to produce any work. He told me that he'll replace me and put me in a team where I'm more resourceful as I have been consistently underperforming. (He doesn't understand data science yet fyi) Then, he informed he's hiring 5 new teams members.

Me (junior data scientist) being really passionate about work was shook to hear this. So much so that it took me a week to even recover from it. I have considered counselling sessions too.

Week later, 5 new team members decide to flip his offer and not join. Another existing senior member decides to leave as well. Meanwhile, major issues in existing systems emerge and only I could solve the same. Still haven't heard back any from him though.

Is this the industry standard though ? Is this how CTOs normally function ? Throwing shit at people without knowing their value or valuing their efforts ? Especially with junior developers. It's only been 2 years in this profession and I've not met more than 3 genuine and helpful people. Maybe it's just my organization.

So why the fuck did you go into code that I've written, change the name from "mode" to "type" throughout the >1500 lines of code that's relevant to the feature, and then move on to change my implementation to something that is arguably not common practice for the language and framework we're using, and in turn create duplicate state? And why the fuck weren't these changes in separate clear commits, but instead scattered over multiple commits? You're supposed to be senior!

Don't. Especially while you're not a senior specialist. It doesn't really matter bad company or good: they all have something bad, they all have something good. From the bad examples you will learn WHAT, HOW and *WHY* should not be done. From the good examples you will learn what and why works and how efficiently.

Next month I'm gonna be working on a project that is SO bad I will flood DR with rants. But I'm looking forward to it, because I know I will learn what else should not be done.

Better learn from their mistakes than your own

So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?

You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.

Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.

In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...

So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

I hear a lot of complaints that having to study math/physics/* subjects is useless, because you don't need it in 99% of the IT jobs.

But so is software engineering, isn't it?

The tiniest companies ask for doctor titles, 19 years old senior developers with 30 years experience, architects and teamleads in the job listing and when the reality hits you, you find yourself being the bugfix bimbo and red button logic designer for architectures called "big pile of shit"©®™. And it will never change!

There is no time for proper software engineering when the deadline is set to the day before yesterday. And software engineering does not yield profit immediately. A big clusterfuck of features and bugs that somehow compensate each other does.

You study all this stuff to learn how to learn. Even if "you'll never need it again"™

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

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

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

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

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

Worst code review had to be when a senior architect told me that my new library was good, but should be a bunch of files that we copy paste from project to project instead.

His comments were just so out of touch with a) what we were trying to fix with the team. b) basic understanding of good modularized code.

I’m far from a stuck up dev. Not stupid enough to think I’m better than everyone, or have nothing to learn from anyone.

But I totally had a “my boss is a ****ing retard” moment. It was hard to listen to him after this as it was hanging over my head “was I wrong? Or is this just no-library man striking again?”

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.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So.. I have raised a PR 2 weeks ago.. it needs approval from 2 of the senior Devs on my team. The first one reviewed it within 3 days, without having to follow up. Then comes the second one, who is senior than the first one. I have been following up with him on a daily basis for the past 1.5 weeks, each time I request him to review my PR he sends me a "sorry" followed by a stupid smiley. I have tried tagging him on Jira, setting up a meeting with him to get it done, nothing's working out. He has already looked at the code and I have explained him the code and the context, but he is just not adding comments/approving/rejecting the PR. I have missed the release date for the feature because of his lack of concern and petty excuses. So done with him.

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

Back on dev rant, been a while. Been two Jobs later...
Was extremely underpaid at the previous job.
Started a new venture two weeks ago. Long story short this company outsources their developers to other companies. The job I applied for is 'Junior Developer'. JUNIOR DEVELOPER!!!
Yet I'm being outsourced as an 'Intermediate Developer'.
Honestly I like the challenge, but businesses need to treat their employee's properly and not manipulate their young developers so they can get more money for cheap.
Really now, I've been dealing with this everywhere I go and it pisses me off.
On top of that I have no Senior Developer. I am the only developer. The other six, including my boss, are DBA's and don't know C#

A meeting to redefine the definition of done. Which a "senior" programmer threw in.

3 hours after we are still there to "define"... All of this because this developer and a couple more want to keep a physical board which has no space for a "testing" section, so the tasks need either to be done-but-not-really and this is technically wrong (who cares?) or in-progress-but-not-really which is technically wrong (again, who cares?).

Just effin find a bigger board and don't waste 3 hours of my life and/or start thinking pragmatically and accept tasks can move backwards or have a ticket saying "testing" stuck to them, ffs!

The funny part? This dev is probably one of the grumpiest devs I met when you talk about meetings which are actually useful.

People of devRant. I am in need of some advice.

So I joined this new firm around an year ago and ever since my team lead resigned, we have been managing it ourselves. Then a senior member suggested me that I could be a good fit as a team lead role. Now there are members in my team that are more experienced than I am but they either don't want to lead or are not good at it. I never had a formal leadership role before although I have driven projects. Higher management is open overlook my lack of experience but has also said that I may not find lot of technical growth as I am moving to a more administrative role. Any piece of advice on what I should do? I would love to have a leadership role but would it really affect my technical learning?

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

The biggest race ..
Intern wanna be junior,
junior wanna be intermediate,
intermediate wanna be senior

And the fear not to be lower then each other may be the reason why tech is
moving so fast on never ending race

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

Arghhhh.

So I'm working alongside a very big development house that specialises in vehicle finance. They are huge - 60 plus developers, only work in pairs, have a minimum fee of £2500 per day and work with all the largest car manufacturers.

However, today they decided to completely change their api sub domain and all api routes that handle finance quotes. No warning at.

Of course sites I'm working on that consume this consume the said api are broken too.

To make things worse, my client pYs this company circa £19000 per year to use their api. I also recently discovered that the client is paying for their so called managed service. Insanity.

I mean seriously. This company has 4 layers of project manager and 3 forms of a senior developer. According to companies house their turnover is in excess of £4 million per year.

However, they get the basics wrong and do not warn in advance of major changes to their core api service.

Off I go to deal with 10 of project manAgers and support people in the hope if speaking to someone who can actually help.

So my brother and I work in the same company, same dev team (pretty nice).

He's an intern and I'm a senior. But the task are very similar only that interns need monitoring and guidance.

He constantly worries because he thinks he knows nothing and is slow on getting things done.

I always tell him that it is perfectly normal to feel like that, he just need to learn and acquire experience and we all go through that at the beginning.

Can you share your experience and tell him something to encourage him so I can show him this post and he sees he's not alone?

And also he finally decides to join devRant 😊

So according to my manager its not really acceptable for me to sit at my desk and vent about what a colossal idiot my Tech Lead is. Fair enough i suppose. even though he feels the need to chime in on every technical decision when he himself doesnt understand how async code works. he thinks you can set a variable inside a promise and then return that variable outside the promise, because its after the call. This guy is a senior software engineer on an iOS team and I, a trainee, have more iOS experience than him.

Here at the client site everyone uses Windows 7, since this is not an IT firm. They make jewellery. So I don't blame them.
The problem is their in house dev team are also forced to use Windows.

Today someone from their dev team was with me for a new project. Their senior guy sent us a mail mentioning that the project code is on AWS EC2 instance and we will have to SSH to see it.
I checked the code on my MacBook with SSH and copied it to local using SCP. The dev guy was seeing it in amazement. I asked, what's it?

He just asked, "You don't have to use PUTTY" 😮

I smirked 😏

So I'm writing this code, that does 2 important things, that cannot be seperated. I run the code, thing1 is correctly executed, thing2 not. No fucking idea, why this happens. Execute again, same result. Debugg the wohle thing, now everything works fine.
WHAT?
I check the code, there are no background tasks, no paralell processing, nothing that should go wrong.
Asking a Senior developer for help, he also has no fucking idea. He tells me to try to wait one second between the two things. Looking for a delay() or wait() function in my programming language but there is none. Ok, building my own delay, writing a "do 1000 times" loop, calculate some shit in it. Execute the code, it works perfectly.

Nobody has a fucking idea, why this is happening and why this solution is working, but now the code is productive and it works fine.