Not me, but a colleague of mine ordered 10,000 pens with <company>.com printed on them - but our company had a .org address.

They just bought 2 fucking 23" extra monitors for every developer in my org.
FEELS GOOD MAN

!Rant
I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE TODAY WITH MY DEGREE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE!

Now to find a job :D

This is just wrong..

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

Douche: So your a programmer ?

Me: Yes

Douche: Excellent, I have an idea.....

Me: No

Douche: cmon bro, week be rich, this screensaver so will make us tons of money

Me: I have a question.

Douche: corz man waddup

Me: do you use a screensaver?

Douche: no, why?

Me: *walks away angrily

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Client: Glad to have you on the team, you come highly recommended for your experience in Microsoft technology, specifically asp.net

Me: I was contacted for a php, mariadb project

Client: well they're all the same

Me: actually sir no.... No they're not.

Client: then why was I told to contact you

Me: you tell me, your hiring manager contacted me for a php project not asp or. Net

Client: well I guess I know who to blame for your, sorry for taking your time. Can I contact you if we have a project made with that thing you mentioned?

Me: php?, Sure

Client: nice...... Take care

Me: you too

That went better than I expected

Clint want custom CMS with php,

*makes custom CMS with php

Client thinks it's not php coz it looks pretty.

*shows php code

client still not convinced it's php

Senior development manager in my org posted a rant in slack about how all our issues with app development are from

“Constantly moving goalposts from version to version of Xcode”

It took me a few minutes to calm myself down and not reply. So I’ll vent here to myself as a form of therapy instead.

Reality Check:
- You frequently discuss the fact that you don’t like following any of apples standards or app development guidelines. Bit rich to say the goalposts are moving when you have your back to them.

- We have a custom everything (navigation stack handler, table view like control etc). There’s nothing in these that can’t be done with the native ones. All that wasted dev time is on you guys.

- Last week a guy held a session about all the memory leaks he found in these custom libraries/controls. Again, your teams don’t know the basic fundamentals of the language or programming in general really. Not sure how that’s apples fault.

- Your “great emphasis on unit testing” has gotten us 21% coverage on iOS and an Android team recently said to us “yeah looks like the tests won’t compile. Well we haven’t touched them in like a year. Just ignore them”. Stability of the app is definitely on you and the team.

- Having half the app in react-native and half in native (split between objective-c and swift) is making nobodies life easier.

- The company forces us to use a custom built CI/CD solution that regularly runs out of memory, reports false negatives and has no specific mobile features built in. Did apple force this on us too?

- Shut the fuck up

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tool I built for my past company just got nominated for a European Data Science and AI award!!!

I'm over the moon that something I built is up for such an award. Be early next month before winners are announced. Oh and given I don't work there anymore, how I was told about it is a REALLY funny story .... I wasn't.

Saw a Linkedin post from my ex-manager congratulating the company and the org for great work done. He/They just forgot to mention the fact that me and another ex-employee did everything, left it practically finished and completely changed the direction of the project within the first month as their plans made no sense.

fuckers.

There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD

Today, I was telling a team member who joined recently to refer a GitHub repo, fork it and start working.

That person asks me, "Why GitHub, why should I access it etc". I blanked out after hearing the first question, so whatever said after that wasn't registered in my mind.

I asked that person "how did you do it in your previous org ?"

The response was, "we zip the code at end of everyday and store it as draft in our mailbox"

I stormed out of the workplace, even though it was just around mid of the day...

"I want to create a Linux distribution from scratch but i don't know how to code, I'll pay you $300 but i get to have the rights to it"

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

"Microsoft should not need to buy github, the platform itself should be ran by a non profit org like wikipedia or linux."

Add a herp a derp at the end. It will probably make it sound less stupid or hypocritical.

Seriously though, how many of you mecos actually pay for shit? Eh? How many of you donate to your fav Linux distros or web platforms?

Lets say that the entire devrant base did :) pretty sweet eh? There are still 28 million developers on fucking github.....now how many of those contribute to help account for server costs etc? How many actually use private paid repos etc?

And without adds and shit? This ain't Facebook!!

It makes sense. I am glad they did... and fuck you I would too.

I will see what happens before I put on my (disgusting) Richard Stallman Hat.

So, this guy at our presentation pronounced a <website>.org as orgy, all hell broke loose! 😂😂

Why in the name of Donald Knuth did you think it was a good idea to have a 1500 line Java Method? What THE HELL WERE YOU SMOKING THE ENTIRE FILE IS OVER 3000 LINES AND HALF OF THEM ARE COMMENTED OUT!

Don't even get me started on your "unit tests" which is a massive 5000 line behemoth that randomly has massive swaths of code commented out.

And of course no solution like this would be complete with you HARD CODING EVERY F****INIG STRING IN EVERY TIME!

And it's not like you don't know how to use classes as you have several of them, every single one of which is over 500+ lines and consists of only getters and setters. LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A MAP! REALLY WHY WOULD YOU USE 500 LINES FOR A CLASS THAT IS JUST GETTERS AND SETTERS?!

The part that really burns me about all of this though, isn't the fact that you sent it to me when I was running into a similar issue, and said "check this out it should help", what bothers me most isn't the indescribable rage I felt looking at your code, the part that really really really bothers me is that you are a veteran with over 15 years in Java development, and according to the org chart are a lead senior engineer getting paid substantially more than me, whereas I am considered a lowly mid-level developer, who isn't worth promoting to your level.

On the plus side you are now going to be featured on theDailyWTF so congrats on the notoriety.

You all remember the hackathon (my first coding event ever)I went to last Saturday?

Well, the founders of the org whose project I worked on offered me an internship on Thursday!

WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?

WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?

When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.

I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.

Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.

The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.

I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.

She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.

She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.

She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.

And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.

And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.

But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.

I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.

I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.

There should be a devrant Meetup one day. Basically The community just gets together, rants about stuff to each other but in person so we all meet our social interaction requirements for the year. Then we could buy swag and sit on our computers and work on our personal/group projects. It would give devs a great excuse to take a vacation once a year.

Career Goals:
Be able to work from home.

ORG 0000H
MOV R0,#00H
MOV R1,#50H
MOV R2,#00H
MOV R3,#60H
MOV R4,#05H
MOV DPL,R0 LOOP:
MOV DPH,R1
MOVX A,@DPTR
CPL A
MOV DPL,R2
MOV DPH,R3
MOVX @DPTR,A
INC R0
INC R2
DJNZ R4,LOOP
END

TL;DR Setup computer for new guy @ office, he got mad about software he was missing that we weren't told he needed, so he complained to the director above our department and got us in trouble.

I work for a small company, in which the I.S. Department is 8 people (Manager Included). We do everything from setting up computers and fixing printer problems to writing custom software for in-house use. Kind of a "Renaissance Department" if you will.

So a few weeks ago we were asked to set up a computer for a brand new user, meaning he would need email setup, a domain account, etc. We were also given a (very) small list of programs he would need to do his job. No problemo, took me 30 minutes, and he was good to go.

Last week I met the guy because he was training at the general office and his training computer lacked a few tools. Since I was called to remedy that situation, I introduced myself, told him if he ever had any problems to let me know and I would get him fixed up.

Now today, 5/5/2017, 15 seconds after walking into the door of the department, I am pulled aside by my boss and asked if I setup up the new guys desktop, to which I proudly replied yes. Come to find out the (very) small list of tools we were told he needed was incomplete, so he was missing stuff (how the fuck were we supposed to know that). So what does the new fuck do? HE COMPLAINS TO A DIRECTOR ABOVE OUR DEPARTMENT SAYING THE IT GUYS DIDN'T SETUP HIS COMPUTER PROPERLY! Like holy shit dude, why not send me a fucking email like you did before telling me you needed stuff? I would have GLADLY fucking helped. Now I hope your computer catches on fire. Or you get fired. I'll take either one.

Team quarterly capacity planning:

- Confluence document created with a big table (+100 rows) by product / business. Each row is something that needs to be worked on for the coming quarter.

- Row 1 could be an Epic with 15 tickets attached. Row 2 could be adding a single log to our analytics. No consistency.

- For each row, we create a separate confluence document with the "technical details". 75% of the time these remain blank. 1% of the time there is something useful, the rest its a slightly longer version of the description from the bigger document.

- Each row gets a high level estimate by the leads. 50% of the time without sufficient background info to actually do get it accurate.

- These are then copied into the teams excel spreadsheet, where it will calculate if we are over/under capacity.

- We will go backwards and forwards between confluence and excel until we are "close enough" to under capacity without being too much.

- Once done, we then need to copy them into the org/division's excel spreadsheet. This document is huge, has every team on it and massive 50pt text saying "Do not put a filter on this document".

- Jira tickets + Epics will now be created for each one, with all the data be copied over by hand, bit by bit, by product. Often missing something.

- Last week, at the end of this process for Q2 (2 weeks late), 6 of the leads were asked to attend a 30 minute meeting to discuss how to group the line items together because we had too many for the bigger excel spreadsheet.

- This morning I was told business weren't happy with one of our decisions to delay one line item. Although they were all top priority (P0), one of them was actually higher than that again (P-1?) and we need to work it back in.

... so back to step 1

- Mid way through Q2, a new document will be created for Q3. Work items that didn't make the cut will be manually copied from one to the other. 50/50 whether anything that didn't get done on time in Q2 will make its way to the Q3 doc.

- "Tech excellence" / "Tech debt" items (unit/UI tests, documentation, logging, performance, stability etc) will never be copied over. Because product doesn't understand them and assumes therefore that they are unimportant.

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

PS: I'd like to say this was a rare event for Q2, but no. Q4 and Q1 were so bad, we were made assurances from the director of engineering that he would fix this process for Q2. This is the new and improved process (I shit you not) that has resulted in nothing tangible.

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.

I had an idiot as my boss once. The guy was a principal architect at the time, and thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate his/our project to the entire org in an auditorium. The project inclined turning the User's phone as the entertainment unit in the car. He spoke of all the bells and whistles, about how you can listen to music, watch videos while in the car. A guy expressed his concern about the cost and availability of 3g/4g data in India, our target market. He blatantly dismissed the concern claiming one doesn't use data while watching videos, as you aren't downloading or saving anything. If you save the video offline only then you consume data. I have never seen a group of 200 odd people grow silent that quick. People looking around uncomfortably. And then this ass goes, "My team is sitting back there. Reach out to them if you have any doubts.."

I sunk in my seat as low as I possibly could without falling down

I work for a "Visionary" in our org. Motherfucker will use something for five minutes and decided it's the new-hot, and off we go chasing it.

"I did a Python + AWS tutorial last night, I get it. We need to start migrating everything to Lambda today."

A week later he hits his first error message that needs more than five minutes of work to solve and we're moving to a local Haskell stack.

This is how we view Kaspersky Anti-Virus at my office.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Post my vaccination break, I login to work today and this is waiting there for me..

My designer just dropped this note in our channel where we have our entire team including directors (my manager),

"I wanted to specifically give kudos to Floyd for creating the Confluence page for XYZ feature requirement.

It's so elaborate and very well structured 👏🏻"

And my Tech director adds to it and appreciates my efforts.

My TPM kept praising various new initiatives that I started and how it made him happy to see the progress + how everything was organised.

My skip level manager kept appreciating the work entire previous week and even in a meeting we had just before I started typing this post.

I feel like I have settled really well in this new org + started gaining trust of teams and leadership.

I need to continue the momentum before I start leading the product independently (a few more weeks should be good).

Now two things I am expecting in return, is good amount of international travel + good timely hikes.

And what's interesting is that my employer is known for these exact two things.

So fingers crossed.. 🤞🏻

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

I dunno if anyone else has said this here but
FUCK WORDPRESS DOT COM
FUCK WORDPRESS DOT ORG
FUCK WORDPRESS PLUGINS
FUCK THEIR DOCUMENTATION

RantComics - Make your own devRant based comics with the community!
(Ideas / PRs welcome)
(Subproject of devBanner Org)

<div id="!rant">
Finally have a full time job lined up for when I graduate in a month!
</div>

I graduated last weekend. Walked in the commencement ceremony, took pictures, posted a !rant here, the whole 9 yards. Then what happens? I get an email from the dean of the engineering college at my university stating that my degree check was done incorrectly and that I am 3 credit-hours short of graduating, it is too late to sign up for an intersession course, and there are now 3 credit-hour courses offered as 8-weel courses. So here I am, with two Job interviews coming up, without my degree, wondering why the hell I found all this out A WEEK AFTER I "Graduated"! DA FUCK!!!!!

!rant

I just wanted to say how much I freaking love this place. I come here every day, and what I find is a magical community of people who are accepting of everyone, supportive of each others hopes and dreams and sympathize with those struggling with jobs or school or just life in general. DevRant honestly makes the world a better place, at least for me. Thank you @dfox and @trogus for this beautiful Eden!

I've developed an interesting habit. I wear a hat 24/7. The same exact hat.
I (almost) never wear my hat backwards. I think its weird, and I look weird, and its just too much weirdness.

There is one exception to this rule.

Before I begin coding each day, before a single stroke of my keyboard, I turn my hat backwards. I don't know why I started doing this, but it is almost as if my hat is a key and turning it unlocks all my programming knowledge.

Anyone else have a quirky habit they do before/during a coding session?

So after a llllllloooooonnnnnnngggggg struggle with the team i've been working with, today is the day that my group move to a different org and start working with a different team.

This is a huge step in the right direction for us and we are so happy. This new team is much bigger, but has been around for a lot longer and has proper processes in place and works a lot smoother. Never going to be perfect, but still going to be much more workable and we are so ...... thats an interesting linter file, hhhmmm they have disabled all the checks for the stuff that will cause crashes, like force unwrapping ... but they've enabled the rule to make sure our imports are sorted alphabetically

... nope, cant do it, no sign of intelligent life in this company at all. linkedin here I come.

Them: "What can we do to fix this?"

Me: Contact the vendor

Them: Ok, but from our side?

Me: Wait for the vendor to reply

Them: And what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Me: get better vendors, include I.T on the process when the org decides to purchase shitty third party software.

Them: Ok but besides that?

Me: Drink?

Seriously tho, tf you expect me to do?

Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with me.

Thankfully, one of the most important skills that I learned is active listening. I am less vocal about my silly thoughts and shitty opinions these days.

I don't feel dumb. Instead, I realise that I AM dumb.

The people in my new org are exceptionally smart and talented. Each everyone is a hand picked gem. This isn't a coincidence. Rather it's evident that they hire folks very carefully.

In my previous org, I used to be the one driving everything. Like the smartest guy in the room.

But here, I am just quiet in every meeting and I enjoy working 12 hours a day. I am the dumbest guy in the room surrounded by people who are brilliant and humble.

I truly feel fortunate and grateful to be part of such an amazing org and wonderful team. One of the best decisions I made in my career and life.

I used to tell people I make websites but actually all I did was made Wordpress sites. On Wordpress.com not .org

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

One time, I was working with an org that got a new senior executive from Microsoft. He decided we needed to throw out our application's java stack and replace it with SharePoint. The code error was committing anything other than my immediate resignation.

NO FUCKING GOOD NIGHT FOR FLOYD.

THIS MULTI FACTOR AUTHENTICATION IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

So my organisation uses some MFA app as an SSO to access any and everything. Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. No VPN shit and one password to rule them all.

But, for some reason I accidentally deleted the app from my phone and as any normal human being would do, I also reinstalled the app.

Well, post reinstalling, the app does not detect the linked Org account.

I was cool, when I'll login, the system will throw a prompt to map the phone.

So I login to org URL from my machine and lo and behold, the URL says that MFA is already linked to the phone and I have to enter the Citrix type code to login.

But phone does not show the code because account is no longer linked and web does not have option to change/re-register the phone.

What the actual unholy fuck?????? Bloody retards. How am I suppose to get in now?

So after a Googling for a bit, a thread mentioned that this is most common issue faced by users with this MFA app. The only way to get this resolved is to contact your IT team.

Cool. Let's do that.

I opened the link to my IT portal and it asks me to login via SSO which is what I need help with in first place.

I can't login to Slack because fuckers ask SSO every time the app is exited. So no contact there.

Thankfully bastards allow Outlook so was able to drop a note to one of my team member, whom I connected recently and is very nice, asking her to help me sort this IT team.

If this is the most common use case then why the fuck not add a feature to help people overcome this shit?

And my IT team is absolute nuts. No other way allowed to reset the linking or connect them or any help links provided on login page.

Whoever was behind this design should be dipped in donkey shit and deep fried in pig urine.

I'm doing it. I'm taking the plunge...
Linux here I come! No turning back now!

At the end of each work day, once I am sitting down, I take a moment to do a little stress relief exercise.

I get in my car, make sure all doors/windows are shut, make sure the coast is clear, and I yell at the top of my lungs.

The relief is almost instant. And even if it was a good day, sometimes a good, loud yell can just help to relieve any build up tension, anxiety, or stress you may not have known you were under. Give it a try (:

I was working on a team with people with various employment statuses. Contractors, employees of the client, and me as a regular full time employee of the company that “owned” the contract. My HR manager gave us a presentation about our reporting structure. I had at least seven managers for different reasons across various projects.

I got a new position so needed to resign but I had no idea which managers were the ones I should notify. I looked at the org chart that the HR lady showed. I sent my resignation to five managers that would be affected by my leaving. Unknown to me my project manager was actually a contracting manager hired by the client. He let his employer, the client, know that the lead dev quit.
Apparently it destabilized the contract for my employer. If I hadn’t just issued resignation they would have fired me for telling a customer about a significant internal staffing change. They didn’t fire me because the optics would have been worse for them.

Some years ago i was getting some dev training at a medical analysis company. They made a performance report at the end. And well, they sent out the report to my employer before actually discussing it with me. Which would be ok if it wasnt horseshit and full of blatant lies. Apparantly they confused me with someone else. Atleast it got corrected in the end.

Some weeks ago i heard they were heavily sued by swissmedic. An org supervising all medical products within Switzerland capable of shutting down entire companies and hospitals for medical malpractice. Apparantly they fucked up programming a cleaning cycle when running a series of samples trough their machine. Hospitals reported this issue but they ignored it. I guess they had it coming.

!Rant
Just scheduled an interview for a full-time programming position with a company for after my graduation in the fall! Super Stoked!

> worst coding procrastination story

worst and best at the same time:

If you wait long enough things might resolve themselves.

My team inherited an ancient site. Hosted on an old host that the org wanted to kill, using an old log service the org wanted to kill.

A ticket was written in 2021 to migrate that site's hosting and logging to the new services our org started using.

My team kept avoiding it since it was a cheap unimportant site.

in 2023 we were about to finally take action - then we hear "Turns out the new hosting platform and logging platform are way too expensive - I know all of you have migrated to these new services but you gotta revert and go back the old ones til we figure this out"

We didn't have to do squat.

Problem solved by procrastinating ✅

I prefer Tribble debugging over Rubber Duck debugging.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

I like like my boss and my coworkers and the place I work but for the love of goat cheese this org has the attention span of a toddler on meth.

Seriously, it's like this is your #1 priority, next week, wait we have a different emergency you have a new super critical urgent thing, then "hey team Y has a vendor coming in next month to integrate these two pieces and they need you to have half of it wired up by then so make sure you get that done." Like SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY

HERE"S SOME LIFE ADVICE IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU PLAN OR SCHEDULE OR PRIORITIZE IF YOU END UP CHANGING ALL OF IT EVERY WEEK!

It's like painting a mural of a field, and then 10 minutes in you decide you'd rather paint a space ship, then you realize you don't like the space ship so instead you decide to change your painting to Elvis with a mullet, and you keep doing this. The end result is not beauty it's the mad deranged scribbles of a man past the point of sanity.

But for the love of Haliburton if they ask me why X or Y wasn't done I'll probably end up going full BOFH on somebody.

Emacs! Why?
Org-mode: Best note taking for work/life.
Magit: Git on steroids!
Evil-mode: Because Vim key bindings are far superior imo.
Elisp: The power to extend your editor however you want.

A bit of backstory...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

Umm Android Authority, excuse me???

Client: "documentation, oh you mean those grey texts the previous code guy wrote on the code files"

Me: I kinda need more than "grey texts on the code files" if you want me to actually fix the system and implement the new specs.

Client: oh you mean the Microsoft asp books

Me: It's a Laravel system sir, it's php not asp.net

Client: what are those?

Me:.................

Breakfast of Champions

When I was a wee little lad of 13, still with that hopeful gleam in my eye, I signed up to work as the webmaster for a local org.

At the time, I had played around with HTML and CSS and a little JavaScript, and I thought all I'd be doing was updating some pages with announcements or whatever

I got paid in SSL, which is a thing kids in Maryland have to do to graduate, and the whole idea is that you need to do 75 hours of volunteer work in your community

The people there promised me 8 hours a month for what I thought would be easy work, and so I eagerly signed up.

What I thought would be updating a few html files and emailing them to the org was actually having to manage a full on server running PHP4 LAMP stack

Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. I tried to make the updates they wanted, but I had no idea how to write PHP, let alone manage a database and server.

I think I got out of it by just never responding to their emails once I realized how fucked I was, but that was definitely the worst learning experience of my dev career

The best feeling according to my buddy is when drawing a character and then taking a photo of it and the phone recognizes the head as a real face.

Made me wonder of some programming equivalent scenarios.

Like checking your website for the first time on validator.w3.org and seeing the `No errors or warnings to show.`

Or writing code in a plain text editor and it works on first try without any errors.

How about letting a coworker do something you really want to do and already thought heavily about, to later realize they did it exactly how you imagined it.

Or even as simple as getting your first assignment on a new job and totally nailing it.

Do you got any good examples of a similar "omg ftw" moment?

My Debug Ghost to go with my Debug Tribble at work. Best part is he is entirely 3D Printed!

Org mode as kanban board for personal projects is quite usable.
(trying to find if this gonna works)

I am stuck with another Postman.

Attrition in my current org is way to high in product teams and we have only one designer shared between ~100 people (10 product lines).

My ex-lead (a genius) and my skip level manager (very smart chap), both keep saying that my manager is a very good manager.

However, in reality, I don't find so.

- Only responds to my questions
- Ignores any other form of communication
- No help on any front
- No support or validation on my tasks (hence, I have to actively keep asking for feedback)
- Regularly cancels 1:1
- Involves other team members in 1:1 and cancels theirs as well
- Says I am doing well but keeps nitpicking in my work
- Hardly reviews anything

My company is amazing, pay is good, perks and opportunities are wonderful, kickass learning but my direct manager isn't making me feel comfortable working here.

Maybe she is too cramped with responsibilities but again, I have never seen her deliver anything and all she does is a postman job of taking inputs from her manager and pass on to me and coordinates until me and her manager decide to jump on a call and figure things out ourselves.

It's just been 3 months and I feel more annoyed than worried about being here.

Just started getting LinkedIn messages from colleagues. I've just completed 6 years in the org that I joined as a fresher.. WHAT HAVE I DONE!??!

Never thought I would like a standing Desk, but this is pretty great. Got horrible sleep last night, was falling asleep at my desk, so I stood up and pulled the desk up and WAM! No more sleepiness! Who needs Coffee or Soda when you have the power of STANDING.

I have a coworker who, when frustrated with a bug in his code then finds the simple solution, loudly exclaims "You Idiot", or "Ah dammit", or "What the Hell?!". He also belches loudly, and says a few other humorous things throughout the day. It has inspired me to make a sound board that would say whatever he would say in a given situation. Don't think it will ever get built, but it sure would be hilarious!

!rant
:D

When our org got sold to another company, and we weren't informed about anything that was going on. There were whispers of emails that went out, that we first thought meant we were keeping our jobs, but it turned out emails = severance packages. Friends that I have worked with for years were dropping like flies and all we could do was wait.....it was awful, and extremely emotional 😢

So, I am a couple of more months in working in my new role. Learning the trade and boy do people have a lot of fucking things to say! It’s incredible the AMOUNT OF BULLSHIT these people get away with…

Background, I’ve been a software consultant for a number of companies working in different sectors in different development roles for +16 years. I built everything from RS232, iOS to BI. Shifted to permanent developer for large global corporation where I got promoted to clown.

Anyway, anyhow.

FUCK, these FUCKING people!!!

Meeting after meeting after endless pointless discussions and even more pointless fucking powerpoint presentation which if you stack them on top of each other will reach the FUCKING top floor where there are even more morons. FUCK!

There is absolutely NO cohesion, there is NO plan, short-term or long-term, no vision that can be practically implemented. There are different organizations of equal power and the result is a FUCKING MAZE.

But people travel the FUCKING GLOBE. You know, THE FUCKING PLANET EARTH, for pointless workshops and alignments (plural). FUCK!

And it’s getting worse. We’ve got consultants hiring consultants now whose job is to hire consultants. True story! And it’s not that high up the org chart either!

It’s a beast! A retarded beast.

We are NOT helping.

I got to get out of this fucking corporation. So, I am starting to design my exit strategy. The master plan.

Rediscovering the wonderful Devrant community and reading through old rants. So much fun to see where I was just a few years ago and where I am now. Feels like a lifetime ago. Glad to be back!

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

I've made it to the big leagues gentleman... Yay avatar!

A report from The Register :

ICANN has halted the proposed $1.1 billion sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm. The DNS overseer has been under growing pressure to use its authority to refuse the planned transfer of the top-level domain from the Internet Society to Ethos Capital. "ICANN ultimately bowed to the US state's top lawyer when it concluded today it "finds the public interest is better served in withholding consent."

The decision will likely spark a mixture of relief and celebration from millions of .org domain holders, including some of the world's largest non-profit organizations, many of which were certain that their long-standing online addresses were going to be milked for profit by an organization that never fully revealed who its directors or investors were.

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

Finally got an offer from a multinational org i could previously only dream of. Ugh i really deserve it plus i didn’t fuck myself over by not negotiating this time. Got an extra 10k on stock options which was wild. Bye bye leetcode, hello Netflix and weed for the next month until i resume in August.
Such a relief knowing my family will not starve and die (joke but i am my family’s support so i was a quite worried last month when the interviews just seemed endless).

It feels good when you mentor someone.

I did GSoC 2018, so I encouraged my friends(3) to take part in GSoC'19. On May 6 the results were declared and I wasn't selected (hurts) but 2 of my friends were selected and after hearing that I completely forgot about my own failure.

I mean one of them didn't even knew how to code in December'18 and he got selected for the program in May'19.

I have to admit it was frustrating in the starting, explaining how Git works, how not to mess up branches etc but in the end it all paid off.

But still there was some work to do because only 2/3 got selected so I pushed the 3rd, told him not get demotivated, started finding internship for him and now he'll be working with an org on developing their app.

Weird thing about this is that neither I got selected for the program nor I have an internship for the summers but I am still f**king happy.

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...

> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....

More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?

Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????

Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???

In my current org we had a AWS SES event processor written in node js, it was struggling everytime we had more than 1000 messages in queue. It looped over every single message made some db calls then processed the next message. At one point we had to run 300 comatiners of this thing to clear out the queue.. It was still horribly slow.

I rewrote it in Golang with channels and goroutines now we need to run a single comatiner to handle upto 100k messages in queue. Used 10 goroutines to pull 10 messages constantly and put them in a channel, then spawned 1 goroutine per message to process them quickly. I'm so proud of this solution, we then brought this workflow to many other event processing services. 😎

Let me begin by saying I knew the jist of the announcment before even reading the CeO's LeTteR... though it's comically and ironically far worse than I could have even expected

this is absolutely an 100% genuine rant from the bottom of my heart

Just go absolutely fuck yourself, your devs, and your entire org. Imma call it right now and say Udemy as a company won't be around in a mere 10 years. (easy to say this actually; the average lifetime of a company in general on the stock market is 18 years, with a garbage shit pile like Udemy i can guarantee its less than that)

oh, but their stock was up 38% on friday on good earnings... wonder how they did that

"But why!?!?!? Why are all creators going to tiktok and youtube?!?!?" - Udemy CEO mouthbreather

stupid fuck, maybe take a lesson from a 1st grader and get educated

people think devs are bad? Oh, its about to get a whole lot worse. there's no motivation anymore for skilled devs to build valuable courses, more and more junior devs using outdated spit out shit information from IdiotGPT, and a destruction of number of people on stackoverflow, asking the same 10 questions over and over again...

oh how the times have changed...

Rant

I almost did not write any code for the entire week. But I talked to a few people…LIKE A BILLION OF THEM!!!

My calender has completely gone crazy Bonanza big time in like a few weeks and org now want me FUCKING FLY TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY to explain some rudimentary stuff for a bunch of folks. And I’m like… what about using a telephone and computer instead, I got a life you know!? People are fucking calling in from India, US and Pakistan every day but I need to go to a neighbouring country for this shit!? Turns out manager there is fucking crazy and HATES video calls and I’m like… yeah now I am REALLY not fucking going there!!!

Family will suffer, I will suffer, planet will fucking DIE.

Stupid crazy bosses…

Back at <biginternationalorg> I witnessed a developer deliberately build an xss vuln into a company web application, so that he could plug a JS file in with all of his passwords hardcoded. Bear in mind, this is an org that provides services to both the UK and US military, and if you have access to some stuff you have access to the tools you need to impersonate high-ranking military folks.

I know its like, twenty different passwords, but that's what a goddamn keychain is for! If you don't trust windows keychains, do what I did and run a VM with a Foss keychain installed! Don't build a vuln right into a public facing web app, that's just stupidity.

What kind of pranks have you had in your office when people leave their desk without locking their computer?

In an office where I used to work, we would send an email from the offender's account to the extended org about how he/she loves bacon.

One guy would start sending messages to every personal IM contact: "you suck." Over and over.

ok. been going full steam since December with 1 day off since. managing teams, review designs, designing, prototyping, code reviewing, mentoring, and doing project. management. i get that it's a "flat" org structure but hire proper PMs and BAs instead of trying to pinch pennies. all the while, i see marketing with deeeeeeep pockets spending money on anything like mommy and daddy are funding their spring break getaway. i need time to disconnect and recharge my spirit.

My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....

Over 100+ learning about, and configuring my i3 .config, .vimrc, .bashrc, etc. Exactly how I want it. Then one day: "Meh, time to reinstall and delete all configs!"
I have a serious problem.

wtf why did this happen?!
I was updating kali in vm and my antivirus on windows fucked the connection to archive__.org.. cuz of a trojan?

Does anyone keep a journal as they develop code? Something to keep track of ones thought process so that you understand what you were thinking when you come back to it? I know most people just use comments, but does anyone use something different?

When it is Friday and you want to be productive, but you have spent the entire time since sitting down at work fixing Visual Studio and its bullshit.

saw this girl's post LinkedIn. a typical influencer like format post which had nothing of value and instead was a post asking for help with a question (basically it consisted of a android doc link for an android component followed by some hashtags like #6969daysofcode #day69 #xyz and "has anyone used it before?share resources")

then i noticed 2 things:
1. she works in my previous company in the same position that i did , and started a month after i left. so basically she is my replacement.
2. i and my senior (who also has left that org) had created the exact same component that she mentioned in the post, and we had created that component as an awesome plug and play component that would handle multiple usecases with decent documentation

now am having this urge to dm her the exact classname in the code to see and learn 😂😂

or i can play this uno reverse card and write a blog on that component writing another influencer like post: "in my previous company, we created this awesome component and here is how it works..." her boss (our TL) also follows me and what i know of him, he will be tagging her, pinging on slack, and discussing it in the DSA the next morning 😂

My companies org is in a serious state of disrepair when it comes to project management.

Everything is tracked via conference. Each level of management (CTO, EVP, SVP, BP, S DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR, S MANAGER, MANAGER) all have a different tracking page that all say slightly different things.

To organize things there's a technical project manager who isn't just new to the team, he's new to the field. He's not technical, or experienced in project management. He's never worked within a scrum before.

He's dictating how to organize the teams scrum, and he's getting it very wrong. Decided to organize efforts in all the confluence pages by creating another one for him, again it's different.

When the work in confluence page 3/16 isn't done by a due date anybody knew about, the engineers have to hop on a call and get a Micky mouse solution out the door by the of day so upper management doesn't think the projects off the rails.

In the mean time I've taken a small group of more junior devs and shielding them. We have a side scrum that we manage and is going great, and I'm blocking the BS.

CORPORATE SUCKS. Golden handcuffs are a thing. I might set sail for greener pastures once i don't have to pay back my signing bonus if I leave.

Tech management and leadership are the most toxic and cancerous folks of any organisation.

In all my past experience, I have encountered nut jobs.

If it were just me, then entire product or design org won't be suffering. What helps me confirm this hypothesis is every engineer who work for such retards is suffering and fighting for their existence.

We have monkey business going on with our CTO and his ass licking engineering head.

I just got an email from matrix that their servers are hacked. Apparently this happened last thursday and they took until Sunday to notify me... I had expected differently from them....

So in my org, as far as I can see, senior engineers and normal engineers do about the same amount of work, and the senior engineer is useful at PBRs for bringing up tech points that other engineers might not know about due to lack of experience. Is this a common thing across the whole software business? In terms of responsibilities, I’m seeing pretty much the same amount, don’t wanna sound arrogant here but we never task work etc based on seniority which I like but just want to know if it’s common

ah udemy updating their "terms and conditions" on how they do revenue sharing... either the corp or the creator is going to get fucked... can you guess which one?

and no i don't want to read a dumbass letter from your dumbass CEO to find out how your going to fuck me... shame that your org has to hide it that way

just give me the brass tax you robber barons

New job is turning out to be kind of the opposite of what I was expecting, based on interviews.

I thought I had done a pretty thorough job asking the kinds of challenging and specific questions during the interviews and was pretty satisfied with the answers.

Three weeks in, I’ve more or less been turned loose onto my first project which is….installing patch updates.

Next few projects through the end of the year and into Q1 next year are similarly sysadmin-chore work, which I’m not going to act like is beneath me or unimportant but it’s not quite what we talked about in the interview when I applied to an SDET position.

Point of order to talk about once I wrap up these first few projects, it doesn’t exactly seem like they know where I’m supposed to be or where to even really put me (on the org chart I have a line reporting up to boss, but I’m also the only one not on a functional team) and reading through the wiki last guy just kind of did everything.

If that’s what this is….eh I need to know if that’s how they want to use me and find out soon.

So tomorrow I start at a new project - super pumped. Looking forward to learning a new language too - Scala. And..
....
I am finally taking the plunge...it's time to throw myself into Linux, as the org has gone all Linux no more Windows!

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

Fuck can it just be Friday already

Thursday
Project Manager: Reckon we can get a demo/status update tomorrow?

Friday:
*status update*
Project Manager: Alright great

Monday 1pm:
*basically a shit tonne of noise all morning, can't get anything done*
Project Manager: Reckon we can get a status update right now?
*status update*
Project Manager: Alright, reckon you can demo it on Friday?
Me: Uh...
Project Manager: Ok, let's aim for a demo anyway.
Research Lead: Great!

Org Lead: How is everything going?
Me: I don't like how Project Manager micromanages.
Org Lead: Ahhh, yes, but it was me that asked him to manage like this

Me internally:
What's 65 - 28? Oh yeh, 37 more years of this. Is there a way I can kill myself painlessly?

I turned the job offer down. It was a fucking clown adventure. (Possibly even an attempt of a lateral arabesque?)

The position was filled and it turns out to my expections. It’s a bogus job! A PM from outside the company now has the role of an administrator. She has no IT knowledge which to me is just astounding of the incompetence of the upper management.

I mean.

What are the actually drinking up there? Is there drugs in the water? Actual drugs!?

We have hundreds of ”IT” systems spread over the planet. All of them are…wait for it… related to, you know, hardware and software and all sorts of integrations and data pulsations and the level of intertwined processes are staggering.

So, obviously it was a bogus title which will soon disappear after the next re-org.

I hate these larger-than-life-projects where all of a sudden an organism is created inside the ”normal” organism and the physical reality is vastly different from the surrounding space. And time. Time is also different. Not only are there actual time-zones to take into account but some projects are slower in time and some are faster than normal time. The guys that get that slower in time than normal time is the guys that ALWAYS should initiate projects from the start. They do know that shit is complex and the invent time. Very good. Some projects does not even come close to even enter the arena. Hell, they are not even in the parking lot! The mind-structures of insane management believing that the ”understand”.

Anyway. I turned it down. And it was the right decision almost certainly. I am now only the Level B Chief Supreme Commander of almost everything (except a lot of stuff).

startup idea : job offer email as a service

basically a company which will send you a fake offer letter email, so you can try negotiating better salary from your current org.
high risk high rewards game

wow GitHub I try uploading a photo for my org and I can't fit the entire photo without cropping.... So I try making the photo smaller and uploading it and it still makes me crop even when I went from 500 to 50px

Group assignment: writing a own Java logger component in a group of four, using nothing else than Java SE libraries, Maven and Jenkins. The software must be able to substitute the logger component without recompilation, just by editing the config.xml (setting jar file path and fully qualified class name of the logger).
I asked around on Slack which group is ready for a component exchange, so that we could test the switch. I found another group and I started doing some testing.

Then I got a `java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/Logger`. I got in touch with my peer from the other group and asked him, if they've been using log4j. Apparently they did, so I told him that the assignment was to write a logger of one's own, not just using log4j. Then he told me: "Uh, ok, I'm going to tell the guy responsible for the logger part about that..."

X-D

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

Maybe I am just sensitive.. but sometimes I feel that my new manager is being a little harsh on me.

Again, he might behave the same with everyone and I am assuming that it's just me.

1.5 months in the new job and not a single good comment/feedback I recieved from him. It's not that he criticises me or my work, or calls me a dumbass.

But whenever I submit anything for review, I get a ton of feedback where he expects everything to extreme precision.

He guides me, explains me post my failure, and has specific pointers of what he wants/how he wants things.

But all I am given is a set of documents to read initially with an expectation that I have to figure things out. When I am not upto the mark, he then guides me.

Why I worry?

1. I am on probation and this place is a start-up, don't want to get fired.

2. They got me as a Sr PM (which was also my previous role where I excelled), so I fear that expectations would be high from me. Failing to deliver those might get me in trouble.

3. He isn't a micro manager and quite supportive, but his communication style isn't working for me (so far).

Somehow, as always, I am getting along well with everyone in the org and everyone is talking good about me.

But with my immediate boss, the imposter syndrome kicks in real hard and I am super insecure. Every time I have to interact with him, I get super stressed and anxious.

I know things take time, but given that I am a Sr PM (and my boss expects me to be a lead PM, a position higher than current), I feel if the expectations are not delivered then I might get fucked.

The stickers have made a home on my laptop.

Nothing much here, keep scrolling...

I think my manager does not like me. I might sound like a broken record because I keep asking feedback at the end of every call (which is every other day).

I genuinely want to make her proud of the decision to hire me and want to learn for which I am willing to work smarter/harder.

What I feel is that they find me annoying. They seem to be happy with my work but guess my Indian roots of typical behaviour are showing up.

My co-worker evidently isn't confident to lead on her own and keeps me looped in to all her tasks which I am fine with. Though, I feel that I might be overstepping in her zone and manager doesn't want me to do that.

I may not be perfect and also a very sensitive guy, but I am trying hard.

Maybe they have plans to get someone else to lead and just keep me as a pawn on the board.

I don't think it is the imposter syndrome this time and surely the teams in this org are working in silos with very little communication within or outside their direct teams which kind of makes it even more difficult for me to operate.

However, as always, I have enough free time in here to resume my side project, learn another hobby, or learn new skills. Or is it just that I am assigned less task or underperforming?

Sometimes things are very confusing and one can never find an answer.

What's the best thing to do in such a situation?

Leetcode.

It doesn't matter if you've done multiple projects with different tools, languages, team sizes and requirements for ANY company / org etc.

You will feel fucking stupid while taking too long on some of these questions.

I know interview questions are mostly to test your critical thinking skills but fuck I feel so bad after 2 evenings of doing this shit.

It is addictive though...

I like being an employee in product development team (rather than a consultant in a project) - we're exempt from reporting hours per project and making sure to stay within budget.

But on the downside it's frustrating to se how the org happily spends development time without considering we cost money. Just found out that one department ordered a campaign site that took 4 days for 2 devs to build.
It's now ended and revenue was only a few hundred bucks.
When I asked "Didn't we lose money on this project? Considering our salaries and the ~60hour dev time"

- "Oh no, we don't count the dev team as a cost! You already work here and would get paid no matter what" 😑

Good thing I'm not in finance.

If we could get a full-time dev ops person for our org, I'd be so happy...

working at an MNC is like dating the hottest girl in campus. everyone stares at you, but only you know of the tantrums and the expenses that you have to take.

Every random aunty and uncle I come across gets a wide smile on their face when i tell them my company's parent company name. i goto this temple , and there, one uncle was introducing me to his wife "meet X ji's son , he is at Y company" .
previously when i worked at a startup, most of the time , people were like "huh? what does this company do?" and when i would explain them how our DBs are sending billions of notifications and interaction each second, they would be like "oh , so you work at IT" , YES DUDE, YOU WANNA GIVE YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND NOW?

And this mentality is sick. i loathe the place where i currently work. i loved my previous org and now am just here coz my mom is too scared to let her son live in a different state.

The only reason a person works in a company is money and WLB. Indian service based MNCs don't give a penny more than basic industry standards. and when they want their employees to be available 2 days a week + x number of days when any CEO , ED or other sugar daddy is coming to office, you get an idea of the shitty Work life balance.

my previous company was a b2b startup, it always paid me more than industry standards and we had wfh until a notification came to enforce hybrid working bh end of 2024. till now not a single person from my team has relocated. All i had to do was to *plan* for living in a state and my mom got cold feet :/

i think so much about my future. i earn decent, so i wanna spend it to live and grow.
i wanna go party at friday nights and go on night outs. i wanna meet this cute school crush at anytime after office and don't worry about the 9 pm curfew. i wanna go look for a new home in a different area and get out of this parking hellhole. i wanna prepare for exams and do a hugher studies from aborad.

everything needs money and growth mindset. money makes money and i am trying to earn every minute. but a chained mind cannot fly . a non growth mindset will not let you evolve. and someone needs to tell it to people who control my every . fucking. action

i have seen people switching from one big name to another. i personally feel that you are just too comfortable in the environment of big names and deliberately ignoring the smaller names which are doing the actual build fast and break reality stuff. reward is proportional to risk and if you are okay with just attributing to a big name, then that's on you

!rant
Hello, World! (Couldn't help myself)
What are some of y'all's favorite books? I am finishing Ready Player One right now, and I am looking for some new reading material. Suggestions?

The downside of writing reusable, abstracted, DRY code for multiple applications to use: you have to remember to test changes in all the contexts... my org has to hire contractors project by project as we dont have the budget to have more devs than just 1 (me) on permanently. the contractors tho often don't know about all the places our code gets used. And sometimes I even forget - last week in the rush to finish some project, we forgot to think about how a library change made for benefit of a new project a few weeks ago might effect an older (in production) project. Until shit started breaking. Annoying. very annoying. luckily i fixed it (rolled back) before the weekend, but thursday and friday were quite stressful... now tomorrow, a bunch of sleuthing time to figure out exactly what recent change caused it... argh....

I find goals for developers to be pure busy work and almost impossible set meaningful ones.

You can't set ticket based goals, because one ticket may take a week or an hour. You can't really set learning goals, because how do you measure 'learning Svelte'? And if that was your goal, what'd be the point of the outcome?

You can set goals like, ensure all tickets have at least one unit test... but then you get tickets that need to get out yesterday and you get people knocking on your door while you're trying to create meaningful tests.

But we often have a meeting to teach everyone how to set goals, then we have to sit and invent goals that satisfy someone in the org, then twist our usual daily work into some BS about how we're working towards the goals in 1:1s and then the whole thing is forgotten by H2, if not sooner. Just to be resurrected in Jan/Feb of next year.

A question for all you grey beards and other more knowledgeable devs:

I work for a small grocery retail company. Work primarily as a dev, but also spend time doing I.T./HelpDesk stuff. My wife is a nursing student, and when she graduates in May 2018 she is wanting to move to a different location to work at a specific hospital, which would require me to change jobs. No problem, I'm fine with that.

Here is what I am wondering: I currently make a modest salary (for 23 years old I feel like I'm doing pretty good), but we are expecting our first child in April and I would like to be making more. Would persuing a different job for extra $$$ that I could potentially only be working at for around 8-ish months be a bad idea? Should I just stick where I am at until I actual HAVE to move?

Thanks in advance for any advice :D

I hate computers and computing things, sometimes

"client: documentation, you mean the grey texts on the code files?"

So it’s promotion season in my org and once again I got passed up. Manager says “you’re right there just a little bit longer” but he’s been saying that for the better part of a year. I’ve consistently done the job not in my job description but the job of the position above me. Some of my senior engineers and staff engineers have told me personally that they are shocked that I haven’t been promoted yet. And I know I should be patient but hearing other people (albeit in different teams) get recognized when you work just as hard if not harder than they do, and you go to conferences and you volunteer to be on call and you lead meetings and when you’re one of the technical anchors of the team… I don’t know. I shouldn’t take it personally I get it but it’s a huge blow to my confidence and my mental health. I work hard and when I see news like this I work harder and get burned out and when I still see news like this it makes me work even harder and get even more burnt out until I reach a mental breaking point. Makes me feel like I’ll never be good enough.

Idk.

Request for internal service

FW takes request

FW NATs request to external / WAN IP

Other FW (different location) gets request

DNS redirect for whole domain
"data-zone: *.*.*.org redirect"

Via DNS redirect request goes to LB

LB sends request to other LB

LB send request to NGINX server

NGINX resolves via Host header

And now you get a TLS handshake error somewhere in the travel of the request...

The level of fucked: my arse can take the Eiffeltower horizontal.

While Indian govt. talks about digitizing the country and is pushing ahead with it, their Employee's Provident Fund Org (EPFO) infra is absolutely shit and it's killing small time business that want to help their employees.

You need to add Digital Certs to do just about anything (great security wise) BUT,
The digital sign interface is written in Java Flash, that was dropped by all modern browsers 4 years ago.
The only stable working latest browser for it is Firefox 52 released 3 years ago.

The USB tokens used/supported are all Chinese that don't respect OSS drivers and fork built their own (read Watchdata) with no/shitty and cumbersome linux support (couldn't get it working after 2 nights of trying different versions of drivers).
You still have to run Windows to sign the docs or to interact with EPFO using legacy browsers from 2016

Non Tech problems: EPFO charges 500 Rs/month minimum admin charges, and I pay 1200 Rs PF for my driver. That kind of commission is plain stupid and will make small employers run away from paying PF for their employees.

Any interaction with EPFO is like having to eat thorns. painful, unnecessary bullshit. How useless can someone be building such a system released in 2019?
I just hope they fix it. A simple google search shows there is Web Crypto API for modern browsers. Someone wake these people up. SMH

I'm genuinely contemplating changing my career to an IT support role from my current web dev endeavors.

I have become rather disinterested for quite some time with web development, I've been working with React, Angular, the regular Wordpress stuff with the theme building/modifying, headless instances, plugin development and whatnot and all of these have become more of a chore than anything else.

I'm leaning towards an IT support role as I genuinely have more interest in a user support/infrastructure support role than a developer role, the question is, is it doable ?. I know my way around Windows and Linux Servers, know LDAP, Active Directory, BASH, Powershell, Networking, can do cabling and whatnot but I don't have the experience to show off those.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated