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There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"
This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.5 -
[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.
Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)
It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)
First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.
The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target
All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...
Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.
"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.
---
I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.
Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.
I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )
The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.
---
It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.
The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.
The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.
---
Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.
Cheers!
4 -
I don't want to work on the project at my job anymore. It's an over engineered piece of shit.
I work on my pet project at home, but only for about 20 minutes at a time. After that, I feel the need to walk away and waste my time with other non-productive activities.
How do I get my love for development back? Has the corporate world killed it?5 -
! Rant
So this project manager from a start up contacted me about a few Jobs are they are looking to get done for their app. They asked for cost and I gave them a ballpark range depending upon the type of work. Anyway, after getting a tour of their over engineered app with 128 menu items for a users to go through to get something done, I gave them the hourly rate on the "higher" side of the ballpark which was $5/hr more than lower. Guess what, next I get an email with 4 huge paragraphs, explaining how I am trying to charge them so much extra and is way over the quote. I passed myself laughing and wished him good luck with their start up... -
I need to vent or I'm going to fucking explode like a car filled with bombs in motherfucking Iraq...
A couple of months ago I inherited a project in development from our team leader who was the sole developer on it and he was the one who designed every single thing in it.
I was told the project is clean, follows design patterns, and over all the code is readable and easy.
Those were all fucking lies.
See throughout the period he was working on it, I saw some of the code as it was going through some pull requests. I remember asking the dev why he doesn't comment his code? His response was the most fucking condescending shit I've ever heard: "My code is self-documenting"...
Now that I have full control over the code base I realize that he over engineered the shit out of it. If you can think of a software design pattern, it is fucking there. I'm basically looking at what amounts to a personal space given to that dev to experiment with all kind of shit.
Shit is way too over engineered that I'm not only struggling to understand what the hell is going on or how the data flows from the database to the UI and in reverse, I'm now asked to finish the remaining part and release it in 8 weeks.
Everything is done in the most complicated way possible and with no benefits added at all.
Never in my career have I ever had to drag my sorry ass out of bed to work because I always woke up excited to go to work... well except for the last 2 weeks. This project is now taking a mental toll and is borderline driving me crazy.
Oh, did i tell you that since he was the only dev with no accountability whatsoever, we DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT IS LEFT TO BE IMPLEMENTED?
The Project Manager is clueless.. the tickets board is not a source of truth because tickets set to resolved or complete were actually not even close to complete. FUCK THIS SHIT.
For the last week I've been working on 1 single fucking task. JUST 1. The whole code base is a mine field. Everything is done in the most complicated way and it is impossible for me to do anything without either breaking shit ton of other features (Loosely coupled my ass) or getting into fights with all the fucking libraries he decided to use and abuse.
1 whole week and I can't even get the task done. Everyday I have to tell the project manager, face to face, that I'm still struggling with this or that. It's true, but i think the project manager now thinks i am incompetent or just lazy and making excuses.
Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the what and why behind every decision he made with this code. But I'm sick to my stomach now thinking that I have to deal with this tomorrow again.
I don't know if I'll make the deadline. But I'm really worried that when this is released, I'll be the one maintaining that nightmare of a code base.
From now on, if i hear a fucking developer say their code is "self-documenting" I will shove my dick + a dragon dildo + an entire razor gaming keyboard up their ass while I shoot their fucking knees off.
oh... and there are just a couple of pages of documentation... AND THEY ARE NOT COMPLETE.2 -
The worst co worker I had is actually pretty recent. He joined a well integrated team on what was basically a legacy project. He sounded like a good developer and seemed to know his stuff but it took him ages to push out fixes/features. They were always massively over-engineered, poorly named, partially tested and what documentation he did write still managed to bitch about how poor the project was structured.
He spent most of his time bitching about the general shitty nature of the project (he wasn't wrong) and the lack of interest from other Devs.
He was so unpleasant in interpersonal communication that by the end no one would work with him.
In his last team meeting he basically said he was glad to be going and that we were all lazy, disinterested and shouldn't consider ourselves his peers. The equivalent of storming out of a party after setting the couch on fire and shitting in the sink.
We've since removed all his overcomplicated, not standard, unmaintainable code. -
I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.
We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.
So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.
4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.
I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.
The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!
I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.
Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.
I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.
I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)! -
Ranting (again) against the almighty marketing teams. So recently we started to build an amazing feature for our product but have been told to put the project on hold to help the "conversion team" which is focusing on trial, subscription and payment. But we are lagging behind the competitors regarding the features, for a huge price. But marketing wants that. Marketing wants an over engineered flow to be "fixed" for the 382948 time. Never had an impact on the conversation and will never have. So here is the truth : marketing stir the air because of their damn complex of inferiority and their inability to build anything.
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