Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*
We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:
- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings
Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!
*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*
Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason
*audience: ooooohhhhh*
You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.
*audience: laughs*
Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.
Backstory:
We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!
... oh to have a time machine
Working with C:
- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.
- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".
- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.
- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.
- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.
- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.
- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.
... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.
- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:
Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"
... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?
- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.
- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).
- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.
- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.
- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.
- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?
You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.
I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.
Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex20 -
fork() can fail: this is important
Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.
It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.
People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.
Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.
That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.
Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).
Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.
...
...
...
Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.
If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...
See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.
Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?
It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.
Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.
Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...12 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
So I'm getting brought into a team for our backend services of our administration application, and they're explicitly using Flask (Python library) for their exposed API in their application and data tiers.
As I'm familiarizing myself with their code, utilities, and dependencies, I notice they're stacking 7-8 decorators on their routes from their in-house utility module.. After further investigation, I realized half of them were entirely unnecessary, and they were proofing payload responses three times for the same JSON format.
The fact that we're using Python instead of Node or GoLang for our REST services is pain enough, but these god damn in house utilities are killing me.1 -
I have been on crunch time for so long, with so many hours I don't even know what day of the week it is. I legitimately had to look it up. I also calculated my hourly rate for the last 3.5 weeks, and I was making the same as a grocery store bagger! Being salaried sucks in times like this. I am paid peanuts.
Last night I woke up every 30 minutes in a panic I was late to work. This job is killing me, and all because the sales team sold the product on an unrealistic deadline, for no money...
In addition, I am gaining weight, haven't seen my family for any significant period of time for ages, and Taco Bell knows me by name and order...
On that note, next Monday I am going to go into my boss' office, and demand like a 50%-75% raise! I am terrified! Haha
Migraines are fun though. THE PAIN PROVES I AM ALIVE!8 -
I'm currently working on a dynamics CRM project which has been going on for almost a year, we're on week 19 of defect rectification brought on by a mixture of the clients abysmal testing and spec writing and the pain of debugging in Dynamics.
This project has left me emotionally and physically drained. I used to love where I worked and the guys I worked with but right now I'm the lowest I've felt in a long time.
I have autism and I really struggle with situations I have little control over, I also pride myself on being able to diagnose and fix problems quickly, I've been working on the same 2 bugs for the last 3 week's. I squashed one on Friday but this other one is persistent and I feel like it's killing me.
I've mentioned my low mood to my boss who could only say "It will be over soon". Well I was supposed to be transferred to a new none dynamics project in September, but yeah that didn't happen.
I really enjoy Angular and I've found this long project has caused my skills in it to rust to the point where even the most basic elements are a struggle.
I hate Dynamics and I hate the prospect of going in tomorrow and facing it again. -
Well I'm back on this stupid project with this stupid Product Owner and I really hate this, it really demotivates me.
I was assigned to this project (data analytics) for like 6 months, working alone with this stupid PO that knows nothing about team management or project management.
The guy had a "methodology" where he established all task to be done daily and would not tell me what we have to do in the entire project but instead would tell me day by day all the tasks to be done in each day. This means that HE was the one making the time estimation which is plain wrong!.
Anyways, I talked to him and told him that I need to have a wide overview of the project in order to be able to make a good time estimation, and it kind of worked.
But the guy is a pain in the ass, calls me every 4 hours to "talk" about the project and texts me every hour to check "how are we doing?".
This project was killing me, I had no motivation to work on it, I hated every minute of it, I didn't like it at all to the point my boss (not him) talked to me and asked me what was wrong with me. I told him: This is not the project for me. He told me: Ok let's try to move you to another project.
After six months of agony, the project was stale (customer approval, paperwork, blah, blah) I was assigned to two other projects that I liked, more software architecture and development, not data analytics.
And last week my boss came back to me with "well, the project was approved so we need you back at it".
WHAT PART OF I'M NOT THE RIGHT GUY FOR THIS PROJECT DIDN'T YOU GET?
Now I'm again with this dude, calling me, texting me, sending me infinite emails, asking for minutely updates...
I really don't want to be working on this project.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View