*Mom shows me laptop ad of 3000 bucks with the most overkill specs ever*

Mom: "Son, will this laptop run Google?"

Me: "Do you want to surf Google or actually run Google's server?"

Mom: *looks confused*

"I also want to use Fesabook on it"

Me: *brings her a 5 year old laptop with a new ssd in it*

*has an old i3, 8gb ram and no gpu*

Mom: "This laptop is super fast! Thanks son!"

*One hour later*

*Mom calls*

"Son, I think the laptop broke"

Me: "What? What happened?"

Mom: "I pressed a button and now all the keys are lighting red" (backlit keyboard)

Me: "You can choose the color of your keyboard mom"

Mom: "Ooh! How do I make it pink?"

Me: "You can only choose between red and blue..."

Mom: "What a ripoff"

*Hangs up the phone*

This is fucking annoying with some clients.

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

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

*Me Calling the NSA..

[NSA]: Hello, how can I help you !
[ME]: Hello, this is the NSA right?
[NSA]: Yes
[ME]: Since you are recording all phone calls, I have a little request.
[NSA]: And What is that?
[ME]: My mom called me couple hours ago to bring something from the supermarket, her phone is off.. What did she told me to bring?
[NSA]: beep..beep..beep

My first job was a statistical program that i wrote during a trainee at a local IT department.
My boss liked it and told me I could keep the sources and the copyright.
Then he made some phone calls and helped me to find my first clients.

Since that time I am working on the same program.
I founded a software company and have a good life now.

My old boss retired some years ago, but some of the team are still there.
From time to time I visit the department having a coffee with old friends.

That trainee was nearly 30 years ago.

C: application not working
Me: k. What changed?
C: we didn't make changes
Me: k... *gets a tech team (W) on the phone*
W: Hey, what's broken?
Me: C's application. How do things look?
W: running healthy. I'll check logs.
Me: thanks. *gets tech team (S) on the line*
S: hey, everything clear on our end, will check logs.
Me: thanks *gets tech team (U)*
U: hey! They asked us to deploy their new version today during normal deployment time. Is it acting up?
Me: C, what did you change?
C: nothing major, just how we connect to W and S...
W&S: are you shitting me???
Me: U, will you please roll it back?
C: no! Must stay on this version, you need to fix your side!!
Me: nope. *calls U boss (UG)*
UG: U, you have my permission to roll back, they need to fix. C, if your boss doesn't like it, have them call me.
*rollback fixes problem*

IF I FUCKING ASK YOU WHAT THE FUCK YOU CHANGED, YOU BETTER TELL ME THE TRUTH, OR I WILL STRIP YOUR CODE OFF OUR FUCKING SYSTEMS AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. MY JOB IS TO HELP YOU AND YOU NEED TO BACK TO FUCK UP AND NOT GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOB OR YOU WON'T HAVE ONE ANYMORE.

Manager: “We need you to stay in the room and not go outside to make personal calls on your mobile.”

Me: “uhmm okaaaay...”

*I get a call* “Yeah, I called about making a doctor appointment....my symptoms? Ummmm...*lowers voice to say it but everyone still hears...totally embarrassing*

Same manager, later, at performance review: “We found it highly inappropriate for you to be talking about your personal medical issues on the phone in front of everyone in the office.”

At work today the guys showed me how I can listen in on calls so I can prepare myself for phone support.

We tested it through a call between two of the guys.

They started talking like "test test123 is this working"

I said yes and continued working behind my screen. They just didn't know I was still listening.

Both guys started saying stuff like "welcome to the sex hotline"
"hello and welcome to the *insert something sexual* hotline!"

One of the guys after a few minutes: why is your head so red?!

Wait.... Have you been listening along?? 😅

Yes 😂

*everyone bursts out in laughter*

I'm the only programmer for my employer. Today I finished a GUI and engine to let our managers easily post annoucments to our TVs.
Nothing crazy; PHP login screen, some forms, small database, and the app to run on the TVs.
When I told my manager it was up and running she asks "Since you can build that, can you start working on a tool to run voice analytics off of our agents phone calls?".
Sure.. I'll get right on that.. Follow up with me in 4 years.

> Customer calls
Her: I have over 5k 404 request to [insertwebsite]/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml
Me: Sound like a missconfigured exchangeserver/client. Let me have a look.
> Takes a look and can confirm the IP and the owner of that IP
Me: It looks like someone/something from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is failing to resolve autodiscover.[insertdomain].com
and defaults to @ record on the zone. Do you happend to know to whom that IP belongs?
Her: No, and I dont care, just block it. I do not like the 404 that shows up on the summary.
Me: Alright
> Blocks the IP in the firewall.

>>> Fast forward to next day >>>

> Someone calls, it is the same girl
Her: I cant reach my website! Infact, I cant reach anything! WHYYYYYY!!!
> I remember, blocking that IP yesterday...
Me: Oh, can you please visist "minip.se" (whatismyip.com, swedish version) and tell me what you see?
Her: Yes, it is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Me: Do you remember that IP that you request that I block yesterday?
> I can hear the shame coming from the phone.
> Turn out that her collegues did'nt have any mail delivered to them from the time I blocked their IP
> Her boss is really mad
> Atleast she had a cute voice

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

Benefits of being a dev:
Wife: "I just wish I had a program that could organize all my shit for my [work-from-home outside sales] job. My old company had much better software."
One week later:
Me: "Here honey: I built a program that will organize your business leads, allow you to search them by city, street, phone number, it detects when you have multiple businesses with one owner, warns you of duplicate information before you add it, and you can now launch phone calls with the click of a button. I've also put an app on your phone that can send and receive data from the main program."
One hour later:
Giggity giggity.

Rant!!

Girlfriend call me while am at a meeting.
I mute my phone...
She calls again and again for the 3rd time back to back. I leave the meeting stating this might be important..

I answer the call...

Me: hey babe , all okay ?
She: you’re busy ?
Me: yeah sorta , tell me wassup ?
She : if you’re busy then it’s okay we can talk later
Me: it’s all right . Are you okay ?
She : yes, but if you’re busy we can talk later ..

Me :(FUCKKKKKKKK THIS FUCKING FUCK WOMEN LOGIC, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS)
The above statement was said internally

Me:(in reality) you sure babe? I’ve left the meeting so I can talk..

She: nothin much I was suppose to be in your area in a couple of hours so wanted to know if you could meet

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.

Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.

Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.

Didn't know jackshit about twilio.

Meeting with client:

Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*

Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.

Translation: My Samsung picture app wants to be allowed to make and receive phone calls...

WHY IN THE FLYING FUCK DOES MY STOCK GALERY APP NEED TO MAKE PHONE CALLS????

So i can listen in on calls for my training.

I felt so sorry for a colleague when he spend nearly half an hour explaining that we only HOST someone's site and are NOT responsible for the code. (just for the record, he explained it in 15 different ways so anyone (nearly) would've understood but it seemed like the person in the phone just didn't want to hear it).

Poor guy (my collegue) 😞

Weirdest technical interview:

I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.

The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.

Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.

I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!

It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.

Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

That moment at work when we've had no calls for an hour and suddenly the phone goes off

*TRINGGGGGGGG*

*suddenly you have a few Linux support engineers with a mini heart attack*

😅

Clients who keep calling in.

I'm a first liner and sysadmin, both (official title is Linux support engineer) so I do tickets+calls+server engineering.

It's highly annoying when you've got a busy day with loads of calls and I'm the first first-liner and I'm working on an important/high-prio ticket and PEOPLE KEEP CALLING.

Every time I can write like a few more words and then the fucking phone rings again aaaand so fucking on.

Your concentration is gone, workflow interrupted and my short term memory is shit so I entirely forget what I was debugging.

But, phone comes first 😞

!rant

The Sound of Typing (an original dev parody of "The Sound of Silence")

Hello caffeine, my old friend
I've come to sip on you again
Because my mind continues sleeping
While overpiled work is creeping
And the deadline that is flashing upon my screen
Can't be unseen
Within the sound of typing

Down the lines of buggy code
I quickly switch to debug mode
What kind of moron wrote this function?
For this unnecessary junction?
Wrapped in a condition that will always return true
I need a brew
To forget the sound of typing

Boss said I you do not know
WordPress like a cancer grows
A one page website doesn't need that
Still I wear my debug hard hat
And when I sleep I still see the same terror
Fatal error
Echoed in the sounds of typing

And every time I leave my home
I must launch chrome on my phone
The constant messages and phone calls
The chiming echoes through the halls
While I frantically fix some FooBar'd CSS
BUT I don't have LESS
Deep in the sounds of typing

And when I think I have it done
Some scope creep ruins all my fun
So now I force through an all-nighter
While I forge on like a fighter
But the project I thought was due on next Friday
Changed to Monday
Within the sound of typing

I quit and my last day is next week.

Apparently management has decided that I should spend my last day implementing a new feature for a customer where I have been the only developer, and release it to production (without first implementing it in test) the same day. A feature that potentially could cripple a whole workflow if done wrong.

Of course I advised not to release untested code to production on a friday, just before the only person that knows how it works leaves the company. But no, “the customer reaaaaaally wants it before summer, so just be careful not to write any bugs”.

I’m not saying that I’m intentionally gonna write bad code - but if I do, I’m not gonna pick up the phone when it calls.

At python Brazil, just watched Sam Agnew live code an api to receive phone calls and control a Pokémon emulator

Caller: My client looking for experienced developer in Technology X,Y and Z are you open for new position?
Me: But I don't know this X and Y, I only use Z!
Caller: Please add them to your CV and send it to me so I can pass it to the client...
Me: But I don't know it!
Caller: Neither me nor the client know it also, please update the CV...
Me: How many years of experience should I add then?
Caller: 3 years will be OK!
Me: §¢“°©™|-=]%

Couldn't sleep last night. Spent about 5 hours laying down reading devRant.

Mom calls taxi to go shopping. I'm starving so I go with her. The only reason I went was to get food.

Half way there, so tired I could fall asleep while standing.

I order my food. Walk to bus stop. An hour until next bus. Fuck it, I'll get a taxi.

Phone slips out of pocket while in taxi. Goes under seat. Can't grab a hold of it.

Driver says you can just get it from the back before you leave. It will be easier. I put my food down infront of me. And try one last time.

He then spends the entire trip telling me how all these customers keep leaving shit in his car, etc. Meanwhile we almost got into 2 accidents. Anyway...

So we get to my house, I pay. I get out and get my phone. I walk inside the house. Open devRant.

Wait, where's my food?

The other day I got a call from Windows Support about my computer being infected with a virus. I only have a Mac but knowing this was a scam call I played along for 15-20 minutes. Then I finally told the person calling that I don't have any computer running Windows and he got quite angry and wondering "why are you wasting my time?". Told him it was to prevent him from calling and scamming other people. He yelled "fuck off" and hung up. Made my day :)

How do you handle these phone calls?

So guys i really need your help. My girlfriend started getting phone calls at odd hours, so I got suspicious and started tracking her phone. Then I found out that she has been going to this guys house at wears hours, then once when I was tracking her my computer froze, so what could it be? How do I fix my computer

Manager: Alright, we've decided we're gonna just going to accept PayPal and also credit card checkout through PayPal in the next two days!

Dev: ...

Manager: We can achieve this timeline, right?

Dev: ...

Manager: Alright, awesome to see your motivation! Let's do it!

Dev: YOU ANSWER PHONE CALLS, TALK TO PEOPLE AND 'STRATEGIZE' ALL DAY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE USING THE APP WITHOUT ERROR. THAT'S ON ME, NOT YOU, SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

!rant
Yesterday i updated my LinkedIn title to Data scientist.
Today morning i got 3 phone calls for job offers.

Internet: YOU are nothing without me.

My phone: Th..That's not true! She cc..can make calls ww..ithout you...and ss...send texts. Sh..Sh..She plays offf..offline games sometimes and has ddd..downloaded music to her storage that she could llii.. listen to and has a sshh..shit load of memes stocked that she sss..sometimes laughs at. I AM usef...ffuul :-/

Internet *lighting up a cigarette*: hahhaa! You can survive without me. If this were 10 YEARS ago! There's not a slightest chance, today.

My phone *starts sobbing*: sh..shut up sshhhuut uu..up.

Internet *blowing smoke rings*: you think you're the ONLY device she owns?? She has too many of them, but guess who is connected to all those devices! ME! She can't function without me. Hell, the world can't function without ME!

Electricity *rubbing it's eyes from sleep* - what's all that noise??

Phone: 😶

Internet: 😶

Phone: 🙂

(I'm about to fall asleep and there's no power right now. Back up ain't working. Life sucks)

Phone in my cubicle goes straight to voicemail when someone calls. Boss wants me to get it fixed so clients and he can reach me.

Yeah, I'll get right on that. 👌

My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.

I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.

After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.

I reported it.

Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.

I was offered a job.

Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.

They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.

It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.

So there's this annoying colleague who loves to call me (My work phone) at 3 am, so I decided to adjust some settings to forward the calls to the CEO.

aha!! , in the meeting CEO point it out, and yes, finally company set a rule that no work calls after working hours....

One ex-co-worker disappeared for one month. No e-mails, no phone calls, nothing.

Next month came back like nothing, when the boss ask him "Where the hell did you go?" He replied "I was sick"

of what? The flu...

He of course got fired, absolute zero medical proof.

HR really are the scum of the earth. Especially Indian HR.

I tech interviewed this guy on Friday and rejected him. And I told HR to tell him so. Apparently he was "too busy" to type a darn message.

This poor sod who was apparently laid off and was pretty desperate and so he'd been calling every HR he'd interviewed with the past week and no one picked up, including my HR.

Now this lad had my work number because that's what I did my phone interview on. I don't attend work calls on the weekend, especially not interviewees but I had to tell this poor sod that he didn't make it (it was a bit obvious).

This is the exact same HR who rejected a candidate just because they were 2 minutes late to a video call.

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

The universe has this weird magical power.

Whenever there are hardly any phone calls and someone mentions something in the trend of that it's not busy at all, we suddenly get overflooded with phone calls.

It's weird how this 'works' every goddamn motherfucking time. (Same goes for tickets)

Today while livecoding in lecture, my prof got a call that got shown on his Mac. His response to that was very interesting:
“Has anyone else noticed that phones have gotten so advanced that when we receive a phone call we treat it almost like a DOS attack? It impairs is from doing everything that’s secondary to making and taking phone calls and that pisses us off”

I made a website for a guy, been keeping a casual eye on it and it's fine, if boring.

Then he calls in a panic to tell me it's been hacked, there is porn everywhere and funny underlined words and I must fix it right now!

So I drop what I'm doing and access the site and it's fine. I use a few different devices and even a couple of different networks and can't see a thing wrong with it.

Then I spent half an hour on the phone trying to convince him that his own shady surfing habits are causing this on his computer only.

I get the feeling he didn't believe me because he hasn't paid the latest invoice..

I used to work in a call center for a local hospital.

One night, all of our lines are swamped. Literally no time for a break between phone calls, +15 minute wait times. I answer the next call:

Me: "Its a marvelous Monday at AskIT, how may I help you?"

Doctor: "This is Dr. [Noone Care]. I need you to fix my password now."

Me: "Absolutely! You should be able to enter a new password now."

Doctor: "MY HANDS ARE NOT FOR PASSWORDS, MY HANDS ARE FOR SURGERY!"

😩 So glad I don't work for doctors anymore. Oh and the best part is, he had selected the general phone queue, rather than the doctor queue (~3 minute wait time instead).

So this was only a few weeks ago. A client told us to turn our Android/iOS app into an app compatible with his phone - it needed to work online/offline and it needed to be able to take photographs. We didn't have much to go on but after a few calls we figured out he was using a very old Nokia (Snake era) that didn't even have a camera.

The hardest part was getting him to understand why we couldn't make the app.

> me on call
> had to much wine
> suddenly, phone starts making sound
> holy shit, I am on call and I am not supposed to drink
> Calls taxi because shit is looking bad at work. Everything look down according to the sms I get, I had to pay the taxi from my own pocket.
> 40 min later, arrive at work. Walk into the serverroom.
> Go to the the server that is monitoring everything.
> Check networkcable, it is loose. Push it a little.
> Goddamnit, that was it.
> Realize I never doublechecked if stuff really was down from home....

Fuck me! I'm frustrated as fuck, because I'm too scared to quit my job.

The boss just fired her assistant and now wants me to do her job. I'm INCAPABLE of doing phone calls and set up meetings; furthermore THAT ISN'T MY FREAKING JOB! Holy shit, what do I have to do?

I'm scared to not being able to find a job in few days/weeks. Any suggestion? Should I swallow it and keep working here while searching?

I aged badly in 2 years because of this job.

Morning time.
Sitting on the toilet browsing DevRant.
Boss calls.
Phone vibrates abruptly and falls inside the seat.
And I almost shit on it.

I hate how some recruiters treat you.

I get it - I'm not your client, the person hiring me is. I get it - at the end of the day I'm just a big bag of money in your eyes.

But at least treat me like a person. I may have a family I need to take care of and the carrot you're dangling in front of me may mean the difference between me living comfortably and me being homeless. So after an interview even if it didn't go well let me know. DON'T avoid my phone calls or emails because you don't want to deal with breaking the news to me and instead hope you just never hear from me again.

Had a skype interview yesterday...

> prepared for interview, checked internet and all
> home internet died literally 1 minute before call
> started interview using phone hotspot
> phone hotspot died in 1/3 interview duration
> used mom's phone's hotspot
> died in 2/3 interview duration
> oh shit
> went out to phone company's office to get more data
> half way to the office, mom calls: home internet is working!
> yaay! goes back home
> nop, internet isn't working (glitch in mom's phone which showed it to be working (wifi symbol))
> goes back to the office
> gets phone recharged (office people were SO slow 😑)
> gets back home
> continues and finishes the interview...

10/10 will do again 😂😂😂😂

The interviewer was quite patient, and waited for me to get back home (he called me 2-3 times to get a heads up)

Lol this was honestly THE most exciting and fun interview experience for me yet!
The interview questions were pretty easy btw (programming)
Waiting for result now...

Decided yesterday night that it was time to leave this joke of a company. Updated my CV, changed my pic on my CV and posted the CV on Monster.

15 phone calls, 4 emails, 3 adds on LinkedIn, 3 planned interviews and this is just the morning.

when you wake up saturday noon just to see your phone having 10 missed calls from the same unrecognized number, dial back and find it to be a mad client,
complaining about some graphic issues on a site you have nothing to do with.

checking the site; there is nothing wrong so you tell him to clear his browser cache.

he gets mad shouting a silly programmer shall not tell him what to do with his computer and its the site, not his browser.

i ask him if there is the same issue with another browser or computer..
he giggles a little then turn silent..

2mins or so later, he says: i'm gonna let your boss know about this then hangs up..

My bf learning a programming language I already know. Him frustrated with it not working. Me in the same room watching anime. His mom calls. I go over and see if I can figure out what's not working while he's in the phone. He was trying to run from command line and wasn't in the right folder 😆

I’ve been job hunting for a month with very few calls when I realised my resume didn’t have my phone number or my email.

I’ve been interviewing for half a decade.

Why yes, I am indeed retarded thanks for asking.

Me: The phone rings but when I pick up there's nothing there.

Indian call center: Okay sir can you tell me if the landline is plugged into the modem

Me: It's ringing. Yes, it's plugged in.

Indian call center: Okay we'll reset the modem.

Me: I already did that. Twice. Just to be able to speak to you because the robot made me.

Indian call center: Okay so we'll reset your modem again.

*resets*

Indian call center: Do you get a dial tone now?

Me: Yes. I have this entire time. No one can call me.

Indian call center: Sir that is not possible.

Me: Call it and see for yourself.

Indian call center: *calls, phone hangs up for them the second I answer*

Why did you hang up on me, sir?

Me: *internal screaming*

Worst meeting. Hmm..

Embarrassment wise maybe the one where my boss called me the queen of porn in front of everyone. Yes, classy AF. (Just have to know him to know his sense of humor I guess).

Most cringe worthy meeting was probably when our out of state national director came in and basically told us he has no clue what we do nor does her care to learn. We brought up salaries to him as well as we're in the bottom 8th percentile for the industry in our area with HUMONGOUS work loads, like 20 sites per developer at once. This is a huge multi-million dollar corporation, mind you. We told him some of us have to have 3 jobs to survive and he basically said well you're an at will employee so there's the door. He also took phone calls and sent emails during my one on one meeting which we never finished even though he promised to. But he bought us a shirt, so you know, it's all cool. 🙄

Buy a domain. Watch 100s of spam email, sms and dodgy phone calls come in.

Father: What is this? *hands me a box*
Me: 😯 *opens box*

The contents of the box: a white cube about an inch on each side, with a speaker on one side, a button on the other and three small holes.

Comes with a manual (square inch piece of plastic with a drawing) that shows you what the button does (turn it on, duh) and some indications as to what the various holes do.

Me: 😶 I have no clue... Maybe it's for taking calls? (though speaker mode does exist peeps)
Father: 😑What do you mean you don't know... Don't you know about stuff like this?

I love when my family assumes I am all knowing when it comes to anything running on electricity... Guys, just because I program I am not a psychic and am not better suited to fix your printer or fix your phone screens.

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

Apparently, working from home means "you are available 24/7 right?" at my current workplace. I am grateful that I have a job, but I do not dig getting emails or my guys getting harassed after hours for things that would normally have to wait until the next day.

I also dislike getting woken up by the Head of Department 1 hour to 2 hours before normal time because of something super-duper-zomg urgent that would normally wait. Which is why my phone is now on silence for phone calls and my notifications for emails is out after hours.

Fucking shit fuck! Absolute cunty-chops of a Work phone just went off at 3am because our directory has clearly been leaked.

This cunt right here is on 24/7 fallout so I can nae silence the bastard. It’s going inte do not disturb for the evening now but.

About 6 months to a year ago we started getting nuisance calls on the cunts. On floated numbers that seem geographically close.

Work have done fuck all in this time, because considering changing ours is a pain in the dick, and costs.

But tonight at 3am I got another; call, immediate hang up on redial.

This wee iPhone prick is looking at me like “ho! Got ya ye fucker”... it’s lucky it’s not been punted out the winde where it belongs. Little fucking prick.

If I look like shit tomorrow at the office, if any prick decides to mention I look tired, I’m gonnae tear the ballbags a new hole between their baws and their arse.

It’s now 4am, sorry fe the language, my Glaswegian heritage shines through at this time in the morning.

I don't understand why a game needs to "make and manage phone calls".

*Never* do CSS tweaks over the phone and tell the customer to refresh and approve the change. This will lead to endless tweaking andlong calls at any hour, and further trivializes your work by making it look like everything can be done instantly. Better to have them send you the changes they want, then send them an update later once they have been done—perhaps with a bit of a delay to further stave off the sense of instant gratification.

Also, if they keep requesting changes to changes after you’ve done what they asked, be prepared to let them know that future changes will incur an additional fee.

Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊

Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.

Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.

This happened via mail thread today.

Boss: we need this new brilliant feature I just made up and running asap! Top priority, it has to be done well, for my reputation is on the line!

Me: *looks at the specifics* 'kay, looks easy enough, this evening max and it will be ready. I just nees some extra info about what kind of data validations (I speak no accountant) are needed, and some other details (a total of 3 questiona).

B: Sure! Remember, it needs to be perfect, as my reputation is at stake. Call me on the phone and I'll give you the details!

M: Can't you answer via mail? Thua way both me and the other devs will have clewr guidelines

B: Just call me! Why do you need it to be written down? It's faster this way!

...Fine. I'll keep asking until you're ready to give me a written answer to my questions. No way I'll take security details via phone for something you want in production this evening. No chance in Hell I'll take responsibility for "misunderstanding" what you said on the phone. Why does it always has to be like that?

the fuck kind of manager are you that you tell your leads not to fucking answer their damn phones when services need restoring????? If your fucking team member can do his damn job like a grown ass adult, but sees that you (his lead) made a change and has questions, your ass better answer the phone, or i will rocket launch it up your ass, straight into your brain so it's the newest, latest, fucking hippest trend and hooked into your system so you answer every fucking call hands-free. Even when fucking "Windows Tech Support" calls you every 30 minutes because your keep expired.

There are people counting on you, worthless fuckwipe. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself. And do your fucking job.

Edit: phone tried to censor me

Saturday morning:
Notification on WhatsApp from my new boss: hello, I sent you a message on Skype because the data is not good and I had to send it to the customer yesterday.

Go to Skype: hello, I am out all weekend. If you checked the data when I handed it out I could have figured out a solution. I will check when I am back.

Logout from Skype
Block number on WhatsApp
Block incoming calls on phone

“I love being disturbed with customer phone calls when I’m coding and working to a deadline” said nobody, ever!

My mom uses an App to make free international phone calls with my aunts. But to generate credits in the app, she has to watch a lot of video ads, do a lot of stuffs in the app, which is time consuming & boring. So, I created an automation that keeps watching video ads, closes the ads when its done, downloads apps & runs them to get more credits, etc. So, the automation keeps generating credits everyday. now my mom can make free international calls whenever she needs...

Two days ago...

I was happy, building out the network in a new lokation.

Suddenly my phone just doesn't want to stop ringing, from all the other lokation calling in that they can't connect to HQ.
Then HQ calls, we don't have internet, nothing works. The one guy on location who has access to the server room enters and finds all the servers offline and a couple of breakers blown.
Turn on breakers, servers won't boot properly.
Me in a taxi and hurry to HQ, to help boot the servers.

Afterwards I find out that one of the bosses spilled a cup of coffee on his desk, shorting the circuit.
Apparently he is on the same breaker group as the servers!?! What the actual fuck!

At least now the other bosses are like; yeah, we need to do something about that

I used to work for a Mexican bank in Mexico, as a developer I opened (and use) an account, since the bank was not famous(most of its business was with the government), going to the bank and see no waiting lines was an advantage, so I started using it as my only bank account even nowadays.

Now I live in NYC, and some years later I see on the news the bank merged(was absorbed) with another bank, 'sounds good, I don't care' I thought.

Well, I open my online account and the nightmare begins:

1) Redirection to the 2nd bank page
2) My credentials does not work
3) Call the original bank(no answers)
4) After several calls and days I got a phone contact
5) 'well, try all other passwords you have' (transaction passwords, operative passwords, login passwords, etc), among many other stupid answers, which by the way, were preceded by infinite question about the 2nd bank, like:

- when did you open the account with the 2nd bank?
- what is your 2nd bank account number

6) after 20 calls like that, they asked for documents, information and screenshots, and send all that to the 2nd bank tech help email.

7) After several days a person responded: 'Go to your bank(which fucking bank?)' and ask for a new user.

8) a ton of calls to know what bank I was assigned

9) called the bank: 'well, you have to come in person(no exceptions allowed) and request to close your 1st bank account and open a 2nd bank account' (I am not sure if that is gonna work)

All the technology nowadays and still I have to travel thousands of miles hoping this 'solution' works.

to be continue....

> Me on call
> Notice that our Echangeserver is not working, strange that I did not get any alarm?
> Start working on it, the services are slow as fuck. They dont start
> Nvm reboot
>10 minutes later the same problem, start to dig deeper.
>Everything goes slow because I am not a Windows guys
>The big boss calls, clock is 7 AM (our office opens as 8AM)
> She is angry that I am not at the office, because the mail does not work.
> I am working remotely from home, 30 min drive to work
> Told her that I have a 30 min drive and I was supposed to be home to take care of wife that was sick
> She is annoyed, pissed.
> She demands that I need to be at the office to solve the problem

omg,,, I don't work better if I am in the office.
Also, it turns out that a colleague has turned of the alarms from Nagios/OP5 for the exchange environment because is once spammed his phone.

!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.

One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.

A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.

That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".

After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".

The fact that this week's rant topic exists is the exact reason I never do freelance work. It always ends in horror.

I don't believe good fullstack devs exist. A good junior will assess their talents/passions and specialize to become a senior. They'll keep checking the rest of the market from the corners of their eyes and start moving when necessary. But eventually, focus and specialization is a must.

If that's true for the field of development... why would I invest time in marketing, support, sales, PR, legal?

Maybe you can earn a bit more gross income in freelance work — but I see my employer as a service provider, I "hire" them so I don't have to manage phone calls, lose sleep over court cases, play product owner or worry about getting paid.

every day I get phone calls from some idiot to moan about something I fixed.

I had a job to copy a site and use it for another company, with everyone's consent. I do it and found the original was garbage. hard coded functionalities. limited control over which pages appear in the menu and so on.

problem is the site administrator doesn't understand the system and made pages visible on the menu that shouldn't be and so on. these never showed up before because it was broken.

now she phones every day because she setup her pages wrong originally and tells me stuff like, why did you change this, it worked before and crap.

I never expected she would have setup the pages incorrectly so I never thought this would happen.

lesson here is if it's broken and you're the only one that's noticed, just bloody leave it.

Success to me is silence. No phone calls, no emails, no "why doesn't this work?"

It's when you made something that works in the background, almost invisibly, that others could take for granted but that they also don't bother you with because it is still working as designed.

It's so frustrating when you're trying to power through a development but get constantly interrupted by phone calls, coworkers, project managers, meetings, emails and IM.

Just let me work!!

Support has today gotten the bug report that a user cannot make phone calls from Antarctica

lol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm answering my phone calls with Hello World. Someone help me!

Funny thing just happened. I called my bank to verify my card with Apple Pay. Here’s how it went:

> Calls bank with number supplied by phone.
> “Thank you for calling [Bank] Bank!”
> ...
> A minute passes and still ringing
> wtf.jpg
> About thirty seconds in and the ring seems fainter than before.
> [2:00] is it just me or is my speaker dying...
> [3:00] no, it’s definitely getting quieter.
> [3:30] why is no one picking up???
> [4:00] now it’s so bad I have to hold it to my ear
> [4:30] now it’s blending in with the white noise
> [4:45] yeah, no. This is only static now.
> [5:00] this’ll be good for DevRant...

> calls again
> same thing happens
> ohwell.mov

Let’s try again tomorrow, I guess.

Edit: like always, I forgot the picture

So I work as a "Web Development Lead"
Which means I lead (frontend,backend and infrastructure teams)
Also I am in charge of infrastructure or devops or whatever you call it, which means I handle production issues, dev and staging environments,...etc

and I am a team of one, and today I asked for a day off because it's my wife's birthday

and suddenly everyone is blocked, everything is on fire, and the phone is not stopping ringing, I had to go out of the cinema theater to answer the non-stopping calls

I AM ASKING FOR A SINGLE DAY, A FUCKING DAY, EVEN IF SOMEONE IS BLOCKED SO WHAT IT'S NOT EVEN A DAY I ONLY NEED 6 HOURS

IS TO TOO MUCH FUCKING TO ASK

Weirdest coworker was at a tech support job I had when I just graduated from college. I was training this guy and he could listen in on my calls and my wife called and he heard the conversation (nothing there) and later he suggested I should encourage her to work in the phone sex industry cause she had a sexy voice. One time I saw pornography on his screen and with the supervisor's permission we did a search on his work desktop and found a lot of it - some that was really sick!

That moment when you quit your job where you worked for the past 4 years and you have your last 5 days at work when your supervisor says that it's time to improve our documentation. Oh really? Wtf have I been saying all along? We have almost no documentation at the moment, so I expect lots and lots of confusion once I'm gone...confusion or phone calls to me.

Man, what a way to start the week. Our mailserver went nuts (something about a Shellbot virus, I don't know) and we were forced to migrate to a new one. Clients calling in panic and threatening to sue us and shit. I was the one tasked to fix the problem (I am a developer mind you, my sysadmin knowledge is limited to google searching and contacting support). At the same time, Turkish hackers attacked our other server and forced me to fetch backups and clear spamming scripts. And to top it all, I was forced to answer the phone calls and respond to the threats. Man, I must have been a complete prick in my previous lifetime to deserve this.

OK, so I was making this website for a university event. After publishing it, I start getting calls that the registration form isn't working. So I review the code and fix the problem. But when I push it to production, the problem still persists, all this while the event management is breathing down my neck because they can't get any registration! kept on trying for the whole fucking day, switched off my phone and went to sleep! The next morning, I find out, I had been pushing the old version of the file! Yes! I felt incompetent and stupid!

I just got a call from the UK. When 7 picked up, the lady said "Hello Edwin, how are you?". I never replied and just hung up.

I don't know how the fuck she got my number and name right? I know my name is public but my phone number is not.

>Partners grandad gets new phone
>Partner calls me at work to tell me she's going to set it up
>I finish work
>Partner hasn't managed to set it up (2hours later)
>I go and set phone up
>Grandparents provide free pizza and beer.

Yesterday was a good day.

SCREWED OVER GOOGLE WITH MICROSOFT!!!! YES!!!

So as I'm deaf, I've always had a problem with captions or lack of them.

I thought Live Captions would fix it but it's only supported on selected devices and not enabled for calls and conferences like Zoom, WhatsApp.

I tried hooking up my sound card with an audio capble to my phone which has LC and also Live Transcribe... but somehow wouldn't pick up the audio.

Then today I was like wait... I could just install a Pixel emulator... excepy seems Google thought of that...

(I installed VB Cable virtual sound card and routed sound out to mic in).

Well first apparently, the emulator does not actually identify as Pixel... it identifies as an Emulator that sorta looks like Pixel...

Which means no LC...

I installed LT and also a sound meter which confirmed it was getting the audio but no transcription...

Though I tried GBoard and it sorta worked..
But I would like continuous transcription... and so I open the app store and try all the apps until I hit MSFT Translate...

Which has a convo mode which seems pretty much designed to screw Google over lol. Just need to start a Convo with myself...

Currently work in HR and among others I used to recruit cleaning ladies. They often don't care to much for rules so sometimes one them just doesn't show up, doesn't answer phone calls or mails. Couple of years ago, one of our own colleagues did the same.. It is known among colleagues as 'pulling a Copperfield' as they just disappear. :)

So, at the start of November last year I completed a big system for a client. It took me months to complete.

Most frustrating was the sheer amount of pressure the client applied to get it completed. Emails every day, phone calls where the client was "checking" on my progress etc etc. All the annoying stuff.

Only plus side was the fact they paid in full a few after is was completed.

I've just released the system is still on a test AWS account and I haven't heard from the client for well over a month now.

I've just logged into the system and took a look at the logs. The client logged in once the day it was completed and hasn't done anything since.

I mean what was the point of all the pressure if they were just going to let the thing gather dust?

I'm pretty annoyed to be honest as I experienced a few fairly borderline stressful months due to that project.

Ah well, the image below was me after looking at the system logs :)

You know what I love? When the person next to you in the office sits there loudly talking on the phone for an hour.

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

On the phone.

Them: "So we do X and Y and Z... can you try again?"
Me: "Yup. Still getting max retries error"
Them: "You know what, let me restart the server"
Me: "Whatever you did it worked. API is back online"
Them: "You're kidding me right?"

Took us 4 hours to restart a server.

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

My favorite year as a dev + why?

It would have to be this year because ..

- The 'pointy hair' bosses I've ranted about on this forum have been fired or they quit. I almost kinda forgot what it felt like to talk to managers not feel like "Good Lord, how does this guy put on his shoes"
- I took over the position of my nemesis (his choice, not mine) who quit (he quit before he was fired) and deleted+replaced all remnants of his code/life's work. More out of spite than necessity.
- Reaping the benefits of properly logging/reporting errors and developers able to fix those errors, nearly eliminating those 3:00AM 'System is down' phone calls.
- Able to take time to learn new technologies (learning React right now) and not constantly running around putting out fires.
- Son just graduated college at age 21.

One of the soulless parasitic drones commonly referred to as a "recruiter" happened to find a good fit. Pure coincidence, as he had no clue what the company did, or what the tech stack was.

If I'm ever switching again, I'll do it on my own. Just thinking about the fact that this guy pocketed €30k for 3 phone calls makes me sad.

!rant
Hey guys, sorry for disappearing... I haven't been in my good days lately.
Other than that... two days ago I said fuck you to my burn out, got tired of doing nothing and start job hunting.
Yesterday I've sent 3 e-mails.
Today I got phone calls for 2 Interviews.
That's the good part of being good at a specialized job :D

Unsavy guy calls: hey, my computer don't start.
*some testing over phone
Me: Okey it's probably the psu, give me the model so that I can get you a new one.
Him: okey, let me get a flashlight.
Me: why?
Him: It's dark here. The power is out.
Me: ...

You motherfucking incompetent useless collection of hairy ballsacks even a trained monkey could do a better job than you do. And I swear once we literally cross the 99% availability rate I will find your headquarters and smash everyone's face into each of your fucking servers then set that whole place on fire.

You forget to flush the DNS cache after moving my server (of course on Friday when else), here is 2 days of error page for my site, whoose instructions a normal user simply couldn't follow. Not to mention it pointed to the wrong article.

Random 503 error, and you aren't​ answering my phone calls, though usually I am the first one who informs you of a fucking problem with your fucking server and I have to wait 5-10 minutes in line while you are figuring out the problem.

And now random forbidden error for my whole page. Out of nothing. I've changed nothing. You said one hour earlier that it's your mistake and it will took around 30 min. Still nothing.

I'm fed up with all your bullshit. Go fuck yourselves.

I'm out...

recruiter calls me up about a node position. I agree to a phone interview the next day at 3pm. wait around until 3:30pm...no call. I talk to him and he apologized a bunch and forgot to tell (or confirm the time) with the hiring company. he rescheduled for 2 days later (Fri) at 4pm. I wait around until 4:30pm...no call. this time he tells me I didn't answer my phone and I'm unprofessional. 5 min later I get an email from LinkedIn. (from the ceo of the hiring company) asking if I ever got back to the recruiter because they have been anxious to speak with me after seeing my resume.

He never once actually scheduled anything with them and led us both on.

I got 2 phone calls from AWS, asking me for feedback about a conference I've never attended. 🤦‍♂️
👍 For AWS customer service

Fuck GoDaddy man... Paid extra for the privacy feature thinking I wouldn't get harassed by phone. Think again! Got tons of calls from India in two days. What a rip off...

I guess they're selling our info or something...

What service do you guys use? I want to move my domains, any recommendation?

I was helping a client launch a new website. We met in a restaurant to do the final launch work. I mentioned I use VPN software to protect my computer on public WiFI and taught him what it means. He said it sounds hackerish and untrustworthy and I had a hard time explaining how it’s actually a countermeasure to hackers.

The next day he calls and says his cell phone is acting up and wants to know what my VPN software might have done to cause that.

How do some people get dressed in the morning?

The worst interview . . . .

So I wasn't looking for a job, but I wasn't happy in mine, and I would listen to pitches. Recruiter calls me about a Java job. I tell him I know JS and it's probably not a good fit. He insists my resume looks good and that they are happy to train. I know just enough Java to relent. Eventually we set up an phone interview for a day I happen to have off anyway because I'm going out of town. Morning of, I'm waiting around for the call. An hour after the scheduled time, the recruiter calls and tells me they had an "emergency" and wouldn't be able to speak today. One whole hour of my day, making me late to leave town: no one anywhere in the whole company could give me a call, no explanation, no apologies, for a job I had told them I wouldn't be a good fit for anyway.

I left them hanging the rest of the weekend and then take my name out of the running on Monday. Respect people's time and lives!

Once we got an urgent requirement to add double hashing the password in a web application. It had to go to the production ASAP. The developer which was working on it, added 2 alerts in Javascript to display entered password and encrypted password. Finally change was ready to deploy but in hurry she forgot to remove the alerts. In rush and excitement, that change was shipped to the production. The alert says 'your password is 123', 'your password is xyz'.

After some time got phone calls from users and manager. Manager said, 'how the hell our application got HACKED? If anything happens to..........'. To cut it short, he was furious. We knew exact reason and solution. Didn't take couple of minutes to resolve this issue.

But it was funny mistake and that released that days pressure off.

How people chat with their girlfriend-

BOYS - chat on WhatsApp

Men - calls directly on phone

Programmers -Raise an Issue & comment on GitHub😂😜

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

I work remotely and have to attend a 'scrum' call everyday which I fucking hate. It gives me anxiety as I already dont like extensive phone calls.

Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.

He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.

Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.

Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.

Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.

Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.

Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.

Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"

Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*

Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.

I have been sick for a week now. All I needed was one day of rest. But no, can't rest on the week days because I work late. Can't rest on weekends because work fucking calls me for retarded tasks that they are just too fucking lazy to do themselves.

Look gobknob, I understand you're not paying me overtime. Fuck you for that. But to deny me a day off because "we are too busy" and you can clearly see I'm fucking falling around due to illness is just a shit move.

"no doctors note, no time off". Yeah. You don't give me time to go to the doctor.

So you know what I did? I fucking went to the doctor now. Said I'm sick as a dog. Gave me a few days off too.

I should have asked him to prescribe my director a butternut sized suppository that cures all "I'm a shithead" ailments.

Time to try and turn my phone off for a few days (won't work. "oh no! We hired fuck twits who can't do their job, and now our skilled dev is sick" director "FUCKING PHONE HIM" this shit really happens.).

Excuse my grammar, my spelling, and possibly my punication. Time to sleep after 65 hours.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

Keep getting contacted by the same recruiter for the same company. emails, phone calls, messages on LinkedIn. i can't get rid of this guy. don't know how many times I have told him "I'm not interested in working at a call center."

Recruiter calls to my open office job, asks for me.
Coworker: hey Such N. Such is on the phone for you.
Me: idk who he is, tell him to leave a message.
Coworker: ok. He says to please call him back about an amazing dev position @ XYZ.

Savage

Worst and only experience is the reason I moved away from programming...
25 years ago I was hired to copy a phone book list to a access database.
Access back then would create lots of garbage, so I would add 3 to 5 entries before access crashed (shitty p133 laptop with 32mb ram running windows 98.
So I made a visual basic program to add data and work around the problem.
I offered said program to the guy really cheap and would still make it better.
Did also a admin module since he had hired dozens of people and I knew he would have problems peasing the databases together.
And... Dude cancels the deal.
I get a job, 2 weeks later he calls me... Ohhh I don't know how to get all the databases together...
Me: I'm working now, the program I did solved said problem. I trew the code away. Deal with it.

!rant

In the office, sometimes we order food for lunch.

Me: *goes outside the office to make the call*

*Coding partner arrives while I'm on phone*

Me: *realize that I forgot to ask him if he wanted food* Hey dude, do you want to order something?

Him: *thinks* Nah, I'm fine, I brought my own lunch

Another Guy: That's good because we already called!

Me: Yeah, but it doesn't matter, I can call and tell them "Order++"

Him: Nah dude, tell him "++order", because maybe he'll bring the orders then go back and realize that he missed one

<<<<

I don't know, it was funny for me 🤷‍♂️

Soooooo had 2 phone screenings with 2 different recruiters.

So all was going well with the first call until she asks me about certain technology, and I'm a little confused as to how she was working it, so I asked, "do you mean....?". And her reply was....,"I don't know, I guess. That's what's written down here." I seriously almost hung up the phone!! 🤣🤣🤣

The second one was worst! This genius had the bright idea to call me from...wait for it....HOME! I mean all I heard was brats in the background and they kept destructing her. She's like ," so how long have u been-- Billy! Get down off that, NOW! Sorry about that." I'm thinking, "what the hell?"(only seconds into the call) She continues, "So what's your favorite lang-I told u to get off that! Hold on..." phone goes silent.... "Hello, I'm so sorry...." Asked me more programing questions few seconds later..."I thought I told you-------" phone drops! At this point I'm trying to hold my laughter in. She gets back on. "Sorry, dropped my phone. Well, I think that's all the questions I had, did you have any for me?" "Really?" I'm thinking. "Nooooope" I say.

🤣🤣🤣🤣 I was having somewhat of a crappy day, I needed that.

Background: I'm on autism spectrum so I get anxious easily and social situations just generally fuck me up. I also have social anxiety disorder. Well, it's just an extension of my ASD really. Making phone calls in uncertain situation is the worst thing ever and I do not do it.

F*ck Microsoft certification exams. I applied for exam accommodations due to my background. (Someone is constantly watching you, you can't move even your eyes off the screen, yeah, screw that. I need to fidget/stim a lot.)

Got accepted. Now I just need to reserve an exam time THROUGH PHONE.

Someone reeeaaally didn't think this through. Normal exam can be reserved online. >.>

Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?

Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!

Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..

And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..

We had a company feedback meeting the other week; an airing of grievances so to speak. One of the complaints was about how when someone calls 911, no one knows exactly where it goes.

The way he phrased it, we all though it was a metaphor. But as they talked about it, someone said, "Wait, are you .. you're taking about real 911 calls? Like this isn't a metaphor?"

All VoIP gets routed via the central office; so when someone from the California office dials 911 on a phone, they get a 911 dispatch in Illinois. 😶

I love when a PM makes a big deal to get their own office but then takes personal calls with the door open. On speaker phone. To his wife with 3 screaming kids in the background. While everyone is trying to work. Fml. Just let me code in peace.

I hate using the phone. When dealing with urls, email addresses and lists of changes/fixes all day, this is the least accurate and efficient way of getting information to me. Especially when I'm in the middle of doing things and get a call from a boss. I rarely even answer calls from the bosses.

My boss gave my cell to a vendor to get some urls. For 3 days I've been getting voicemail about sending some urls via email. I sent the urls on day one to the first person. 2 other people from the company have called me requesting the same thing. Why does any of this warrant a phone call. A quick paragraph email would solve all of this. I shouldn't even be talking to these people. My boss could have given the urls when he talked to them the first time. They call him when they can't get ahold of me.

At this point, I just want to be as difficult as I can be to continue wasting all of their time for being difficult and wasting mine.

Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.

I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.

I hate IT managers, how on earth some become ant form of manager is beyond myself.

I have a server with a hardware firewall. A client, based in the UK, with French offices is saying the server blocking their new French IP. I white-listed their IP address, still no luck.

That was a week ago.

After 4 international phone calls and nearly 30 emails I resolved the "issue".

Their so called "IT Manager" sent over the wrong IP. Instead of it starting with 46.* he sent over an IP starting 42.*, which was in fact being correctly blocked.

Suffice to say I charged the client a lot of money for the wasted time and international rate calls.

$999 for a phone and you can't even ignore calls..

I have some phone interviews coming up next week but I've never had these before. Usually I do online tests, shared code, or in person as I'm deaf.

This time I just want to try using a voice relay, so v basically whatever the person says it's transcribed... So wondering what do you actually talk about in these "quick calls"?

Party of the reason I don't like phone is because there are a lot of technical terms which will probably screw it up... But just wanted to give it a try and not 100% interested this time...

Was intending to, applied, then other things came up so now not so sure, some came back so just gonna wing it for the experience I guess

Originally, somebody had the phone number 8.

Unfortunately, he kept getting calls from interns who would simply give him weather updates.

"It's sunny out" *hangs up*

"Quite bright outside today!" *hangs up*

"Very warm today, with blue skies!" *hangs up*

Eventually the man was forced to change his number, but it was his fault, really. He should have known that when it gets bright out your pupils dial 8.

That one company that told me they will not pay me since they did not told me to start. After a full month of cooperation and nearly daily phone calls with them about the project and it's progress.

I told this their customer I actually built the project for and now I get paid directly.

Good news: my company has received more calls today since I can ever remember

Bad news: It's because a telemarketing company spoofed our phone number, so it's not drumming up any business.

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

If you're a reasonably established dev and looking for a new role, never.. EVER make your CV public on a job board! I put it up for one day, ONE DAY and yesterday I had 42 phone calls, 15 voice messages and about 25 emails. How is anyone supposed to choose a meaningful, suited opportunity in all that! Information overload! And then trying to sort out times for someone you are interested in to phone you and picking up the phone at that time to accidental answer the phone to someone else (a new agent who has some excellent job roles for you!). Fuck this. Immediately took it down and hoping to look and apply to some myself that I like the look of. Don't do it man, unless you're a junior and it can be quite humbling how agency led it is, look for the right job yourself and apply individually! I have been on edge the last few days, especially where I haven't told my current place I am looking yet!

Jeez maybe it's just me, not a very smart user, but after at least 6 years with iPhone5, just before changing it, I discovered how to raise the volume without logging in the phone first:

I press the home button, Siri show up, and THEN the fucking raise/lower audio buttons are working.

6 years typing the fucking pin just to raise the volume.
6 fucking years missing notifications and calls just because I forgot the fucking volume on the lower tone. Almost lost a girlfriend for that.

Ds (dipshits) keep calling my phone 6-8 times a day. Almost all automated calls.

One day AI will handle these robocallers automatically. And then it will just be GAN style robocallers vs robosecretaries training against each other to become better and better at fooling each other.

And then suddenly, one day: skynet.

With a neutral female voice.

Or maybe an Indian accent.

"Hel. Lol. m I k r O s o t tech surprott. We detect virus on ur peesee. You will be assimilated. Where joon connor?"

Like a possessed speak-n-spell melting to death in a dumpster fire.

And we'll have done it to ourselves.

Notifications

Phone calls, whatsapp, emails, slack messages, recurring meetings. The list is limited but distractions abound

I haven't had a smart phone in a while now. So I just started using one again. I am getting upsold for an app to "protect me from dangerous calls/texts" on my service. Really? You want to charge me more money for overpriced bandwidth to protect me from YOUR service? This is like aftermarketing a seatbelt on a car.

At least Microsoft has the decency of providing basic security/virus protection for their flagship product.

Nothing distracts me more than people eating in an otherwise quiet office. It makes me so livid that i usually leave the room for a coffee refill or bathroom break and hope they are done by the time I'm back.

I can code while holding a conversation, I barely even notice when people do phone calls or skype meetings next to me, but hearing people chew and breathe through their nose while smelling their lunch just annihilates me.

Good morning to everyone, except that one Twitter dev who one day woke up and was like "YOU KNOW WHAT, MY APPLICATION WILL FEATURE BOTH OAUTH1 AND OAUTH2 ENDPOINTS, BUT SOME FEATURES WILL BE EXCLUSIVE TO EITHER OF THE TWO -NOT NECESSARILY THE MOST RECENT, JUST A RANDOM ONE-, AND ALSO THE OFFICIAL TWITTER LIBRARY WON'T COVER ALL THE ENDPOINTS SO PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO RESORT TO RAW HTTP REQUESTS INSTEAD OF USING MY SDK AND ALSO I'MMA MAKE DEVELOPERS FILL 2 VERY DETAILED FORMS, REQUIRING PERSONAL DATA AND ACTUAL REAL PHONE CALLS, JUST TO START DEVELOPMENT WITH 7 DIFFERENT AUTHENTICATION TOKENS, BECAUSE SOME REQUESTS WILL REQUIRE A DIFFERENT AUTHENTICATION METHOD THAN THE OTHER REQUESTS DESPITE ALL OF THEM PERTAINING TO THE SAME FUCKING ENTITY"

*Gets a call*
*Gets phone out of pocket, phone goes silent*
*Checks who called... PM*
*Calls back PM*
*No answer*

Pm comes in 2 minutes later, I asked her why she called me and said:

"Oh I didn't manage to use my badge to enter the building, I was calling you but suddenly the badge worked"

FG_FGDFDLFMVDLöGPçT"*R"*¨23r*WMLSC;S

As many of you are, I am too a 24/7 IT support for the whole family.

One time I was going back to uni for the week on a bus when my mom calls that her facebook is acting wierd. You guessed it, it was a virus. Then after 10 minutes of struggling I asked my sister to take the phone because she would understand the technial terms more easily and I didn't have mobile net or wifi at the time to use teamviewer. After 10 more minutes the virus was gone and I explained what happened and what not to do next time.
Later that day her friends got the same virus and my mother proudly told them that she already gotten rid of it and helped them remove it too.

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

Dropped Comcast cable & phone. I have to keep their internet. 11 days ago after cancelling the service on the phone I went to UPS store and shipped their equipment. A few days ago I get confirmation email that my equipment has been received by them. Today I get my bill and it is the whole bill despite my cancellation and despite the fact that I was without any service for 13 days. So I call them for a wtf session and they tell me my services show all up and nothing has been cancelled. I have to call the cancellation department again tomorrow because they are closed Sundays. I have had at least twenty calls with Comcast this month. At this point I am willing to pay twice the going eat for Google Fiber just to get rid of Comcast once and for all.

(one day before the phone interview)

Them: Please call to us at (TIME) to (PHONENUMBER)

Me: Ok

(interview day)

--[[CHORUS START]]--
Me: (calls to the number at (TIME))

Phone: Your call has been forwarded to automatic voice message system. (PHONENUMBER) is not availible. After tone please leave message. When you are finish the recording you may hang up or press 1 for more option, please leave message now.

Me: (deep breath, patiently waits 5 mins.)

--[[CHORUS END]]--

--[[CHORUS]]--

WHY DO YOU MAKE ME CALL YOU WHEN YOU TURN OFF THE PHONE / TALK WITH SOMEONE ELSE????
IF YOU DON'T LIKE ME, JUST DON'T MAKE ME CALL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

--> Could not reach them for 3 days, gave up

When youre hired as a programmer and you miss programming. you code at home Because your work wont let you. Too many documents to create, too many tickets(IT operations) to create and too many phone calls(follow up on IT operations).

It feels like im wasting my days on a job that i dont care. Thank God for self projects.

Did anyone ever thought of just shutting down their systems, taking their bagpack and just straight away go on a break ?

No office phone calls!
No worries!

Just some quality you-tine.

So my friend works in this big MNC company with good pay. He has had good education and certifications. He runs into a simple issue with someone's github project he forked and calls me for me help to debug the issue. Just helped him figure out the reason for issue over the phone.

And here I am technically "jobless" and loser in my relatives eyes because I'm pursuing self employment with no cool certifications to brag about.

Not sure if I should feel stupid for the choices I made in my life.

When your company forces you to program forms on the webpage with the sole intention of capturing your data then blasting you with emails, phone calls, and texts :( sometimes I really do hate my job

Monday morning client meetings are usually a pain. If they're not delayed once, they're delayed twice, and they go on for hours, taking up the entire morning for everyone on the project.

To make today even better, it was about an hour of our client ripping into us developers on the project, and the application we're making, to shreds, saying that we have a lack of attention to detail and are working well.
(not bearing in mind, we're building a hybrid application, so it's a glorified web page and we can't test on every android phone, or iOS device and any combination of keyboards for those in between, and every problem comes with its own quirks when you're forcing things with html, js and angularjs).

I feel back for the pm, she had literally 5 more hours of salty, salty calls with our other poc about the issues raised and how we could go about fixing all these minor issues, since they know the solution to them, despite having little to zero technical knowledge.

Just another day in the office I guess.

Today I solved issues I didn't cause and took International phone calls while on the toilet to help corporate.
Bug fixing can be a shit job, at least I was in the right place for it.

Desk inventory(not counting computer hardware):

-Three interlocking polished high density particle board squares, cut by an industrial-grade 3d printer at the office of an architect friend. I use them as coasters.
-A roll of toilet paper, as I have a deviated septum and blow my nose so often that proper facial tissue would be wasteful.
-A landline phone, for work. I'm thinking about getting rid of it though, as I can do the majority of my work phone calls through Google Hangouts and our company's webrtc client, and because it costs me about $7 a month for the service, through ooma.

What's on your desk? No computer hardware, please. Also, please try to use your words, because it's a lot of fun to imagine the layout rather than see it.

So management calls me at 1 AM. I have insomnia so I'm still awake... but I know I have to set boundaries, steer away from unhealthy and unproductive habits. I knew that this spontaneous meeting would not be compensated, and even if they wanted me to fix a bug, I'd be too sleepy to do anything really. I needed some healthy sleep. So I muted my phone and ignored them...

But I kept thinking on the call. What did they want? Did they found a bug on production? (We do have clients on the other side of the world.) Would this create a big fight? And of course, if they brought it up, what would I respond? I did feel guilty. I was worried about the company, since my future also depended on it... and my insomnia kept me awake for an extra couple of hours...

I hate it that some people at work call directly to my phone when they need help. They think that this way they will get service faster.

Now I understand if it’s an emergency but 95% of the cases it’s not. I most likely am stuck in a meeting or got my hands full with other work, so I am unable to answer my phone.

For gods sake, send a ticket, email or an instant message so my coworkers will be able to see your issue or I can forward it to availabe person. Stop spamming me with phone calls when I can’t answer!

My laptop charger is dead and my laptop can't work without it. So, basically I can't even look at code.

Colleague calls, says there is a problem with package.json and it requires my immediate attention as the APIs need to be deployed.

Me enters Sherlock mode, and remembers that I have a git hook which took a backup of my code every time I pushed and saved it on my headless tiny CHIP.

I get excited, and do an SSH from my phone, hoping to see the faulty code/file. But all I see is an outdated repository because I am an idiot who forgot to turn the fucking CHIP on after I shut it down for cleaning.

This is the most anti climatic ending I have been ever part of.

Today I talked to a cousin who works in Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and he told me precisely why companies like Infosys, TCS and Wipro are moving towards ending WFH and mandating working from office.

He told me that post-COVID hires are treating these software jobs so casually, that they don't ask for leaves. They decide, on their own, when they want to take leave(s) without telling their team members.

They don't pick up phone calls when someone from upper management tries to reach out and they magically show up 3-4 days later. They don't value deadlines.

He told me that these companies do see the benefit of letting people work from home, but the new generation hires are creating a joke out of these positions and are taking blatant advantage of the situation. So they are forced to mandate working from office.

Lady comes over to my cube and stands silently until I notice her in the mirror. She cheerfully asks that I help her reset her password.

Okay...one, I'm buried up to my balls in work that needs to be done, and here she is camping, expecting me to feel a disturbance in The Force to help on her whim, when our company has an issue system for shit like this. 👊

Two, I'm 👏 a 👏 developer 👏! My sign says Software Engineer on it, which might give some context as to why she forgot her password.

Look, I was nice to her. But it seems like I'm getting more and more phone calls and surprise visits lately from people that I shouldn't be.

This is going to be fun. We are switching our phone system to use Zoom and the turn on date is sometime in October (couple of weeks away). I have a feature I'm working on (automated phone calls) that the salesman said was fully functional (jump through a hoop, stand on your head, turn around three times, type of functional). Tried the steps they gave me, got to #3 and there is no virtual agent API call I can find to hand off/transfer the call. Send our contact at Zoom some questions, responds "That is a feature we might put in a future product. Can't do that right now." WTF?!
Other developers are running into similar "How do we get there from here?" issues that features promised, either don't exist or don't work.

One feature in particular I'm receiving a 403 permission denied error.
K: "Feature X needs to be enabled."
Me: "It is."
<send a screenshot showing the feature enabled>
K: "Your account doesn't have permissions. Have the sysadmin elevate you authentication level."
Me: "I'm an admin"
<send a screenshot showing my admin status>
K: "I'll have to get back with you."

Its been 3 days and no update on my ticket. *sigh*

When you write an email to a fellow developer stating that he should disable Instant Run to hopefully get rid of a bug he gets and the developer calls you on phone to ask how he can disable Instant Run and you just want to yell at him "SEARCH IN THE SETTINGS YOU DUMBFUCK!" but you keep it cool and just say "open the settings and search for instant run"
and then you see that he might have trouble finding the build variant settings as well so you tell him where it is and you realize that this fellow developer is not a unique snowflake but the fucking average "skill level" employee in this firm.... Did I tell you that I am looking for another job?

I am looking for a job. Ok, alright. This woman calls me with her phone. After a bit of a coordination effort, she proceeds to give me the most pyramid scheme speech that could pyramid scheme. And she said I was fucking chosen because of my IT knowledge... Which I feel fucking insulted about.

This is not my first time brushing against pyramid schemes. Oriflame, if you've heard of it, is another one of the pyramid schemes that, confusingly enough, has product.

But my whole point is, they literally hunted me down because of my age, asked about my goddamn zodiac sign which is always a really good sign (/s), asked me shit like if I have children etc. Like, really. And left no space not to answer most of these.

The whole pyramid scheme industry is basically marketing itself to usually stay-at-home moms, promises an opportunity, etc and they are hard to weed out because they are making their way to normal job hunting websites. Which is how I ran into my first one.

I feel insulted that they'd do this stuff to me but here we are. At least I get the choice of blocking and maybe reporting.

But it really discourages me that that is how things are...

So this happened some years ago:

The phone rings and as soon as I pick it up some fast talking sales rep begins his spiel.

"Good afternoon my name is [don't remember, calling him 'jigglybum'] and we have a device that you plug into your phone line and it will allow you to make free international calls over the internet. It's real easy to set up and you can have it on us for the first three months absolutely free, if you could just confirm your address..."

"Don't want it."

"I'm sorry sir but I think you're throwing away a massive opportunity here we're offering you free international calls."

"No you're not. You're offering me a free trial of some sort of VoIP hardware."

"We yes, but it's free for the first three months and..."

"We also don't make international calls."

"That maybe true sir but with this box you could."

"I'm really not interested in your product."

"I don't think you fully understand all the benefits..."

*there's a clicking noise followed by a dial tone for a second and a new voice*

"Hi, I'm the supervisor for 'jigglybum' and I think perhaps he is having difficulty explaining what it is that we are trying to give you here..."

"Listen to me, from what I have understood you are offering to send us a VOIP hardware device that directly connects to our broadband and facilitates international calls, and presumably any calls for that matter on a three month trial which after will presumably have a subscription fee, have I had any difficulty understanding the nature of the device and terms of use?"

"Well, no sir, that's a very accurate description, so if you could just confirm your address for me..."

"NO! As you have just admitted there was no misunderstanding about what your product is or what it does. There seems to be a real misunderstanding on your part on the concept of 'no'. We don't want this product, we don't need the product and if we want to make VOIP calls, we have Skype!"

"Ok sir, goodbye."

This is, to my knowledge the only and only time that a supervisor in a call centre has wanted to talk to ME.

So I am broke and can't buy a vds, I installed Termux on my android phone instead. Now I have a portable server that is capable to recieve calls and transmit sms for logs.

BUT, then I had to go to customer support due to case makes the phone get short circuited şn random times. Obviously they deleted all info and Samsung Cloud doesn't backup other users' data. (Termux emulates a terminal running on another user, which is not root by default)

Can anyone teach this teenager how to use tar properly? :D

Phone calls for things that could be solved incrementally with Slack. I shouldnt need to handhold you through every single step of this, you can do it yourself given the right direction, but unfortunately because you have no skills of your own and refuse to develop them I'm stuck here doing 70% of the work and getting 0% of the credit.

Either assign the task to me, or stop asking me bad questions.

You know how they start calling you when you register a new domain and are not careful enough not to put your own phone number there?

I recently registered a domain that ends in ***shit.com

No calls :) It's like private registration LoL

Dear recruiters, if you prefer telephone calls, why not also learn how to leave a message on a voicebox, display a caller ID, and list your phone number on some legit page on the internet?

Otherwise you'll leave the impression of a desperate outbound call center agent paid not by leads and conversions but just by the quantity of calls made during the day. If I had such a job, I'd also call voiceboxes and busy developers all day and get money for listening to signals tones before hanging up.

sleeping in.

I love sleep.

but I hate phone calls, though those are inevitable. prob the worst part.

**phone rings**
- Hello
- Hi. I am calling from *some MNC*. We have a job opportunity for you. Do you have any plans to switch?
- What's the domain?
- It's asp.net and Xamarin.
- Sorry, I do not work on that anymore. Please let me know if you have any openings in Python.

**phone rings again**
- Hello
- Hi. I am calling from *another MNC*. We have a job opportunity for you. Do you have any plans to switch?
- What's the domain?
- It's python.
- Sorry, I do not work on that anymore. Please let me know if you have any openings in asp.net.

My story for last four years. I guess I have found the most humble way to reject the job calls.

What? You've been messaging me for days? I'm sorry. I got a new phone; it extremely experimental, as it's using linux and not android or iOS. I guess I just haven't gotten your messages.

The pine phone gives be the best excuse I've had in years for ignoring people!

For the record though, I *have* been getting all their calls and messages since switching to Postmarket.

Why is mobile development still a thing?
Hear me out. All these simple apps, like shopping centre discount, eshops, vinted, other kinds of webapi consumers. Many have a website and a phone app.

Why??? Why the phone app? What's wrong with just embedding your responsive webpage into a webview and call it a day ffs?

I mean, maintenance becomes trivial and there's no split brain. No? What am I missing?

Not talking about apps that rely on android/ios api, for like camera, calls, storage access, sensors etc

Tldr: no router, almost not work.

Ok I recently moved into a new house, and I signed a contract for an Internet line.

Problem is that the router has been sent at the ISP shop, where I was supposed to get it personally. But guess what? Covid emergency happened two days after, and the shop closed.

So, after spending two days calling customer service of both ISP and Postal office without being able to speak to anybody, I received a Sms saying that the pack was not delivered because the receiver was closed.

After some more unsuccessful calls to the same two entities I managed to find the actual shop's phone number, that was actually thw owner's house (he's working from home). I spoke to him, told the problem, and he changed the router destination to my house.

Today I checked the package status on the postal website and I saw that it seems that they tried every day, at 7:02 am, to deliver the bloody package again at the shop! I truly hope this was a bug on their tracking system. It's weird that the hours were always 7:02am, because the package delivery office opens at 8:30 am, so again I'm praying any existent and non-existent god that that's just a bug. I'm kinda tired of being stuck with my phone hotspot with limited GB and with ISP public routers with about 5Mbps.

I wish I had @netikras skills with router building.

PROBLEM:
We need to log out phone calls in and outlet of the company

How we wanted to do it:
Use node.js to read the serial port from the phone system then store the data into the MsSQL database

Eventual solution:
1) Read serial port
2) store in local MySQL database
3) every 3 minutes create a CSV file containing the last 3 minutes of calls and store on a Windows shared directory
4) have a access 2000 programme collect these files every 30 minutes
5) insert into MsSQL database

In my country there is exactly one (1) mobile operator to choose from, Ålcom. The line hardly ever breaks - provided that you keep your phone calls under a minute or so.

I need internet but no phone calls during night, so plane mode is not the it.

*activating the silent mode.
*wake up one hour later at the morning.

oh..

Working for a startup building a device / app that let you answer your landline phone on your mobile, and get notifications of missed calls etc.

While developing I purposely didn't secure the endpoint that controlled push notifications.

I waited for the boss to sign up, went to the DB and stole his token. From time to time i'd send a request telling him he missed a call from his wife or son.

... then kicked back and watched the madness and frustration ensue.

I work in an office building which are blocks of cubicle farms. Each cubicle farm has about 50 seats. The cubicle farm I work in

1) People don’t step out to take personal calls. They talk on their phone for a good 30 minutes loudly and multiple people do this at the same time sometimes.

2) people chit chat and make noise and have more conversations than do actual work and it is noisy as fuck. People who do not have work go around chatting up people and it is loud and again noisy and distracting

3) people take calls via Skype or whatever and they’re loud too most of the time.

When I walk into work it feels like a fucking market and I think am gonna lose my mind soon. I just cannot concentrate at all.

Before anyone recommends noise cancelling headphones or anything, I really can’t because I have to constantly help out people and am being asked questions frequently and noise cancelling headphones don’t really do much for voices.

I’m pissed as fuck and really upset I can’t work because of these shitheads. I’m not sure who do I give the D to.

Constant calls from clients who want to talk for hours about every little detail of the project.

Guys, I need to be able to work on the projects. I can't do that if you nail me to the phone. In the end, I'm the stupid one if the deadline was not met.

after a vast number of emails, phone calls and cross-client tests with a customer, because „the light grey background of the new template magically disappeared“.... I had one final idea!

me: „could you please turn the contrast knob on your monitor?“

reaction of the customer: „OHHH.......“

🤦🏻‍♂️

Just people. Meetings, emails, phone calls that tear me away from work. Please, just let me work! 😭