This happened at my previous job where I worked for a dating app. It was at a time where the CEO was trying to turn the dating app into “more than a dating app” by adding tons of social features. We always had “interests” which allowed users to see what interests they had in common with another person, but he wanted to take the social component even further.

So with that, he decided we needed an “activity feed.” The activity feed would show what various Facebook connected users were liking on Facebook, posting on Facebook, etc. On a dating app. Where the majority of the audience was > 50 years old. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and everyone but the CEO knew it was destined for failure before we started building it.

But that’s not the best part. The best part was when we launched the activity feed component. We launched it late on day and went home shortly after. The next morning, we came in, and checked on the activity feed to see what was doing. It was literally all spammers liking porn/sex related stuff on Facebook. It was a complete disaster. All garbage but not just boring garbage - completely obscene garbage.

And just like that, the activity feature came and went in the course of a few days.

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

Interviewer: "..and what was your biggest achievement in your previous job experiences?"

Me:

I believe this is why companies look for Junior Developers who actually know enough to be a mid or senior developer.

One day, a company that doesn't have the technical chops to know the difference between python and ruby hire a developer who is still in school. That developer doesn't know what he's worth, so the company gets him for pretty cheap. He does amazing things, takes last minute requests, learns some along the way, but eventually leaves because he just got contacted by a recruiter telling him how much he's really worth. He leaves, but the company needs to fill his spot. The company asks the former rockstar all the technologies he used to accomplish his job and throw that into a job description. The company could only really afford the junior so they keep all the stuff about being a junior, but because they need to maintain all the hodge podge stuff the previous developer put in, they need someone with experience enough to jump in.

My boss just designed this and asked me to implement it, without asking for any input.

I was a UX designer at my previous job. This makes me want to cry.

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

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

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

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

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

Nope... The "senior" knew little

You start new job and take over huge codebase without tests and documentation.

It turns out programming language is custom language made by previous developer who was the only one maintaining project.

There is no source version control.

Language runs in vm developed in Fortran.

No one cared to this day cause everything was working.

Project is critical for multi billion dollar corporation that sells medical equipment that keep people alive.

You can’t test your code on real devices only on virtual ones that were made using same custom language but you can’t find source code for it.

Previous developer accidentally died before you were hired.

You signed contract with penalties that will ruin your life.

Your first task is to add “small” feature.

Good luck !

In my previous job boss wanted me to implement all features found on WhatsApp 🤦🏼‍♂️

I'm lucky I found another job two months later

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

Waaaay too many but let's go with this one for now.

At my previous job there was a web application which was generating about 1gb of log data a second. Server was full and the 'fullstack engineers' we called had zero clue about backend stuff and couldn't fix it.

Me and another engineer worked our asses off to figure this out but eventually the logging stopped and it went back to normal.

Great, right?

For that moment. I was the on-call server engineer and at like 3am I got called awake because this shit was happening again.
Sleep drunk with my phone I ssh'd into the server, not sure about what to do at first but then suddenly: let's chattr the goddamn log file...

$ chattr +i /var/log/logfile

Bam, worked, done, back to sleep.

(this comment + param marks the file in a way that it can only be read until the mark is removed, so you can't write to it or move it or remove it or whatever)

!rant
Handed over my keys and computer to my boss a moment ago and left the office for the last time. Spent 3 years there, and most of the people there came with me from my previous job I spent another 3 years at.
Feels heavy to leave a bunch of great people.

Two weeks until I start my job as a developer at a game company though.
Took me 6.5 years of work to finally get there.
Super stoked!

And I won't lie, some stickers on my new work laptop would not be a bad thing.

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

Was struggling with depression and stress for an extended period. So, naturally, I had more sickdays than average.
However, I was still managing to overperform on my goals, so when it came time to discuss salary I was hopeful.

Didn't get a raise, not even a pat on the back. My manager told me he couldn't justify giving me the raise I had earned simply because I had had too many sick days. So my actual performance didn't count. Everybody else got raises though.

On a previous occasion he told me that I had to 'Learn what it means to have a job' and get my priorities straight. I told him I already had very little social life so I could spend what little energy I had on work. I tried to explain to him how depression works and he assured me he understood.

Yeah, right. My colleague with back problems, who suddenly couldn't walk, didn't get that treatment.

Depression is real. I'm so glad they ended up firing me so I could work for a place that cares.

I was messaged on LinkedIn by a recruiter while I was in the UK for my honeymoon. When we got back home to Colorado I called him back and everything went well enough that a tech screen call was set up between four or five guys on the team, and me.

I was expecting to be grilled about various Linux, networking, video transcoding, database, and transaction handling questions and problems, as that was the bulk of the job's description. But instead they just gushed that they'd used software I'd written at previous jobs and loved it.

It was very friendly and they never challenged me (not being arrogant here-- they literally never tested me) and we wound up just talking about, "the job," and about how the work sucked without the tools and apps I'd written.

I got an offer for $30k more than what I asked, the next day.

This applies to some of my co workers in my previous job

Follow up rant from my previous one about the Linux job hunting.

Recruiter called today! He said that the company he recruits for is looking for people with a lot of Linux experience and since I've been working with it for seven+ years (not extremely long but keep in mind that this job requires no certifications etc except for a highschool diploma) he really wants me on board.

Asked him what my chances are and if he could be honest about that (it's a genuinely nice recruiter) and he replied with "95 percent".

It'd be loads of traveling every day but including free certifications etc so awesomeness!

Let's see how this goes :)

Again I am unemployed, and now in a worse situation than before. In a country far from family, parents and everyone I know, just me and my wife and in a very difficult situation.

Summing up what happened was as follows:

My previous boss had a very horrible habit of being rude to everyone, yelling at the developers in the middle of the office and being rude whenever he could. And when he saw that we did not lose his composure and showed no fear he used the tightening of salary and employment to threaten us and do unpaid overtime.

Then he decided to yell at me, I asked him not to do this in the middle of the office that is not polite and everything else, he resigned me.

Since last year it's very difficult to find a good job, I'm not even talking about salary, I'm talking about a good job even where I earn some money to live in the least in humility but at least work with legal and educated people.

Wife has literally the best IT job in the city. First wall of miners up and running. From my previous post of the 8 card boxes to this -- stacks of them and more stacks of bitmains. Fuck I wish these were ours. I know one IT honey that's getting chased around the house tonight cause she's sending me pics like this:

Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.

Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»

All that boring stories leads to my final question :

is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?

Please answer no.Please.

Riskiest Dev choice...

Leaving a previous job, moving 1000KM (620 Miles) away with no job prospects and going absolutely broke.

This was all in the name of “I need a better job”, so what better way to force yourself to get one.

I’m currently in my second job since then and now make just over double what I was earning before.

Sometimes it takes a high risk to get out ahead.

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

How I've got my previous job?
Imagine you are in a wild techno club. Dark aisles, A dj from berlin behind the turntables blasting out hard beats, couples kissing on extasy pills.

And there was a friend I've didn't meet in ages. "how do you do?" she asks. "ah... you know i'm on a job hunt for a year i feel misrable". "really? my dad is looking for somebody, send him your resNZNZNZ!" "WHAT? can't hear you!" "Send him your resume!" "Ahhh! okay great!"

So on 24. december 5pm, snow outside, i've sat on wooden table in the kitchen of her father discussing the conditions for the job. It was the start of a crazy time. Dining with millionaires on their Castles. Shaking hands with top businesses leaders. Going to China and having dinner with the 500 richest chinese at once. Wild!

so my advice for you nerds, don't stay in your comfort zone behind the screen on weekends. Vistit a techno club sometimes. You may find a pretty girl/boy with a CEO as a father.

I got a LinkedIn message from the HR from my previous company about a job opening as if I never existed and never met them before. I'm just a profile to them.

Stupidity level: HR

Some companies be like-

.. In job posting - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

..in Introduction - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. in Interviews - We are the next big thing. We are already changing the industry. Think of us like Google / Facebook etc...

.. during Interviews - Our interview process is rigorous because we are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. questions in interviews - Since we are Google / Facebook, please answer questions on Java, C/C++, JS, react, angular, data structure, html, css, C#, algorithms, rdbms, nosql, python, golang, pascal, shell, perl...
.. english, french, japanese, arabic, farsi, Sinhalese..
.. analytics, BigData, Hadoop, Spark,
.. HTTP(s), tcp, smpp, networking,.

..

..

..

.. starwars, dark-knight, scarface, someShitMovie..

You must be willing to work anytime. You must have 'no-excuses' attitude

.........................................

Now in Salary - Oh... well... yeah... see.... that actually depends on your previous package. Stocks will be given after 24 re-births. Joining bonus will be given once you lease your kidneys.

But hey, look... We got free food.

Well, SHOVE THAT FOOD UPTO YOUR ASS.

FUCK YOU...
FUCK YOUR 'COOL aka STUPID PIZZA BEER - CULTURE'.
FUCK YOUR 'FLAT- HIERARCHY'.
FUCK YOUR REVOLUTIONARY-PRODUCT.

FUCK YOU!

!!rant

When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.

But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.

Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.

I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.

Im one of the people who got laid off due to covid19. I was hoping to find work at the same salary my previous job paid me at the very least. A friend of mine pointed out the fact that since i've been in the industry a while that I could ask for a lot more than what I made. I didn't believe him, but since my wife agreed, I've been asking for double my previous salary. I actually got a job that met my ask. I'm glad to say that after being afraid I was getting in over my head, I can actually do this. Glad my friend told me my worth and I hope others have friends that can do the same for them.

*Programers can't spell*

In a previous job, I once spelled inquiries as enquiries. It was a service and it was used in many places throughout the app. Somehow, it made it through peer review and even my teammates started using the misspelled word.

I didn't realize my mistake till months later and by that time I thought it was too much work to fix it (or I was too lazy).

I'm pretty sure we even misspelled it for the on-screen texts.

Moral of the Story: know how to spell shit

--- SUMMARY OF THE APPLE KEYNOTE ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER 2018 ---

MacBook Air:
> Retina Display
> Touch ID
> 17% less volume
> 8GB RAM
> 128GB SSD
> T2 Chip (Core i5 with 1.6 GHz / 3.6 GHz in turbo mode)
Price starting at $1199

Mac Mini:
> T2 Chip
> up to 64GB RAM
> up to 2TB all-flash SSD
> better cooling than previous Mac Mini
> more ports than previous Mac Mini - even HDMI, so you can connect it to any monitor of your choice!
> stackable - yes, you can build a whole data center with them!
Price is 799$

Both MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recyled aluminium!
Good job, Apple!

iPad Pro:
> home-button moved to trash
> very sexy edges (kinda like iPhone 4, but better)
> all-screen design - no more ugly borders on the top and bottom of the screen
> 15% thinner and 25% less volume than previous iPads
> liquid retina display (same as the new iPhone XR)
> Face ID - The most secure way to login to your iPad!
> A12X Bionic Chip - Insane performance!
> up to 1TB storage - Whoa!
> USB-C - Allow you to connect your iPad to anything! You can even charge your iPhone with your iPad! How cool is that?!
> new Apple Pencil that attaches to the iPad Pro and charges wirelessly
> new, redesigned physical keyboard
Price starting at 799$

Also, Apple introduced "Today at Apple" - Hundreds of sessions and workshops hosted at apple stores everywhere in the world, where you can learn about photography, coding, art and more! (Using Apple devices of course)

Pretty new at the job still.

-”Hey, best practice to do X?”

”Just check how we did it in previous code”

*checks whole bloody project, everything done in 500 different ways by 20 people*
*selects what seems as the best solution already used*

”Ya, you should have done X like this instead”

😒

I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

!rant

I got the job!

Yesterday morning I got a call from the wonderful recruiter I’d been working with, to say they were giving me a decent competitive offer 😄

After handing in my notice, backing my colleague, trying my best to look after the current employer... it paid off, I have the job that I wanted.

The guys at the new place really impressed me out the gate, clever, decent people doing some interesting stuff.

Senior is going back in my title where it belongs.

Basically it all worked out in time for Christmas 😄

I’ve been tracking this little saga on a tag but if you want to know what lead me down this route my previous rants are there. I’ll continue to rant as I finish in the current place and move on to the next 😄

How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb? One. But you can guarantee the next developer who comes into the room will want to take it out and replace the bulb and the fixing because the previous developer did a shit job.

I've only experienced a quitting coworker once.

In a previous job a coworker quit with the words directed to the boss in a very loud and aggressive manner: "Ich künde, du verfiggti pissmorchle!!!"*, while throwing around office chairs and swearing all kinds of nasty stuff.

My boss at that time was indeed a fucking wanker. He exploited the shit out of every employee and expected from us that we work overtime for free. No pauses were paid, eventhough he'd had to by law.
I don't have to mention that he was a sexist fucktard and 3 female ex-employees sued him for sexual assault.
Sadly he is still in charge of that wanker company and he "miraculously" dodged every "bullet".

* trigger-safely and roughly translated to: "I quit, you fucking wanker!!!"

I HOPED I WOULDN'T BE BALD AS MY DAD BUT AT THIS RATE I WILL BE HAIRLESS FROM TEARING IT OUT ON MY BLOODY OWN

I got hired for cleaning up a 2 year project of rushed spaghetti code , where they previously only had 1 programmer aND HE WROTE 37 THOUSAND LINES OF CODE!

OH WE NEED A NEW FEATURE?! LEMME JUST RESEARCH THIS COMMENT-LESS CRAP FOR MULTIPLE MILLENIA BEFORE I CAN GRASP WHAT THE FLYING FRICKIN FRIDGE CODE DOES

To top it off, I've about ONE MONTH LEFT BEFORE BETA RELEASE TO FIX THE CODE!

I'm super grateful for this job as it's my first programming job BUT I'M GONNA SET THE REPOSITORY ON FIRE SOON AAAAHHHHHH

HOW CAN YOU, THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER, WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WHERE MOSTLY ALL FILES ARE +2000 ROWS OF UNDOCUMENTED CODE

OH AND JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER:
"You can just remove the unused code and refractor it some, izi"

IZI MY SHITTY POOP CAR
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Now with that out of the way, how would you recommend handling a stressful release deadline?

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

-When they ask for your current/previous salary in a job interview, tell them that you don't find that relevant or that you don't want to tell. If they insist on you telling your salary, GTFO

- When they are overenthusiasticly telling about all the latest technologies they're using without staying one word about legacy projects, GTFO. It's a trap.

- If you walk trough the developer room(s) and everybody is extremely focused and just programming like a zombie, GTFO.

- If they cannot tell you one single downside of the company, it's probably too good to be true.

That's about everything I can think of at the moment

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

Background: I'm proficient at PowerShell, I was told that I got hired to my previous job (as DevOps engineer) mainly because of that skill.

Few months after I started I wrote a script to automate some processes. My boss saw the script and told me that it was too complicated, and that I should make it more simple.
Now I'm all into clean code, meaningful names, small functions.
So the code was readable and maintainable.
I asked him in what way is it complicated. He didn't know exactly. (Later I figured that he didn't know of some of the (built-in) cmdlets and functions I used.)
He raised his hand high and made a gesture and explained that I'm "that high (skill? enthusiasm?)", then lowered his hand to a lower position to mark the bottom line, then raised it up half way up and said that he wants me here - in the middle.
After that he added: "This is not Microsoft! and we don't own the 3 other buildings that can be seen from our office window" and pointed at the window.

I was surprised by his comment, I didn't know how to respond.
I've got more stories to share about that workplace.
I can't believe I stayed at that place for 1 year and 2 months.

After two extensive talks with a potential employer (they lasted for hours), I decided to accept the offer, although the salary was ~25% lower than at my previous job. Everything else sounded fantastic and I needed that desperately since at the previous company everything was toxic for years.

These new guys wanted a senior php dev because they had none of them, except only wordpress and drupal people who were not skilled enough to take other types of projects (they called them "custom php"). I liked it and thought I'm gonna shine there and quickly earn a raise because the agency will start earning more by getting projects that they were unable to even bid for.

First day at work and I got assigned to a new Drupal project, although it was supposed to be a simple restful API for a simple iOS app. It could be done in a week or less, with no rushing at all. But it had to be Drupal. And I happened to be around to hear that there is a queue of Drupal projects waiting. After 2 days leaving the office late and having my brain melted by nonsense I was looking at, I quit the job.

No offense to Drupal people, I really do admire you, but I just could not stand it after 8 years "doing custom php". It felt too much like being downgraded. But more than that I was pissed off by the fact that I have been shamelessly lied to and tricked to accept something I clearly said that I dont want.

This happened a year ago. I now earn 2.5x more money than those guys offered and work in a very healthy environment. In the meantime, I heard that the other guys shut their company down.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Today I quit my job lol.

In my two previous stories I told you guys about a job offering I got, and after a few more incidents in my old job, I decided I take it.

No, this is not an april fools joke, though it felt quite bad to tell my team lead that I quit on april fools day.

Due to notice period I'll begin my new work at first of july this year, can't wait <3

Previous job:
- Every dev needs to connect to a remote server, and do the coding there because the bosses are afraid that we will "steal" their legacy spaghetti written by the CTO in 2006 (the current year was 2016-2017).
- There are no QAs, because "why do you devs need mommy to look after your codes?"
- Bosses think it's our duty to stay extra hours without overtime payment while talking bullshit about a culture that promotes work life balance. You receive no bonus for staying late, but if you leave work 15 minutes early, HR will have a serious talk with you the next day.
- Bosses require "evidence" when you submit a leave request. For example, you tell them you're taking a vacation, they'll ask you for a copy of airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc.
- Bosses spend a ton on hosting parties for the customers while we're using 6-7 year-old laptops
- The CEO loves firing people for ridiculous reasons. Once he considered firing a guy because the way he walks is funny

How the fuck am I expected to salvage a fucking project that has been handed down to me with.
- No fucking clear architecture
- No fucking documentation
- Fucking shitty ass code base with no fucking coding standards
- The previous team was fucking learning a whole fucking new technology stack *Not fucking kidding* making fucking mistakes left and right
- No code reviews
- Mixing fucking local and cloud enviroment together
- No fucking testing
- Feature that were supposed to be implemented and are not working
- No configuration all the stuff are hard coded
- Full responsiblity for the whole stack
- Only one other guy with me
- And this fucking project has been delayed for a year
- MUCH FUCKING MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Like what the fuck am I expected to do? I took the job thinking that people knew what the fuck they were doing and surprise surprise that was a fucking bust.

the problem is also I am the junior and these fucking people have more experience than me, what the fuck happened to over seeing people's work, PM doesnt give a shit, developers dont give a shit nobody gives a shit.

But when I got this surprise surprise now everyone is interested in finishing the project

BULLSHIT

-Friend of mine telling me this nugget-

At my previous job, we were porting a UNIX system to Windows NT using Microsoft VC++. A colleague of mine, that was in the process of porting his portion of the code, came to me, looking really upset.

Colleague: "Hey! I hate these Microsoft guys! What a rotten compiler! It only accepts 16,384 local variables in a function!"

if people are curious of the PTSD baggage i'm carrying and why i rage so much at everything, see attached picture

granted, this was partly my fault, as i said, i was far too nice, and stayed for far too long

also note this job was AFTER a 2+ previous e-commerce job with ultimately failed project and little pay

UG i mean LOOK at this... i could go on and on for hours "push notifications must run" - yeah a casual bullet point that needs to be finished by end of day? hahahaha

At my previous job a coworker left positive comments alongside any negative ones on my code. “Nice job here. Very clean”, or “nice use of X design pattern here!” Kinda made me look forward to his code reviews.

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

Dear Product owners / Company Owners / Whoever requesting a feature:

Devs like to know they are adding value to whatever product they are working on. Every time you request a stupid no value added request, you kick the dev's soul.

After several hits the developer will stop caring about the software and eventually will get the job done, but oh boy, the amount of tech debt/trash code the dev is gonna leave behind will be horrendous.

Then the next developer, not only takes the hit from another stupid request, he/she will see the crappy code the past sad developer left and will take a double hit. Of course all of them start proactive and try to fix previous blood trails but sadness will catch them eventually.

If you want you're apps/products/reports to be good in a long run don't make stupid requests.

BAs, Stop being Expensive Email Forwarders and challenge a request, understand the process and then hand it to the developer.

Us developers are sensible cute ponies. Treat us well or expect poor quality projects

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

Favorite/most hated language? (I love a good flame war)

Why did you quit your previous job / Moment you've considered quitting your current job?

Why do you think Linux is so much better than OSX? (Ahh yes I feed on apple flavored hipster tears)

What side project are you currently working on?

If you had the best teams and unlimited funds, to be used only on a serious project using both Blockchain, IoT and AI, what would you create?

If you forgot how to code, what other career would you pursue?

What is your "I was so busy wondering if I could, that I forgot whether I should" concept/idea/project?

How many chicken eggs would fit inside the moon if it was hollow? (I like retarded interview questions)

If you started a startup, what unique perk would you offer your developer employees?

Do you under- or overengineer?

Most unnecessary feature you ever had to create?

Most necessary feature your boss/client denied to approve?

You guys get promotions?!

I’ve had to quit and find another job for every title and pay bump I’ve ever received... but I’m at a place now where I’m actually learning a ton of shit, my salary is damn decent (compared to all my previous jobs), and I’m having a blast diving in and working on actual projects vs boring as fuck maintenance / helpdesk type work.

The things on your cv are suppose to be known by you, not by your colleague from the previous job.

I had a guy on interview, who talked about his colleague's work... wtf.

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

At a previous job, we had a CTO and in a meeting of all the department heads, we all realized we have a CTO that knows about as much about tech as the pigeons do.

I’d always seen the confused emoji, I however never knew an actual human being could look like it, I’ve seen confused people, but on this day I saw a living 🤔…

How did I manage to achieve this result, I told him you can’t copy AngularJS code into a Flutter project, I then proceeded to tell him you also cannot copy it into a react project. I think I broke his brain.

Oh and yes, I worked at a development house, all the department heads were developers except for the QA head.

I rage quit my last job, I didn't want to do 'my last comand'. So I requested my 15 days of vacation from the previous year I had at thursday. And when my boss aproved it I delivered my auto fired letter at friday. Since then when someone just leaves in one day they call it 'to do a Dani' in honor to me XD

As stated in a previous story, I just started an internship using angular and am learning it on the job.

The other day, one of the admins posted an issue in gitlab about how easy it was to delete user accounts via the front end.

He wanted someone to add further confirmation to prevent accidentally deleting anyone. Literally just had to hit the X icon and poof they're gone.

I was like, I can do that! Of course, as I was looking at the platforms account page, accidentally deleted that admins account 😅

He thanked me for resolving the issue, and it became a joke around the office about the irony of the situation.

At a previous job, I worked with a graphic designer who knew it all.

The first design he gave me, all font sizes were in points, and way too big.

I asked for them in pixels.

He said points and pixels are exactly the same.

I explained that they were not, when you're using a browser. He got visibly angry, and stormed out of the office to cool down.

When he came back, I sent him a link explaining the difference between points and pixels for digital media.

He sent me pixel sizes.

Next project, same exact thing happens, complete with him angrily storming out of the room.

By the third project, I just started picking my own font sizes, and ignored his point specs.

A turret (white) from Portal 2

A silver RWBY logo

Two foam dice as memorabilia from my previous job

A plush 😈

Plus a collection of various things saved and hidden from the scary hands of destructive children monsters.

We used to have a portal gun (both full size and mini) and a gravity gun on the dresser. But with the advent of children, they’re safely back in their boxes.

So the story start like this, 6 months ago i left my job in a big company for an oportunitiy to work on a new one without all the bureocracy and shit and with better benefits , the first months were wonderful we were using a nice stack of technologies and the team that was assembled was a nice one with smart and hard working people with a few exceptions, but overall very good. One day out of the blue the manager started to presure us to release a project that was on time and wanted us to make extra hours and work on saturdays, sadly we blindly did because we cared for what we were creating, fast forwarding to yesterday, the whole team was called to a meeting and our contracts were terminated without previous advice because the company could not afford to pay us for more time and blahblahblah..., soo here i'm feeling used and sad but with renowed feelings about starting my own business!!

Got a corporate profile pic
Filled out my Linkedin profile
Checked that I'm open for work opportunities
3 months later an HR wrote to me about a nice job opportunity
"Hey, guys, I need more $$$, I'm going to other company"
And here I am, doing even less than at previous job, but get paid 2x more XD

Worst: my previous job was hell and...
Best: in May I quit and so far the current job is a a breeze. Also in 2016 I fully switched to Linux and now everything is going to be fine.

At my previous job we had to complete an online security training exercise. It shows you how to behave secure in the work place, to not open unknown links etc. The scary part was that the entire training thing was BUILT IN FUCKING FLASH. So I'm suppose to listen to some god damn virus shitting flash application on how to do online security?! Get your shit together before teaching others.

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

CEO of previous job, only reachable by email, coming to the office twice a week at best, business trips at no notice, answers every third email, addressing the dev team:
"You need to plan better. A lot of the delays and bugs are due to poor communication and unaddressed issues."

I don't miss that job.

Today I am going to rant about this guy who I am working with in a group for creating a mobile application as a project for a course.

So let me give you some background info about this guy. He has 5 years of experience as data analyst from some company in India. Now he is here in Canada for his masters. I took him in the group thinking given his experience, he can be an asset. However, as I started talking to him it became clear that he has no experience with programming or software development. I am ok with that as everyone is new to something. However, he started intrupting and started giving negative feedback about each and every thing we discussed regarding the project. Don't get me wrong, I am all about getting feesback. But if someone who is just sitting there and just searching stuff on google just to bull shit with people to show that he knows stuff is irritating. He always provide useless feedback and solutions to any problems.

I was talking to him about his past working experience and his future plans after graduating. He literally said, "I want to learn just enough to fake in front of employer during interview. I was doing the same thing in my previous job." I was legit shocked at this moment.

Now I have to tolerate this for another 3 months. I am just worried about the project.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

After two years... I finally was able to quit my job.
I'm finally in a cool job, with a great team, with a cool project (from scratch! )
I have to learn Spring and Vue.js, knowing that I never tried any framework of these languages. But I really want to make it, I didn't suffer for two years, just to be beaten by a stack :p

Thanks for the ones who commented on my rant a few months ago, telling me to keep hoping for a better job. I got hired three days after the end of my previous contract, and I couldn't feel better now!

at a previous job at a shit company ran by bible-thumpers, i was rebuilding the company website for my a-hole boss. I asked him where I should get images from- if there was a stock photo site he preferred or what.
"Just pull them off Google. That's what I do."

Later when I was combing through the site, I saw he'd added images that CLEARLY STATE another COMPANY'S NAME in the image themselves. Nothing like promoting another company on your OWN company website, huh?
(And no, their company name is not ActiveMobi.)

They're still there, 3+ years later. Dumb ass.

Previous Job I had finished a website for a client but the launch date was delayed (the logo was being redesigned) and when the client was ready to launch I was on holiday

Before I went I sent the files to my colleague and asked him to do the launch but spelt his email wrong

Never checked my emails on holiday so the client had to wait 2 weeks for his website to launch

My job feels (and acts) like a soulless void.

Wow, that sounds like lyrics to an emo song for adults. screw that.

But it's still pretty accurate: While I have quite a few coworkers, and they're at least somewhat chatty, they never seem to respond to me, or even notice me. I see them talking, but anything I do or say gets ignored. It goes into the void and disappears.

I talk in the off-topic channels. People talk around me.
I make comments on releases. No responses.
I talk about music I've been addicted to. No responses.
I talk about food and cooking -- a popular topic at work. No responses.
I respond to an invitation to join the security team. No responses. (well, an empty deferral)
I release various features, some both my boss and a coworker described as "soul-crushing." No thanks, priase, appreciation; honestly, no one even seemed to notice.
I build useful utilities and functions for other devs to use. Nothing.
I optimize the scripts everyone uses on a daily basis, and mention it to others. Still nothing.

The void eats my efforts, and occasionally spits out parcels of work for me to do. The only responses I recieve from the void are when I ask about its parcels of work. When I send them back completed, nothing happens -- unless they need more work. If they do not... nothing.

My previous job was friendly and nice and rewarding.
The job before that was Hell.
This one feels like Purgatory, but ... somehow emptier.

My previous boss disappeared for a week and didn't tell us why. We thought the team was gonna get fired because of him and I even started looking for a new job. The team got fired, but they kept me for some other work.

> at my previous job as mechanical engineer at an HVAC company
> was given recurring monotonous task
> decided to start a sizeable side project to automate it
> people got pissed at me because it worked too well, i.e., took their jerbs
> decided automating things was more fun than actual current job; also, people should be more hyped about continuous improvement
> switched careers into web-development

i.e., my most successful project was the one that changed my life for the better.

Tried to do a startup for a year, did not make loss but did not get the funding to keep going. Now going back to previous company and taking up the old job. 😔

I left my previous company because my tech leadership was insensitive and agressive.

However, I am in a start-up right now and CTO is a nut job.

He creates random Slack threads and keeps messaging me like crazy. The co-founders have shut him down multiple times and yet his only success metric is "number of deliveries".

The other day something broke in production and teams were discussing about resolving the bug in one of the Slack channels.

CTO literally wrote this and I wish I was making this up, "let us not look at the logs and trust our code to work fine."

I was baffled and confused. I realised me leaving my previous organisation because of such tech leadership was a stupid decision.

Crows are black everywhere.

At my previous job I used to deal directly with a client. This client wasn't particularly tech savvy although he was the head of IT department.

During the beta testing phase of the project. The client would regularly send me emails with snapshots of his laptop with application open accompanied by some amount of text to explain what the error/problem he was facing.

One fine day I got an email with a very wierd error. It was a module for attendance of employees based on which salaries were calculated. The mail had a snapshot and some text saying that he was unable to see the attendance for the dates 22, 23, 24 and so on...

I immediately replied with a snapshot of the calendar highlighting the date, which was the 21st of the month. Those attendance are empty because they haven't been marked yet.

No reply untill the next day with more "errors" 😂

Declined a job offer with a startup, partly because of imposter syndrome. Applied for position as programmer, showed up for interview and got cold feet when it turned out they actually wanted/needed a senior programmer/chief technology officer and offered me the position after having asked me no technical questions, seen none of my code or previous projects.

Still, it was a job that paid money... And I'm still jobless two months later :(

I was unemployed and had to sent out 10 or so job applications per month to e eligible to receive the money substitution for unemployment...
Anyways, not many jobs fit my experience, so I was sending out to those with higher/different requirements aswel.. That day I was meeting my sister and she was already waiting for me, so I quickly sent out a totally unpersonalised application for a job I wasn't qualified for. Next day I got back response email with a self grading questionaire I didn't really understood, all about MS technologies I never worked with..which means I didn't know how to grade myself..I decided to ask around people to try to help me grade myself, but then I totally forgot about that in the next days and never replied to that email.
Anyways, week later I got email for job interview from a sister company (found that out later, snooping through linkedin). I was surprised someone requested a meeting with me, especially without the agenda (at that time I was not aware it was a job interview).. Anyways I went there, found out the guy interviewing me thought they lost my questionaire. I explined the situation and he just decided to ask me around to see what I know. So we talked about my past experience and the guy who was doing the interview explained what is what & and explained what I did before and together we figured out what I know and what my experiences are... After we were done, he said that everything else, the payment and other stuff about the job position I should discuss with the director. Not to ask questions, but negotiate.. O.o And just like that I got the job, because they liked my CV & attitude (I like to learn new stuff) and they thought I'd fit in perfectly.
I'm still working there, it's been 4 years now, I think.. loved it since the day one.. Got 'promoted' to another project, crappy old code noone wants/dares to touch but I love it! The guys think I am weird cuz I like to solve/fix things and make them better, and previous employees who worked on that project have all lost their shit and quit. They are all wondering how I can handle this, but little do they know about devrant & my love for the crazy!!

At a previous company we hired an 18 year old guy and father from a minority and without a high school degree. He could write enough code to get the job. However, he took 3h long lunches, came in late to work and apparently had a problem taking orders from women. At one point all the juniors got an earful because of his attitude and he got let go, not long after. It still saddens me because he could have made a really good career if wasn't for his attitude.

You know how, sometimes, you start being tooooo proactive and implement stuff even though your boss never told you to do it? Well, that happened at my previous job, and apparently almost everyone at the team questioned the changes and made me look like the fool I was. That day, I learned that you should never implement stuff that wasn't asked... And it was humbling, since I was an arrogant fuck and basically I was speaking loudly and denied the criticism... But today, I'm better, I know how and when to shut up, and I accept criticism now.

So, 2 weeks ago I started my new job at a company I had my eye on for almost a year, feeling super blessed because after leaving my previous job with such a toxic work environment, it is so refreshing to be around new people who actually value you. I’m so excited to learn new skills and push myself towards the role I was dreaming of since university. :-)

In a previous job as a system developer I had an office with a door. Unfortunately, the boss of the company had heard of "open door"-policies, and insisted on all physical doors being open all the time so he could pop his head in unannounced every 15 minutes with random chit chat and to see how work was going... :x

Was invited to work on a new startup which had 2 founders and 3 devs including me.
Within 2 years, founders started fighting related to equity and stuff. Those mfs Finally dissolved the company.

We 3 became jobless but continued as a team and with the contacts we got from previous startup we started working on projects outsourced by other companies.

I was the designer, and the other one a passionate android and ios dev, last one was a pro php, node.js dev. We were super productive and fast. Worked together alot until one of us got a really good job in a company.
We still work on some crazy projects, discuss random shit, help each other with their projects whenever we meet on weekends.

Just browsing job postings for fun, see a junior developer posting I thought I would read.

Requirment:
Previous experience as a Web Developer (18 months +)

Who would this role suit:
Graduate Web Developer

Yeah fuck off...

Agreed on an offer from company X... Told them I'd sign the contract on my first working day, still a week away.

The offer had a lower salary than my previous job, I needed to relocate, and travel costs were not covered. It was a step back for me but I really needed a new job.

After the weekend I got an invitation for another interview... All went well and the perks were better than the offer made by company X.

Next day I had the second interview and they were very excited and offered me a contract.

Contract came in on friday, signed it and called company X that I'd like to reject the position after reconsidering my options...

Boy were they pissed off 😂

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

I'm intentionally resigning from my remote software development job to teach my company a lesson. The guy who wrote the codes previously really knew how to cook spaghetti 😀😂.

To add a single line takes minutes, because when you do something else breaks, and you'll keep fixing what breaks when you tried fixing what breaks when you try fixing what..... endless loop of bug-fix cycle.

Now they blame it on me.

They won't understand if they don't get someone new, my reputation will fix itself through that..

My first opinion after sighting the codes was, "re-write the whole project using better patterns and architecture", the reply as you can guess, we'll do that later.

I couldn't even upgrade the server to use even PHP 7.1 because the framework breaks, the guy has editted a lot from the vendors files. Don't ever try composer updates.

Two word to describes the situation. "It sucks".

The previous developer needs to be shot, literally.

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

In my previous job we had a monthly meeting, where we had to discuss all periodic meetings we had to attend. This meeting was only for non managers, and we created a sheet of pros and cons, which was than reviewed by managers on specific meeting for that purpose, and then we had a meeting to discuss those points with managers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My ex boss wants me to finish some stuff stuff for his company, which means month or two or more without getting paid, while my current job pays me 5 times more then my previous job.. No way I'll make my priority something that doesn't even give some money. Yes I'm young, yes I learned a lot in your company,but I am paying my bills, I have to eat something, and there is no fucking way I'm going to spend that much time in something that gives me nothing.

Previous employer demanded I work on Christmas Day or risk being terminated. Wasn't the final straw (I was young and needed the work) but did start the slow spiral.

I'm grateful now, happy in my current job for about 9 years with plenty of career growth.

My fav interview was at my previous job. It was a junior position. The lead was a very friendly and wise guy. He kept pushing me (positively) with subtle hint until I get a code right. After completing each problem he give me elaborate explanation about the meaning of the problem and how to approach it from other angles. It felt like I'm in front of buddha who is making me realize the inner working of the world. Didn’t get 50% of the questions right, still he recruited me because "You were very curious and you were having fun solving problems". Best one and half years of my career.

After being let go from my previous job (previous rant) roughly two and a bit weeks ago I already have multiple offers for new jobs.

There's lots of sterotyping for how difficult it is to get a new position in this field. I was worried, this is such a relief

Moving to a new job 5 months after starting the previous one. The company did not manage to pass my probation period.

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.

They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."

If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.

You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.

That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.

I quit my previous job to relax. Then current job came out of nowhere.
How? I just added a new framework I tried to my resume.
Best decision made so far.

So those of you who have seen some of my previous rants will know that the past 2 years, I've been "employementally" challenged. I am now very happy to report that I've gotten a contract renewal at my current job. The terms are exactly the same but 3 extra days of anual leave and a 7% raise!

I finally heard a retarded question on a job interview. I thought they were just jokes.. I was wrong!
What kind of a question is "how would your friends describe you?"..
They'd say I'm fucking awesome, did you expect a different answer?
Or when I gave them a referral, my previous boss, and they asked me what would he say about me.. well fuck me sideways, I have no idea.

And one of the last ones, "tell us your three top qualities that would make us hire you". What kind of information does such a question even give them? Are they testing me how well I can lie? Because I can't, and others that can lie will give a better answer, regardless of the reality.

And they were even taking notes after these questions.

Other than that, nice company. I really want to start working there soon.

Stages of being a self-taught developer.
first: you think you have taught yourself enough to apply for a job.

second: A Company actually believes you. Evidence? They hire you.

Third: You realize you don't know anything.Evidence?
Me in my head
I thought I was good at this. I don't know anything. I should probably switch back to nutrition(my previous job).Why am I struggling with this? Who even struggles this much with APIs??

So, I wasn't invited to the caffeine-and-sugar-back-patting orgy (4+ hour meeting, I kid you not), despite the fact I've poured a shitastical amount of time and energy into the stuff they were talking about, and I actually accomplished a lot of useful stuff too (not that they would know, most (including the boss) have shown little to no interest)...

Telling it like it is, which I did at previous occasions, would probably have ruined all the positive energy.

Oh, am I glad I'm quitting (I got a new, better job at a company that seems to know what they're doing).

At my previous job, no matter how many times I explained it, "a jquery" was an image slider for by boss. No need to say new devs didn't know what the hell he was talking about when he said the clients wanted "a jquery".

I just realised I'm on this platform a lot less since I changed jobs, that is a good sign right?

One of my ex-trainees, mid-level dev at the time of the story, from the previous job asked me and insisted to work with me and if it's possible to open a position for him at my new employer (i was a team lead). We were also somehow friends, spending a lot of time together - including our girlfriends - outside of work.

He went to the interview, passed it and he received an approx. 1500 euros salary, jumping from around 1k euros. He was very happy with it and accepted the offer.

One week before starting his new job, my manager came to me and asked: "hey what happened with X?". I was like: "what happened?". "Don't you know? He sent an SMS this morning to announce us that he doesn't want the job anymore."

I had absolutely no idea about that. The second thing that I did was to give him a call and ask him about his decision. His argue was that "my current employer made my another offer: 1550 euros". I said something like "ok, have fun".

I got back to the manager to tell him about that. He offered to make another offer of almost 2000 euros to the guy, but I refused.

when you're at a job interview, the interviewer shows you some code to give you a taste and the first thing that comes to mind is, "how long is it gonna take to refactor and is it worth it..."

then proceeds on to show a database diagram and its an unholy cluttered spaghetti soup that even a purple octopus would feel a cold shiver from..

then the interviewer mentions the previous dev left suddenly and the deadline is very soon(TM?)..

I loved my previous job. It paid shit but I learned so much. Starting from prototyping to production. DevOps, Development etc. I started a new job 1 year ago. It pays great but man, I only do “if-else” nothing else.

My old boss contacted me for some contract job because the dev that he hired after me, not only he didn’t do anything, but broke production and all other systems on a Friday before going on vacation. So the company went old school with excel spreadsheet to keep track of orders.

I accepted the contract job and man. I’ve learned so much these past 2 weeks, working only ~ 10 hrs / week.

I already had a previous succesful interview the day before and just went to my current employer out of decency.
The previous day gave me so much confidence, that I dominated the complete interview and asked them what they could offer me, that I would choose them.

On my way home they send me a text how much they were interested in me and that they will show me code as I demanded.

I took the job because the were as much interested in quality, as I am.

Friend of mine who has a job that uses MS office at most, sent me a message saying "I want to make my own AI, any good python books?"...no previous programming experience other than playing video games...slow down there bud

At my previous job when I was new, I asked my boss to let me use headphones while working, It'll increase my attention and productivity to work but he denied right away.

How are you guys taking care of mental health?

I feel down in dumps. Burnt out from previous job and life seems like a drag.

Any advice appreciated as I feel pretty isolated.

At a previous job I bumped heads with the IT person a lot because he would spread misinformation about technology so the owners would never replace him. This was conversation with the VP:

VP: Hey I just got a new security setup at my house and I can monitor everything with my phone.
Me: That's cool.
VP: I'm rethinking it because [IT guy] said it was very dangerous to have, what do you think?
Me: ....? What did he say was dangerous about it?
VP: He said hackers could then gain access to cameras and plan the perfect time to rob me since it's in the cloud.
Me: I seriously doubt anyone is planning an Ocean's 11 heist to steal your TV.
VP: Yea I thought it sounded weird when he told me.

I've noticed that, wherever I am, people tend to come to me for help and guidance. It happened at my previous job and is now happening at my current job too.

These past few months I've spent most of my day helping my coworkers instead of actually writing code. I'm not complaining, I like helping, but I feel like I'm not being productive.

Is there a name for this role? Should I embrace it?

Week 1 of the new job, and it seems I have some pretty low expectations to meet.

Seriously, I just did the math. Let's say one works an average of 48 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Just as an average. That's 2400 hours in a year.
In the Micro-scale, a manager would mess up their team once every 2.4 hours (2h24m) or about 4 times per day (assuming 5 working days per week).
That is a pretty low bar to clear. It easy not to be an antsy brat that are-we-there-yet's a professional dev four fucking times a day.

And yet... that is what the complete moron who previously sat on my chair used to do.
Seriously, apparently he used to remote access the team's dev envs *while they were working* and even mess up some of their code. Just as a "monitoring measure". He logged their "keystroke time" in a day (using a primitive windowing method, I must add).
At least 7 requests for updates per person per day. I have his slack history, I checked. Dude literally did nothing else but be an annoying anxiety death pit.

And then there is his bulshit planning...
He created tasks out of his stupid whims, no team review or brainstorming, not even a fucking requisites tallying interview.
He prioritized those out-of-nowhere tasks using panic-driven-development practices and assigned them by availability heuristics.
No sizing method, just arbitrary deadlines for tasks.

I think I will need to have daily standup meetings and an open door policy (that is to say, do no actual work) for a couple months until I can instill some sense of autonomy on my new team. Shit.

Someone has another idea? How do I bring some confidence&autonomy back to devs that are used to be treated like dogs?!?

I'm glad I have a job where we don't have team 'building' nonsense. We just come in and we team-build on the spot, as in, we get along.

Oh, the nightmare of my previous job where they resented employees for not joining some stupid party where they all got drunk and had forced 'fun'. I like authentic environments.

Just visited my new office! Tech offices are the best IMO. Open office plan, fully stocked pantry, bean bags, and a lot of cool stuff. Wayyy better than my previous job where we literally had desks and a coffee machine.

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

Left my previous cushy job for a start-up and a paycut. Can't work in a project that still uses CVS and being the only one who knows what git is.

My previous job. My first day at work. I get my laptop and I start walking to my office. My PM intercepts me and starts harassing me about our team being late. She ignored the fact that I had not even manage to turn the laptop on yet!

Received an email from my previous employer (I worked there two years ago)

They have positions opening up in a few months and want me back.

Here I was worried my current job is at risk and now more than likely I have a job waiting for me now.

Strap in...

- Previous employer
- 3rd party partner firm
- integration link between both over SOAP
- Both sides riddled with poor code and messed up political structures (partner firm CEO is an investor in my employer)
- Doing a deployment to update to https (I know)
- Keep http endpoint live
- Other side starts shitting itself
- Diagnose
- Not us
- feelsgoodman.tiff
- Get angry email
- Explain not us
- Back and forth
- Tell client it’s “irrelevant” on https issue, it’s their side that’s gone wrong
- Get angry reply with boss cc’d about how nothing is “irrelevant” for the client
- We all had to have a make up meeting and meal
- Client was calm and reasonable, all agreed we just snapped and it wouldn’t happen again
- 2 weeks later
- Their system shits itself again and suddenly we’re on the hook
- BA on my team (smarmy little bastard) constantly fucking me off
- Get so close to actually screaming and hitting him

So yeah. I don’t tend to hold that a job is more important to me than my dignity.

I have and will never hold my tongue for the sake of a job, I’m not gonna put up with people shouting / belittling / backstabbing etc.

3 months to get married:
* gets another client, everything good

2 month to get married:
* lose previous client, all good, the previous client didn't pay as much as the current one

1 month to get married:
* previous client don't wanna pay for the previous month
* lost the second client

Great job 👍 debts + no fucking job

3 straight days with less than 3 hours of sleep per night. If something or someone wakes me in the first fifteen minutes as I'm drifting off, that's it, my wired for however long.

Previous two nights I just barely slept at all. Last night got awakened twice as I was drifting off. To start with, its ettypre for me to be able to fall asleep at all a second time.

Last three nights I'm not actually sure I even slept. I blinked and it was morning and I woke up exhausted. Only thing I can remember is racing thoughts, as I fell asleep, and the very same exact thoughts *as* I woke up, as if my brain had been thinking the same thing on a loop for a few hours, while I was catatonic and unable to fully shut down, stuck in 'on' mode all night and not realizing it.

Not a single fucking job I work honor's their god damn promises, let alone my repeated requests for night shift.

Was so exhausted yesterday my chest hurt.

How am I supposed to drive to work on less than 9 hours asleep spread out across three days? Cant catch a fuckong break lately, and when I do it's like the universe fucking sabotages me with shit like this.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.

Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.

So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.

Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.

Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.

Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.

Kinda positive rant: Started my new job today after I quit the previous one (or as we started to call it the "bad place"🔥). Lot's of nice people and so far a really nice atmosphere. A bit of information overload. They are working with a lot of technologies which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it kinda scares me. Also made me sad I have to start all over again making friends...I just felt really "new" you know.

My previous manager reached out to me (we still work at the same company; different clients/projects/countries). Offered a very temporary project (1-2 months tops). I look at the client's requirements -- sounds super easy, doable in 1 month.

I dig more into the docs, details, other references. Turns out, this invitation has been published publicly and anyone could reach out to them applying for the project. Even I could, outside of my employer.

And the budget is $60k

And now I'm a bit mad at myself for not finding this page earlier. Had I been accepted for the job, I'd have earned $60k in 1 fucking month. And now I'll only get my usual salary

FUCK!

Definitely adding that website to my bookmarks.

Normally I don't give a shit when I lost a job opportunity.

But dude, this year everything is bad as fuck. I moved out (yet again) to marry and start a new life.

And as I said a previous Rants, I got a client that just made me lost another client when they started to get shady. For almost a god dam month now, I can't find even a crappy job.

This never happened. I got more than 10 opportunities. A handful of interviews, a few tests and none of them gave me a job.

Now I have one week to get married.
The money I saved whent to all expenses. And now my anxiety is kicking in like it never did in years.

I really don't know what to do and I
can't fucking sleep.

36 in previous job (sysadmin) - had to run 3 shifts in a row. Boy was I a vegetable in the end....
18 in current job (java dev), when I messed up PROD db

Worst:

Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.

Best:

After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job.

My favourite year was probably 2016, when I left my previous job and became a full-time dev. That year, the OS project I'd been working on hit 10 000 users, and one of the collaborators decided to hire me.

Moved country, and had a really exciting time, and the years since have been pretty great too.

LoL, why do we even have job reference contacts? So your previous manager can tell your new potential employer how much you sucked?

It's all so pointless..

I made a bash script for my website that anonymises the visitor IPs in the Awstats logs by replacing the last octet with 0. It can either process all logfiles except the one of the current month, or only the one of the previous month. The latter mode is how I put it in a cron job to be called on the first day of each month.

Everything worked flawlessly with test data, but on the server, some visitor IPs were not anonymised. I noticed that all of them were from the last day of the previous month. Looking at the time stamp of the logfile, it was indeed from the first of the current month, but not from 00:21 where my cron job runs - instead, it was modified around 14:30.

Then I realised that the Awstats engine seems to be configured to batch add the log entries once per day at 14:30 so that when my cron job ran, the visitor data from between 14:30 and 00:00 were not yet in the file!

Solution: batch process all previous logfiles once to clean them up, and schedule the cron job on the 2nd of each month at 00:21.

In my previous work, my boss my horrendous. He didn't know anything about programming, databases or scripts. He often had ridiculous requests that we (two developers trainee) had to refrain.
But he wasn't the one who pissed me off the most.
My colleague, who was supposed to have had the same cursus as me, was as skilled as someone without any knowledge. He spent one year to make a database for a new site, with one table per product type and sub-type, per company and per slider. Today there are 93 tables in a database made for a presentation website. When I proposed to see his work, he refused, saying he knew what he was doing.

Now he's still there, I switched job, but I know he'll get the same diploma as me for this shitty pile of fuming crap, and it pisses me off beyond imagination.

Today I read a job offer from my previous workplace and all the things that bothered me there had put them as their points in favor. They are definitely liars

Literally swear I despise flash. So, had a small job to update a page that consisted of a list of members, clicking on a members name will populate an adjacent div with 3 or 4 contact names. Simple stuff on the face of it.

However, it turned out the previous developer had decided to use flash for this, meaning there is a horrible .swf plonked into the page.

I mean seriously, why can't things be simple? :(

I want catch previous developer and cut his finger off. If you don't know hot the job should be done don't do that job.

No experience with paid work yet, but for sysadmin work I'd mostly look at the environment and how the previous admin left the premises, and why they left. I wouldn't want to work with a bird's nest for a server room, that's got everything jammed into one clusterfuck of a god-function sort of server or something crazy like that. Separation of services, security, wire management, all those things matter because that's the state that you'll be working in, and cleaning up someone else's mess.. it makes my blood boil.

Payment is important, and if the job doesn't pay well, don't take it. Or if they place a wee bit too much value in those expensive pieces of toilet paper called certificates, it denotes incompetence from the employer by being unable to gauge your skills on their own (and I get that there's time management involved, but come on.. how long can it take to have a conversation with someone to gauge what their skillset is). But the working environment in particular is of vital importance. If it's all going to be yours to build, great (and don't you dare to half-ass it -_-). But if it's already been partially done by someone else, they'd better done it well.

Fucking managers
Now I know why companies with shitty managers don’t grow

Me conversing with my senior as to how to make one of our functions scalable which around 10k devs would be using.

Manager walks in

Manager: how’s function x going

Me: great , will be done soon

Manager: you need to finish it by today

Me: can’t do it , too many sub functions need to be reconfigured( which was his job)

Manager: take *insert some managers asslicker’s name*’s help

Me: okay

We will finish it by today , but everybody know how “robust” the output will be

P.S. I didn’t argue because I’ve done that before and it’s like hitting your head on a wall. If you have read my previous rants, you would know

<insert obligatory "long time lurker" statement here>

Started a role about 6 months ago. I'm the sole IT programmer. A bit of the mess I inherited...

- 100+ stand-alone applications/tools (luckily most of them aren't too big).
- No documentation.
- Some applications' only copy of the code exists in production.
- We only have production.
- A single file consisting of 30K+ lines of VB. Little to no comments. The one comment at the top says to keep old code by commenting it out and state what you changed.
- Previous devs didn't like foreign keys.
- No. Fucking. Version. Control. At. All.
- And so much more...

Luckily I was hired due to my experience so I could fix all these problems. Its actually a really great job.

-Applying for internship
-the "previous work/employee records" field is their
-can't leave it blank
-so did this "------" for its various fields of work position, start date of job, and date of job, salary, etc.
-warning says "can't leave that field empty"
HOW THE FUCK ONE APPLIES TO AN INTERNSHIP WITH WORK EXPERIENCE WHEN THERE IS NONE ?

Got a new job on a big brand bank in the financial district in NYC, went through multiple code interviews, 2 hours of in person interviews asking me about architectures, design patterns, solutions to imaginary complex problems(which I enjoyed thinking about), finally got accepted, background checks needed before starting (previous job check, credit, drugs, etc..) so I waited 2 months, 1st day at work, the building is huge and cool, biggest spaces I've ever seen, amazingly insane large monitors and people working on a great variety of new technologies.

I was assigned to a corner far away from the open spaces, trying to understand a project that I will maintain who works with java 5, struts and jsp(for fucks sake, JSP!!!)

Why life laughs on my face? why?

A short bittersweet story.

Ever since I quit my previous job a couple of months and started working as a freelancer, I haven't felt the need to visit devRant.

Everything that's rant worthy is essentially my fault.

I’m currently still looking for a new job after two very, very horrible jobs. My doc said I’m worked out and shouldn’t work for a while because it really has some physical negative effects.

I always feel unenthusiastic, have breathing problems, crumbly, sweaty hands all the time.

But just today the CEO of a company I know from a previous customer texted me on behalf of another company which I’ve worked for where I was extremely happy. Sadly, that company wasn’t quite the focus I had as programmer.

But I’m happy to slowly be known in the industry around me and look positive in the future.

In my previous job, the head of tech was a bully and my project manager had an affair and probably sex at work with him after I rejected her attentions. They both played against me at work. Not to talk about the call centre there.. Have you ever tried to focus on programming whilst people at call centre talk loud about how often they walk their dog to poo? I've been used there and then kicked out in a very sneaky way. They didn't fire me because I've been awesome (as far as my colleagues said) at work, they just made me want to leave after increasing my salary. I left that job with disgust and indignation. My new job now is far better but still hear the voice of the head of tech sometime as a ghost in my head. If I was another kind of person I would have probably punched his mouth until it stopped offending and harassing me because of too much bleed in the teeth.

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

Well I was laid off at my last company with 6 weeks paid holiday at the end of my employment - since one of my hobbies is volunteering at the red cross as paramedic / ambulance driver, I was on duty quite often in those 6 weeks but since this job does not pay well, I had to look for something different and so I did - after those 6 weeks.

I found one quite nice job posting online at 1 am in the morning, sent my application out at 2 am and went to bed as I had a 12 hours shift at that day. I didn't really think that I'd get a reply but at 6 pm I got a call, talked to the guy and he asked me if I could come in the next day and talk to him in person and show him some stuff I did lately. I didn't really have projects to show as most of my previous work was under a NDA and so I just developed a small blog engine to show off (the main thing he wanted to see was my coding style). So I went there at 7:15pm , talked to them and at 10pm I got the contract - I signed the contract about 48 hours after I applied to the job :)

# Honestly, no intention of starting a holy war;

Been a Linux guy for over 9 years spanning school, college and my previous job years;

Now I have to use Windows at my new job. I know very little abt this os and it has never been among my strong skills (only used it for gaming);

What's more intriguing is that my current company's entire infrastructure is Windows based - which I had no idea that it could be possible at such a large scale;

I don't know about what I feel about this whole thing. But what I know is that I don't wanna shy away from it. I love the job and the role (only just if it was Linux, it'd be perfect).

Just need this for a future reflection:
Can anyone confirm if it's the same with other investment banks/financial services institutions etc. infrastructure?

- Favourite pastime while waiting for your code to compile
- Most heroic/ingenuous bug fix
- Hardest to track down bug
- Worst legacy code you wrote and left behind leaving a job
- Weirdest project
- Last side project you actually finished
- Explain your job like I'm five/the way you do it for non-tech people
- That time your past self (almost) got you in trouble
- Software pet peeves
- Story about how you freaked someone out
- Feature that most certainly was a bug once
- Post something for your favourite previous weekly tag!

Finally switched jobs after 7 years, with the expectation to have bigger workload then at my previous job where i almost fell a sleep.
To find even less workload at my new job, asked my manager if i could do something extra because i'm bored.

To get the answer that i don't have permission to do extra work for a half year, because they think its already a big workload for a new employee and they don't want to give me a burn out..
Sigh... what to do... any ideas?

Sometime ago in my previous job an IT prick decided to troll developers by blocking access to stack overflow in our offices. It coincided with a settlement case of a few million dollars that our company had to pay because some idiot copied code illegally.
It was one of the most confusing hours of my life : a few hundred developers looking at each other and laughing in the weirdest fashion.
We sure shat some bricks.

Guys should I quit my CURRENT job ? I feel like I should find another job because of the following reasons

a. I suck. I know I can't complete the task given. The task given is to build a trading bot. I can't complete it because of my incompetent trading knowledge and i find it difficult to understand trading logic and I tried my level best even paying someone to private tutor me but the tuition fees are too high and I still don't understand. Btw I am from a web development background

b. It has been 3 months in this company. I feel like I am not doing anything. I feel like a loser who has been eating free salary without contributing anything. Sure I have managed to write few strategies on pinescript.

c. I dread everyday to even do anything. I use to feel accomplished in my previous job. Nowadays I cant hope to feel like a complete idiot.

d. I don't have the motivation or fire that I use to have when I was a web developer. I just hate looking at code nowadays.

e. Algo Trading is too difficult for me. I don't feel like I am progressing anywhere.

f. Nobody in my company knows how to build a bot or have any knowledge on this.

g. Python dataframes , plots, charts bores me to death and I am really no interested to even look at it.

I am just so frustrated as I am typing this and I am becoming tired and exhausted to go to work everyday because everyday I am so clueless on what to do. You need at least some idea where to go to but I don't. Everyday I feel like a complete clueless moron.

Today I feel I made it

So today was my second day in new job. I am very happy because it is great improvement in all imaginable areas from my previous one. I feel treated better, colleagues seem to be more mature and friendly, I finally work again in English- speaking environment and etc. etc. i could go on and on..I ranted here couple of times when things got rough and it helped. It is very important during those desperate moments to see other perspectives and this app helped me tremendously! If YOU are reading this now and you are going through s****y times - just hold on and don’t give up on yourself, if I made it - you can make it too!

P.S. it’s not like I am feeling like a best programmer in the world or I am paid a lot, but sometimes you get the feeling that you are in a right place and right time, doing right things.

wow. I, do, not, want, to work today at all.

I don't think I've ever felt this strongly about first day back to work before.

Guess the previous job was actually interesting :(

I even went to the office on NYD just to do some heads down coding. (but ended up doodling on everyone's empty whiteboards)

Not a rant, just another story about me and the man I'm gonna wife.

We both have an upcoming job interview, and I was just talking about how at our previous internship I was using python to automate some tedious tasks for me.
Me: it's like a general thing, right, to just automate things you don't really want to do
...
Me: like breathing, and waking up, ya know? I don't wanna do that shit
Him: it kind of already is automated.
Me: *three years of wasted time at med school come tumbling back in to my brain, suddenly recalling the brainstem*
Me: oh, yeah.

Job BS that made me consider quitting?

Huh. so timely.

With my previous employer, it was the whole "we're doing Agile and sprints and all the things" with "finish the project in six weeks plus here are some more requirements" garbage. Plus my tech lead always let the business roll over her and add unplanned requirements during a sprint without adjusting the deadlines set by the project managers. In summary: a fuck-all combination of Waterfall deadlines, Kanban tickets and Scrum timeboxes.

At my current employer, it's our business partners who're a bunch of douchebags that don't plan for anything except making sure their bonuses stay intact. Recently they terminated support for a third-party product that literally drives 99% of their web application then says to us "Hey, we need to build our own replacement for the vendor product using an entirely new stack. You have 3 months or our clients will get pissed." Oh, and these business partners keep raising new issues without any documentary basis except "this doesn't feel right" when they test our in-progress work. So helpful <sarcasm />

On the bright side, I'm getting paid whether or not this project fails, so... meh.

I left my previous job without notice period (didnt need to coz i hadnt signed any contracts with them yet and have not been there for more that 3 months) so they got pissed and decided to not pay me my monthly salary.

Today (4 months later) they have the nerve to contact me to check if I want to go back to them. :)

I switched my job a few months ago.

And now instead of having daily rants in our team lead's channel on slack on how I wish to inflict physical harm on one of my interns (and I'm talking interns that would just interrupt a daily to make their breakfast), and having something to bitch about because our method of version control was using the IDE's history.

And that I came on here to make another post about the times that I brought up that we should address our technical debt, and only being met with "we don't have technical debt" by our CTO.

I now have a good dev environment, with also a lot more trust given to the employees, where I actually don't have much to complain, and 0 reason to really post rants about my work here :D

(and the previous company I worked at got sold and merged with another, so I jumped that ship in time :P)

My previous employer, which I've described on here many years ago as "the best job I've ever had", pivoted a couple of times during my time with them.
I felt obligated to help them, next thing you know I'm no longer developing, the company focus changes and I end up in a general IT support position.
I knew I needed to get out, but the skills I'd picked up were mostly forgotten because they weren't being utilised. When I looked for other positions nowhere was taking on someone at my barely-existent skill level, despite being well liked in terms of company and team fit.
I was tired all the time, stressed out, miserable. I couldn't grow in the company and was starting to worry about finances due to company issues. I thought COVID and lockdowns would help me get myself back in the game, but I burnt out with everything I was trying to take on at once and didn't make much progress.
When I was made redundant I'd thankfully picked up enough to finally find a much better position. The old company was in a lot of trouble and it's a case of when, not if, it will fold.
Now I really am doing the best job I've ever had, feel much better about myself and my relationships have improved.

@Gilles had a similar rant and reminded me of a story...

As a kid I learned QBasic. Moved to VB5 and later VB6. Because of this 'knowledge', I was the one who had to maintain legacy applications at my previous job. All of those applications were in use at various banks. On first work day in 2011 all hell broke loose - no date input control would accept the date anymore. I quickly discovered that the max year on date inputs was set to 2010. Later, I was told that nobody expected these applications would still be used in 2010 so they entered it as a distant future number. The funny part was that one bank was still running apps written in VB3 and I had to go back to basics. Didn't even know how to edit basic controls in that interface :D

Good times :)

On a previous job, my coworkers were jealous because I started going out for lunch some days of the week instead of staying with them at the office kitchen. So every time I went out, I came back to find some kind of small prank, and also a sign reading "Lunch Break Maffia Attacks Again". Once they made garlands by glueing/taping together a lot of sauce packets (mayonnaise, ketchup, and so on) in different patterns and decorated my whole box with them.

At a previous job I had, there was a bug in the payment code, we did not know anything was wrong until the customer support team began receiving some crazy emails stating that our company emptied their bank account. Then we investigated further and thousands of customers had their banks emptied. So the payment team went big hunting, found the problem to eliminate further chaos.

Unfortunately the person responsible for this huge screw up was not fired immediately, but did resign soon there after.

At my previous job I was working with cliets as a support for our application. One client had problem printing invoice so they caled. Was web application so invoice was first converted to PDF then you would print it.
I ask client if they have Abobe Reader installed. Her response was some thing like that: " I don't know what are you saying. Its is like you are talking chines."
I asked for remote access, fix problem.

Still don't know how they managed to use application.

So it's officially a month into my new job...

I have to say, sometimes life can surprise you, I never expected things to go down so smoothly especially after getting fired from my previous one.

My manager is just an amazing super friendly guy, great colleagues with positive attitudes, positive work environment, better benefits, the list goes on...

Honestly I would say the biggest con is I now work 45hrs/week instead of 35, which might be a dealbreaker for some but I also work in the cloud industry which is honestly miles ahead than the UAT testing crap I used to do, plus the company pays for your certifications after you pass, so it's a small price to pay imo.

If any of you are struggling with a shitty job/work environment don't give up, out of all the places I worked at I never felt appreciated until I came here, keep on grinding.

Through my previous employer's complete incompetence and lack of a spine I had to work two days during my last holiday. He'd managed to approve time off for all three of the remaining staff at the same time, so as a compromise, our six day work week was covered by all of us for two days a piece. Sooo maybe not technically not coding on holiday?

The business could just about scrape by on one staff member, so the boss should've allowed the holidays to those who requested it first (myself and one other), but that would've caused problems with the third person who he just so happened to be related to.

I was made redundant a few months later. The company is in the a lot of trouble and on its last legs, but the one member of staff who kept their job was the least capable and, surprise surprise, the relative.

Just thinking back to my previous job.. My manager was nice and friendly to me.. until I messed up. It just makes me realize that in every company I'm just nothing but a tool they use to get good results.. If you start producing bad results, they'll hate you..

Urgh..