*Interview*

Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?

Me: What is that I'll be doing?

I: What technologies and languages do you know?

Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?

I: Any experience working on frontend?

Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?

I: Can you work with databases?

Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?

I: Can you do big data processing?

Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?

I: Any experience in cloud development?

Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?

I: Do you know CI CD?

Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.

I: Yes. Go ahead.

Me: What will be my position?

I: A full stack developer.

Me: What technologies do you use in your project?

I: We use all the latest tech.

Me: Like?

I: All latest tech.

Me: You mentioned big data processing?

I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.

Me: what do you use for that?

I: Java.

Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?

I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.

Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?

I: Just to know if you're familiar.

Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?

I: Flash

Me: 🙄

I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.

I: Are you willing to join?

Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.

This company!
Ugh.

Two days ago we had an hour and a half meeting on which projects to focus on, with the result being all seven are top priority. Because of course.

Last night I told my boss why an api he has me hitting always returns 401s; even gave him the line# responsible for the response (in his code). After an hour and sixteen minutes of him debugging, he finally admitted I might be right. zzz. This morning, he tells me it's on my end, and to ask someone else for their project's API code. The problem is that the server is not accepting the new application's key, since that key is not in the allowed list. That other project works just fine. Guess why? Their key has been whitelisted for months. But it's totally my code. Yeah. Bloody brilliant. 🔅

Anyway, today we're discussing "Winning with Accountability," a 100 page book that boils down to "do what you say you'll do, by when you said you'd do it, and take responsibility if you don't." But a huge part that the boss is stressing is: provide the exact date, time, and timezone of when things will be completed by. I mean That's fine for sales calls and reports and such trivial busywork. But dev projects? Not so much.

And that's been my past three days!
Friggin joy.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

rant

When you start a new project.
You create a new directory.
You start the IDE and create a new application project.
You type just 5 lines of code for testing it.
Then you compile and run.
Nothing happens...
You abort and retry.
Nothing happens...
Half a minute later a window pops up and Norton reports you that an executable has been removed because its suspicious and has a lack of reputation!!!

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

It's getting close to that time of year when we are all encouraged to think of others and spread joy around the world. I've decided to go against my usual snarky/anti-social nature, and do something to help others this year.

I'm announcing the practiseSafeHex charitable fund, to give back and help others.

This fund will invest in cutting edge medical research to detect the genetic abnormality in humans that results in project managers not being able to comprehend the simplest of concepts.

Together we can find the reason why the concept "more meetings = less work" is uncomprehendible.

Together we can discover why we can't use an automated bot to generate reports, instead of spending hours in excel spreadsheets.

And together we will find a reason why the answer to the question "can we please just try it?" is always "No".

We do this not for ourselves for short term gains, we do this for the greater good. Together we can find the cause and build a test to filter these people out. So that never again will stressed out developers have to deal with these petty ridiculous issues.

Together, we will solve this!

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex, CEO and managing director of the practiseSafeHex charitable fund for the betterment of developer sanity

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

Job BS that made me consider quitting? If you find my previous rants, you find a lot of BS.

Here is one (attached is the actual email sent to me.)

TL;DR. The biggest BS part is the fact that I *got approval* from my boss to work on the migration and we already 'owned' specific project and no one else was working on it.

After I got the email (my boss sits right next to me)
Me: "Whoa..what's this!? Two weeks ago you gave me the green light to work on it."
C: "Oh yea...I forgot. Sorry."
<yes, the BS flags thrown all all over the place>
Me: "I'll schedule a meeting with everybody and straighten this out."
C: "That's a good idea, but I'll take care of it."
<10 min. later>
C: "Sorry, J said his word was final. You are not supposed to work on the project."
Me: "I never said I wanted to work on the project, it's already finished and with your approval. That's what I want straightened out."
C: "Yea..yea...I know, but J said to roll back your changes. I tried everything I could to change his mind."
Me: "I don't want his mind...never mind...I'll go talk to the boss if J won't listen"
C: "About that..um...the directive came directly from the boss. It's probably best you roll back the changes and forget this happened."

I knew then the well was already poisoned, so anything I said could be grounds for dismissal (the boss had an itchy 'firing' finger)

Time and karma took care of most of the rage. Not really a month later my boss was demoted back to developer and working on dead-end projects (porting data for reports).

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.

I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.

There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.

There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.

Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.

I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.

I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.

I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.

And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.

I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.

I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.

My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.

On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.

I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.

I think I'm fucked

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Freelance project I was working on was deployed. Without my knowledge. At 11pm. Their in-house "tech guy" thought that the preview build i gave them was good enough for deployment. Massive bug, broke their api endpoints.
Got a call at 2 in the morning,asking for a fix. I told them how it was their fault and the App they deployed had TESTING written right on the main screen.
They promised additional payment to get me to fix it asap.
Went through the commit history (thank goodness their tech guy knew git, fuck him for committing on production though) and the crash reports.
Removed three lines. All became right with the world again. 😎

Not dev related.

I have only traveled to the places the Army send me to.

I didn't wanted to go to those places.

But there are a group of countries I have been dreaming of visiting them since I was a child. One is Spain. I would kill to go to Spain and see many of the landmarks that exist in that gorgeous country.

The other, is France. And one landmark that I always wanted to see was the cathedral of Notre Dame. Now, the reports I have seen regarding this make me believe that it can be restored, since the central spire that was not saved had already been added during a restoration project some time ago. The entire wooden interior? Lost. Bell towers are good and a couple of other things as well. I have mad respect for French people, and know they will need to do whatever it takes to get this done, and French business magnates have already started pledging to rebuild.

What pains me is that it will not be the same, and I feel time coming down on me as the places I dream of visiting face the possibility of similar tragedies happening to them.

I guess I have to hurry up.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

Migrated to SharePoint 2016 which included Reporting Services, and trying to fix a bug in the reporting services scheduler, I created a report (aka, copied an existing one) 'A Klingon Walks Into a Bar', so it would first in the list and distinct enough so the QA testers would (hopefully) leave it alone.

The PM for the project calls me.
PM: "What is this Klingon report? It looks like a copy of the daily inventory report"
Me: "It is. The reporting service job keeps crashing on certain reports that have daily execution schedules."
PM: "I need you to delete it"
Me: "What? Why? The report is on the dev sharepoint site. I named the report so it was unique and be at the top of the list so I can find it easily."
PM: "The name doesn't conform to our standards and it's confusing the testers."
Me: "The testers? You mean Dan, you, and Heather?"
PM: "Yes, smartass. Can you name the report something like daily inventory report 2, or something else?"
Me: "I could, but since this is in development, no. You've already proofed out the upgrade. You're waiting on me to fix this sharepoint bug. Why do you care what I do on this server? It's going away after the upgrade."
PM: "Yea, about that. We like having the server. It gives us a place to test reports. Would really appreciate it if you would rename or delete that report."
Me: "A test sharepoint reporting services server out of scope, so no, we're not keeping it."
PM: "Having a server just for us would be nice."
Me: "$10,000 nice? We're kinda fudging on the licensing now. If we're keeping it, we will be required to be in compliance. That's a server license, sharepoint license, sql server license, and the dedicated hardware. We talked about that, remember?"
PM: "Why is keeping that report so important to you? I don't want to explain to a VP what a Klingon is."
Me: "I'm not keeping the report or moving it to production. When I figure out the problem, I'll delete the report. OK?"
PM: "I would prefer you delete the report before a VP sees it."
Me: "Why would a VP be looking? They probably have better things to do."
PM: "Jeff wants to see our progress, I'll have to him the site, and he'll see the report."
Me: "OK? You tell Jeff it's a report I'm working on, I'll explain what a Klingon is, Jeff will call me a nerd, and we all move on."
PM: "I'm not comfortable with this upgrade."
Me: "What does that mean?"
PM: "I asked for something simple and I can't be responsible for the consequences. I'll be documenting this situation as a 'no-go' for deployment"
Me: "Oookaayyy?"

I figured out the bug, deleted the 'Klingon' report, and the PM couldn't do anything to delay the deployment.

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Time tracking. 😡🤮 If I’m salaried and only working on one project for one client, why the hell should I waste my time making weekly reports of how many hours I spent coding, reviewing pull requests, and sitting in (mostly pointless) meetings?

When you gotta take longer screenshots 😂

When i worked for a large, international bank (whose name rhymes with shitty), I always had to use the following formula to estimate projects.

1. Take estimate of actual work
2. Multiply by 2 to cover project manager status reports
3. Multiply by 4 to cover time spent in useless meetings.
4. Multiply by 2 to cover user support and bug fix tasks.
5. Multiply by 2 to cover my team lead tasks.
6. Multiply by 3 to cover useless paperwork and obtaining idiotic necessary approvals to do anything
7. Finally, multiply by 3.14159 to cover all the other stupid shit that the idiots that run that company come up with.

It's only a slight exaggeration. Tasks that required less than a day of actual coding would routinely require two weeks to accomplish and get implemented.

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

Project Leader is explaining to teammate how their UI will call my API and it'll run asynchronously in the background. UI guy asks: about error handling? I said the callback listener will be notified if anything goes wrong. I ask the PL, what next? just log and forget about it (that's my sarcasm)? How would anyone know this has failed?

PL says: good point and can worry about this later. Lets first focus on getting things to work.

You know later never comes. Well, except when the customer reports a problem. Its like every disaster movie you've ever seen before

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

Got a mini project assignment in college. We decided to make a game using Unity that recgonizes sign language gestures from Leap Motion.

I asked my colleague to make the function to compare the hand gesture, and I'll do the rest of the game. One more friend does the documentations and reports.

Three weeks passed, asked for the code but he said he hasn't finished it yet. I told him to ask me if he has any problems with it.

He sent me this 24 hrs before the deadline.
Me and my other friend died on the spot.
I screamed at him the whole night on the phone call whilsth trying to do his part in just 3 hours...

Needless to say, we didn't finish the project on time.

As a junior dev I'm really frustrated at work today. My boss wanted us to complete a project within 3 weeks. The project includes a multi-tenant hotel system that includes reservation, invoicing, advanced reports, housekeeping system and an API. I'm starting to feel something about myself, I have no progress. I'm so slow. I love what I'm doing but maybe this is too much.

ps. we're a team of 2

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

I fucking hate people who report somebody else's work as their own successes so much.

I've written a fair amount of perf tests for our project so far (actually I'm like the only person doing that). Some fucker from another team asks me if I could write one more. I agree, because why not. I spend a few hours, making sure to cover all cases and commit the test. Then the same fucker runs it and reports it as HIS PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS.

0 credit given to me. Fuck you, I just wanted to be helpful and you used this.

I'm still quite young and tend to fall for shit like this, but getting more and more grumpy because of those people.

I got an extremely hard task in the morning, I asked for some clarification and I got them at 13.23.
Boss ask for updates at 13.45 (during lunch pause).
I work on it 2 hours like never before, he calls me and I said I can manage to finish in half an hour + testing.

I work more 10-15 minutes, time is around 16.15.

2 other enormous bugs shows up on the same project, boss ask me to take care of them, and I manage in only 2h to look up something like 40 web pages and correct each of them, write reports and inform the affected people. After it I work more 15 minutes to report and finish small tasks. Ended up working almost 1h more on a non paid extra time working contract.

In the morning, while my boss was aware I spent that time

In the morning boss ask "everything went fine with the big project, right?"

Because
The
Client
Is
Angry.

I already got a burnout from this job, I really can't go on like this.

How to waste money as a dev company, 101:

Give people ton of budget for their education to do whatever they want with it with no oversight at all:
1) Devs go to some shitty confs in places across the world that teaches them nothing (new) so they can visit interesting places on company's money
2) Go to a conf where you learn ton of stuff that can be implemented right away

...Then you come back, no time to do stuff properly, just "make it work" (or make it seem like it works), because of deadlines, poor prioritization, new features, bad planning, vague roadmap and poor client management. And the worst of them all, LGTM code reviews.

Few months later, who the fuck wrote this shit? Oh, dude that left? What about this mess? Oh, he's a goner too. What the fuck should this random undocumented chunk of code do?!

Do that a few times and you've got bunch of pissed off clients with a ton of bug reports nobody can solve without wasting 20x the amount of time it would originally take.. LGTM

RIP project.

As a team lead, what would you do if one of your direct reports sent obscenely bad code for review? Like absolutely nonsensical, non-working, touching wrong parts of the project, doing wrong things… Terrible even by your company's standards.

Would you consider it an instance of stupidity? Tiredness? A resignation letter? An insult? A cry for help? A combination of those things?

I'm a .Net developer from Morocco, i'm currently working on an accounting software for this fucking company owned by an American boss. And i'm handling every single aspect of the project including the back-end (C#), Database (Sql Server), Reports (crystal reports, ABAP, VSTO), and design (UI, logos, animation...). For a salary of 300 USD/month, with no insurance, no transportation fees, and no fuck given about my health or my coworkers'. Not mentioning the shitty working hours and condition.
This is my first (job)

story - u get a new job, u really like the boss and work env, have been assigned a v ambitious project.. which involves v critical deploy control, data backfills and multiple level of integrations, takes 2 quarters to complete, in the mean time ur fav boss left for a better job and new boss doesn’t seems to understand the gravity of the project and thinks u r just sitting there twinkling fingers...anyways fast forward to d-day : deploys go fine everything working great... time to run some post deploy scripts for some data consistency, a single change to another piece of code done by some one else 2 days back triggers an additional logic and damn suddenly the app users loose ownership to part of the data they owned... u run history reports, do data loads to assign them back, some data errors out, u r about to manually set that up - u drop ur laptop from ur table and it refuses to restart - and all the Prep data is gone and all the scripts are gone and it’s a weekend so no IT Sypport... u r without a laptop for next 24 hours... the struggle continues... next update on Monday

Today's been majorly tough 😣, I might lose one of my fav an most high paying clients 😐

He's OK in taking risks in his business because he has money to fall back on 😐 I have none we are sorta partners in projects. So we have this one project he never wrote in this project brief/outline maintenance or sign off ,😐 it never occured to him .

So now this app is ongoing I got paid nothing they just released it I need to do these jobs to make money 😐 but I'm stuck helping him 😐

There have been so many issues it's been ongoing forever 😐 I dunno what I can do .

To make it worse the code is a pile of shit 😐 literally couldnt be worse.

Why ? Because there has been 4000 minor adjustments. I'm a good coder I swear , but this job is killing me 🙁

Here's an example start of the new year the new iOS kicked in on the 12 Dec I started get more n more bug reports! Saying iOS is messed up.

Because of an update it's not my fault. 😣, 6 months this project took 😐 every 2 weeks I've had a major issue come up like that.

😖 I'm near my wit's end I feel like the best move is to just say I'm sorry I can't anymore I understand that this app is important and that we need to get paid less to grow it etc but I can't let my business die because of that.

Times like this I really appreciate this app

I guess I have to stick it out 😧

A coworker asked me about a specific tool because he "had heard" that I had some experience with it, whether that tool would allow a certain use case, and whether there was some documentation.

Wait, in which project was that? None of mine anyway, hmmm... ah that one, from a few years ago. Who wrote the reports back then? Can you guess?

THAT MODDAFOKKA!

So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.

I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.

I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.

Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".

This is going to be a great year.

Since we’re adding new backronyms every day, I propose SIMPLE.

S - Spaghetti: write tapestry of code like a chef.

I - Interlinked: if the project has modules, they should all depend on each other (we are strongest when we can depend on one another).

M - Micromanaged: if the product owner doesn’t expect reports in the daily stand-up, do they even care?

P - Perplex: diversity for the codebase.

L - Lazy: Bill Gates once said “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”, for example, without testing, collaborating with team members, or ensuring the feature works with anything else in the codebase.

E - Opinionated: because I believe E should stand for opinionated and everyone else will have to work around this with adapters. But E should mean Opinionated because Uncle Bab said so.

You know what's the worst in doing software?
being assigned that dreadful project, that's doomed and cursed just from the start. Nobody dared to try or touch it for 7 years, because it's destined to fail. You will never get the resources to do it properly, all the constrains are just against you. Even as the requirements bars are lowered and lowered you barely make it. You keep testing that shit with QA for like 8 months past schedule. Then before release some core changes need to be done. It passes QA, but you somehow now it's just a ticking time bomb. It will just crumble and fall somewhere out there, if somebody dares to use that shit for real.

And so it goes.

Bug reports coming in.

I begin with the optimism and the joy that I am creating something new that will improve people's lives.

I listen to the user and analyze the current process in depth.

I try to suggest additional value to the system for the users consideration. Sometimes they do not realize we can improve 10x rather than 2x.

I learn what the users goals are and what they want out of the system. We think about reports and downstream value. Sort of working from the end to the beginning (data ingests and upstream processes that will feed the system).

After the user signs off on the requirements and deliverables and I have a realistic project plan I begin to code.

It works and has worked for me every time for a long long time.

I was discussing scope and budget with a potential client for a side project. It involved a good bit of complex postgresql and subsequent aggregations and creation of reports. He was hiring because the last guy's work was so poorly documented, they couldn't verify its accuracy.

Me: "So, what are your thoughts on a budget?"
Him: "We were thinking something like $15/hour."
Me: "Um...ok. If I can ask, where did you get that number?"
Him: "That's what we paid the last guy."
😑😑😑😑😑😑

Helping out a team, I was documenting some code/processes when I came across several classes that was logging a lot of, IMO, 'junk' that was unnecessary (and I knew wasn't being used in any Splunk alerts/reports)

I offer a refactoring suggestion, simplifying the data being logged, moving the duplicate code to a central location, maybe saving 10~20 lines of code. Didn't think it was a big deal because they were already actively working on the code and it was all new code (nothing deployed to production yet). Sent the suggestion to the lead developer and he responds:

Dev: "Yes, the changes looks fine, but not in scope of the project. Any out of scope work will need to be suggested at the end of the project, reviewed by the team, the project manager and approved by the vice president."

"Out of scope"? Logging data to Splunk needs a vice president's approval? WTF?
YOU PROBABLY HAVE THE PROJECT OPEN IN VISUAL STUDIO RIGHT NOW!!!

Along with the documentation the lead dev said they didn't have time to do, I send his boss and the dev team my suggested changes (before-after screen shots of the code) and offered to do the 2 minutes worth of work (again, this was new code, nothing in production and zero side affects to anything).
I even offered to create the splunk reporting/alerting against the data being logged (another item they said they would not have time to do)

About a minute later the lead dev responds..

Dev: "Those changes look good. I'll have Jake make those changes and we can test the logging when we deploy to dev on Monday. Thanks!"

Of course you will...fracking ass hat.

I'll bet my Battlestar Galactica DVD box set he was going to make the changes himself, brag to his boss how he refactored the code, saving X lines of code..blah blah blah to help *me* with documenting the logging portion.

How would I go about finding a game dev project that I can follow where I can view progress on a designers level? I want to see a game built from the ground up, detailed error reports included?

Built a Svelte app year ago and it's broken today.

This is not the case with Windows. You can still run a app built on 1999 today.

Opened an issue on their repo requesting that they should add backwards compatibility.

No later than 5 seconds. It got closed and locked with this comment,

"Welcome to development when you don't write your entire stack yourself by hand.

Please open helpful bug reports or don't open any at all."

This is what every FOSS project got as defense. They think since they work for free, they can do what the fuck they want.

The defense is false because they put their OSS project on their resume and in return they get hired for full time work or consulting.

I fucking sue you Svelte if I had money to hire expensive lawyers. This time you are just lucky.

I modified a Crystal Reports file to adjust some margins and now the project is crashing when executing some DTS and is my fault...

Me, working hard on a SQL project with a deadline that is half what it should be with no support from the other people on the project and was mostly made with with data I imagined would be in there cos no one could get me any fucking shit done (i.e. effectively designed, built, tested, fixed, upgraded, documented on my own for an entire weekly/monthly/ad-hoc analysis process that would output various reports for internal/external/management)

Manager - man who is a known waste of space but for some reason is in charge of the smallest part of the project, shouldn't have been fucking involved fucking management guzzling stain magnet...

Manager: Hey, do I need to refresh the database?

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

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

Me: ............I dunno, do you think we should refresh the database that this entire project is reliant? I mean...why do we need up to date transactions to analyse? Wait....you telling me it's not been being refreshed this ENTIRE time?

Manager: No....you never said I should. So should I?

Me: ..................I never said you should!?!? Are you not in the meetings talking about dependencies?????? Do you think i should have up to date trans or just run this with old stuff????? Why would you not update it!??!!?!?!? Its transactions...... (Desperately trying not to punch through my screen, through his, into his throat)

Manager: ..............

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

Manager: I think i'll refresh it and add it to the job?

Me: ....................(goes back to work cursing with music in so I think its quiet but who knows).

Tard, don't know how he even gets to work without someone holding his fucking hand.

Happy ending, I don't work there anymore :p

Sad ending, his spirit of tard follows me to my new jobs and possesses someone (or three sometimes)

Have you ever found a infinite task? Well, I did.

So, the software that I'm working now was under responsibility of another company for development and maintenance (I'll call them X) from 2014 to last month , and the company I work for was handling only with the business part. Now we took all the development for us as well.

This software has a lot of reports , so it has a lot of templates for this reports.

When X was handling the software, they asked the client and the old project manager if they wanted the templates to have the client's products dynamic (no need to change the template when adding a new product) or hardcoded for some products they already had, they choose hardcoded because it would be faster. Butterfly effect.

Fast forward to this week, the team leader designated a task for me, It looked easy at first, just fix 2 templates, easy.

Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I fixed the first template, discovering in the process the hardcoded things, had to add the product reference in a lot of places.

So i went to the second item, a super template that they use to put together some smaller templates.

It was really weird, I couldn't find all the templates that it was supposed to use, and I didn't really know the exact problem, the only thing I knew was that it was not being generated, the reason could be the super template itself or one of the 15 smaller templates, that could happen to have sub templates.

So I called the team leader and explained to him wtf was happening, he called the senior business analyst, that called the PM, we agreed that it would be infinite because of those fucking hardcoded things, they prepared a excel sheet with this and a lot of other problems and will send this to the client, explaining that we'll need a lot of time to put this new product up and running.

Now I'm in the middle of this shit storm seeing a time of darkness in the future.

Ps: This new product was supposed to be inserted in the software since last November, when it was under X responsability, and they analyzed it and said that it would take 190 hours to be completely done, the client refused. It was the first rain drop of what would become a shit storm.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

I'm doing a project for uni in Omnet (C++ framework that should facilitate working with networks of queues, simulating and displaying statistics).

I needed to retrieve a random value from an exponential distribution, and the function to do so requires a random number generator as input. The framework has 2 implementations of the RNG and I picked the first one.

I spent 3 hours trying every possible thing, using both the exponential() function and its class wrapper (both provided by the framework), it was always returning 0 or NaN.

The RNG was spitting out values correctly, so I thought it was okay.

When I was almost ready to give up, I figured I could try and change to the second implementation of RNG, expecting nothing to change. And it fucking worked.

Zero reports on this behavior on Google, no apparent reason why it would work with one and not with the other when the two RNGs literally implement the same abstract class and spit out the same exact numbers... Just black magic...

Oh and cherry on top, it works with the raw function but not with the class wrapper on that same function... IF YOU GOTTA IMPLEMENT SOMETHING IN YOUR DAMN FRAMEWORK THAT DOESN'T WORK, FUCKING DON'T! 1 combination working out of 4 is not good! Or at least document it!

Sorry just had to share my pain

i have a question for you. You work for an industry, a factory, in house. You have only one developer to help you.

They ask you for an app to store production and get reports. Ok
Then before a year passed, they want you to start making apps for: project managment, hr 360 evaluation, implementation of SSO without paying a third party service (like auth0 or okta)

Would you feel comfortable, even if the proper time was given, to get involved with so many different domains without anyone above you having any idea about software lifecycle and development?

Just been writing my project report, because I'm a student and reports are necessary -_-. To use to working in visual studio and just ended a sentence with;

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Recently I deal with low motivation, because of my internship. I have to write a lot of reports and I just hate that. I'm almost at the end of my internship, these reports just get higher priority.

So instead of being busy with my internship I just start a random side project. The advantage is that I don't think about the reports and the disadvantage is that I don't think about the reports... so at the moment I just don't want to do anything at all.

What I meant to say is, please keep in mind that it's not all about work. Just do stuff that you like, but make sure you have the right balance between it. I just started too late with a relaxing side project and lost track of time and now I only can work on my reports, writing 10 lines a day or so..

Now I have 6 projects on JIRA and I have lots of data collected from all projects (for example visitors on website, how many of them donated money in our project and etc.).

I am looking for some software/app where I could import lots of data from these reports and I want to be able to compare datasets or see some overview.

What should I use?

One of the things that gives me a lot of satisfaction is doing integrations. One customer has a good architecture, and they chose to put their metrics database with billions of records in Apache Cassandra. Which is pretty cool! A business consultancy that is helping them grow a lot, has implemented PowerBI and the dashboards are really good, but the most important reports will be based on this gigantic Cassandra database. We just delivered a quick integration using Apache Spark. Small project, fast delivery and everyone happy. Is so good. Mission accomplished feeling.

I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).

T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).

Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).

In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.

I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.

Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.

I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.

I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.

What should I do, I have a central function that is not documentated and no test-cases are written for it. I have no clue what the method should really do, I know that it works in 99.9% of all cases otherwise we had much more bugs. Now there is one Unit-Test that reports an issue. I tracked it down to this method, no one touched the method nor the unit-test.
My logical thinking says that there is one statement missing, but it could also fuck up another part of the code... (This project has a bad testing coverage :'( )

What would you do?

- copy paste the method for this special case (I would hate me so much for breaking DRY)
- inheritance?! (Would make it more complex and then it would be still untested / undocumented)
- YOLO changing oO?! (hope for luck, just joking)

P.s it's an edge case unit test, the client / customer probably wouldn't realised it if it happens

"Most successful private project" would be an extension of the webeditor Brackets named brackets-swatcher.

The silly thing about this is that it started out from my own frustration with variablenames in variablefiles in Foundation and Bootstrap.

After a collegue of mine also used it he had a shitton of ideas how to improve and what he wants so i developed it on many weekends with many many beers in my belly.

Where we come to the conclusion - its for sure the ugliest project ive ever written (=> beer and jquery) and i hope i never have to touch the code again - but on the other side i never had bug reports despite the fact that alot of big websites had it in their "Top 10 Brackets Extensions" and many downloads from the Brackets Marketplace.

I'm currently taking part in IBM hackathon based on a healthcare theme and my project idea is that storing patient healthcare reports or medical research docs on the blockchain, is this idea had some potential to make a difference in the hackathon?