Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

Coworker in my team recently said to boss:

"Thanks, this conversation with you has taught me so much about single-threaded blocking I/O"

Some random PR comments from our company's repository:

"Are you insured? I hope you are insured"

"Learning git is not that difficult. You only need one command: git reset --hard"

*Link to amazon for dog poop bags*
"Please clean up your shit, before I step in it"

"Have you thought about a career in sales? At least there you might sell your bullshit"

My last internship. When acquiring a new project and having to give an estimate the boss/sales guy always went to the programming team first to ask them what the estimate was and then communicated that back to the client(s).

Asked him why he does that because many companies don't:

Well, the programmers are going to write the software so why the hell would *I* be the one who gives the fucking estimates?

Yes that was a good boss.

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

-------------

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

My boyfriend is in dental school and I am, of course, a dev. So we often swap analogies to help each other better understand what we are talking (or usually complaining) about. My favorite one so far is when I was explaining to him how the sales team undersells websites without consulting developers and we are constantly over budget. So he goes, "That's like the receptionist telling the patient they have 2 cavities just by looking at them and having them pay immediately. And when the dentist takes a look, the patient actually needs 4 crowns and a root canal... but they already paid for just the 2 cavities."

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

!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!

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

When the Sales team fucks up something, they point finger at each other for the blame.

When the Dev Team fucks up something, as a Senior Developer I say to my Boss that we fucked it up no matter whose fault it is and we will fix it up by x time.

When the SysAdmin team fucks. The Dev Team is to blame.

Sorry guys, I got a bit frustrated. All our servers wasn't backed up from last week and the SysAdmin guys are saying it's our fault.

What the fuck is going on? fuck you fuck fuck fuck fuck...

Sales manager: Hi all, we are launching a new internal hackathon. Form up a team with the right expertise to help with address the problem statement and get going!

Me: what’s the problem statement?

Sales manager: you have to sign up first. There’s proprietary company info with our plans for next year involved. You have to agree to terms and conditions before continuing. Legal say so.

Me:

*signs up*,
*fills in docU-sign*,
*clicks through 3 other screens*

Ok let’s see this problem statement.

“What new and magical customer experience can you create and launch to win in our markets”

... that’s not a fucking problem statement ... and why the fuck does that require filling out a docu-sign form to see?

I REALLY fucking hate legal / sales people. Wasting everyone’s time.

A new sales guy in a startup I used to work at was using Internet Explorer. I told him why are you using IE, it's a shitty browser and how frontend devs suffer to support it.
Before I continued, he interrupted me saying that he used to be the regional head of sales team in Microsoft and started defending IE.
I was like Oookaaayy.
......he left the company a week or two later

Assume the sales team lied

Was asked to check the sales team server as it was running slow.
Apart from redundant processes and users with too much permissions I found a "Cobol" folder under one of the sales team member's home folder.

If it weren't the sales people I would immediately disregard this as trolling but with them it's quite possible that this is a real attempt to learn programming...
...most likely from the facebook ads with the hooded guys that offer to teach you to code in 10 days for $800.

Back in Hell, we had a “company summit” where everyone flew in for an all hands meeting.

It was three days long in a tiny office with very lacking air conditioning in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. Basically the entire thing was the CEO / goblin salesman king chewing at us and expounding about / proselytizing his latest and greatest sales ideas and how they’ll change the world. And randomly asking “which of you are HUNGRY?! Which of you want to be FILTHY FUCKING RICH?!” etc.

One good thing came out of it, which was that any and all new endeavors needed a “co-signer” and a sign off from development before we (developers, or more accurate: just me) would work on it. It reduced the growth rate of my backlog by like 80%, which was nice.

While dreading the “summit,” I hated him more than I had in quite awhile.

During the summit, I hated him more and even flipped him off.

After the summit, I swore to leave the revolting wreckage that was the company.

(And months later, I did just that —after becoming the sole dev and the only person holding the damned company afloat. When I gave him my two weeks’ notice, I absolutely relished his terror. And my time spent writing my 43 page no-sugarcoat handoff document that was guaranteed to scare off any hapless dev he might find. 😇)

But I digress, three 10-hour days with him and the rest of the sales team, the sleazy lawyer, the CTO who mentally checked out years ago, the yes-man contractor, and me. The only good thing that came out of that meeting was one good idea that he dismissed, and the sign off idea that saved my backlog a bit.

One of the sales people quit shortly thereafter. So it was a huge expense that wasted everyone’s time and added absolutely nothing of value to the company. GG!

Oh, it was also in the “totally better” office — meaning… cheaper, unfinished (literally plywood floors), and was one room in another company’s office, who often locked the door leading to their offices because they trusted him so much. But it was in downtown Las Vegas, with no parking at all, where gang members were hanging out almost every day, and it was next to low-income housing and weird no-service restaurants with shockingly high prices.

Weird and scary.
Very scary.

Totally carried pepper spray every time Mr. Goblin asshole forced me to go into the office. Didn’t get raped, though, or my laptop or car stolen. So that was nice.

Dear sales team please stop promising the customer stuff that doesn't exist within the system and then promising them dates for getting said functionality without discussing it with the product team let alone the development team. Also repeating 'but I promised the customer they'd have it by august' will not make 6 months of development work fit into that time frame!

That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.

I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.

I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.

Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.

I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT

secretly hoping to get fired over this

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

Overheard my boss speaking at the pantry.
He tells the sales to promote to potential buyers that our product will only take 2 days to setup but actually the dev team has been alloted 2 weeks.

How the in fuck could we deliver 2 weeks worth of effort in 2 days!? WTF boss. Fuck you, and your double chin. I am tired of your shit.

Product team having a proof of concept demo with client:

Sales to client: "Just for the record, we are not selling this to a rival company. Because we really want this technology exclusive to you"

Me (thinking to myself): "Oh really? We just had a demo with them last 2 weeks"

One of the core values of our company is Integrity, and I am not just seeing it.

The sales and business team at my office really look down at the devs. Just because we don't dress in fancy suits doesn't mean we are any less important that those asshats.

In fact we are probably a hell of a lot more useful since they cant land any sales since they barely have any idea what they are selling and the company is rapidly going under.
To give you an idea :
We recently changed office and one of them asked if they had had to be in the same workspace as the developers again?

Why do we need them?
Cant we outsource their jobs ?

Some of them dont even answer when you bid them good morning

And one douche bag even brought his bluetooth radio and refuses to use headphones , he keeps playing shitty music and disturbing us.

The company is kinda fractured and there is poor chain of command, so there is little we can do, telling dev management is fruitless he has no authority over the guy
And the business manager simply said oh you dont like good music then walked off.

Nature of Startups

Sales executive go and sell the features which are not available in the product.

They come back and inform them to the manager, then the manager makes the request to dev team to do the features.

After all these the discussion will be made in the morning and delivery is expected by evening.

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

CEO : this Facebook app has this great feature .

Me: yep, it’s really useful

CEO : can we make something like this in ours too ?

Me : we can sure try using this(x) method.

CEO : cool, I’ll add this into the sales team memo , and btw, it needs to be done in 2 days,
Me : but... but ...

It was my first ever hackathon. Initially, I registered with my friend who is a non coder but want to experience the thrill of joining a hackathon. But when we arrived at the event, someone older than us was added to our team because he was solo at that time. Eventually, this old guy (not too old, around his 20s) ( and let’s call him A) and I got close.
We chose the problem where one is tasked to create an ML model that can predict the phenotype of a plant based on genotypic data. Before the event, I didn’t have any background in machine learning, but A was so kind to teach me.
I learned key terms in ML, was able to train different models, and we ended up using my models as the final product. Though the highest accuracy I got for one of my model was 52%, but it didn’t discouraged me.
We didn’t won, however. But it was a great first time experience for me.
Also, he gave me an idea in pitching, because he was also taking MS in Data Science ( I think ) and he had a great background in sales as well, so yeah I got that too.

The project manager and sales team decided to call a meeting to see how long a project I'm currently working will take to finish. Little did they think to ask the only person working on it.

Oh yes. Of course I want to be sat next a noisy sales team.

The battle is lost. I'm implementing the mother of all stupid features because the sales team wants it.

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

I am on a team of 2 currently at work.

I am assigned to build some custom code for a customer going live with our product soon.

Because my team mate is already working on another customers project I explained the work may not be done in time because we were not given sufficient notice for our team of two to plan for the project.

Sales team contact me later that day asking me why I told our customer we don't have enough resources.

He wanted me to find a better phrase to tell them like "We have half our team dedicated to your project."

Another reason to hate our sales team 🤪

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Backstory: A few months ago, I wrote an inventory management web app for internal use by the sales team, logistics, and whoever else might need to use it.

Earlier this week: A few minutes before I usually leave, my phone rings. It's some dude I've never heard of. No idea what his function at the company is, still don't, probably never will, don't care. He's never used the app before, and says he's having problems. His cube's on my way out, so I swing by.

I'm not making this next part up. This dude is probably 60 years old, and he's using a very old looking gateway desktop (with the cow print logo thing on the chassis), running Windows XP (not a typo), using IE7.

I don't know what to say, so I just stare at the desktop, look at dude, laugh, and eventually explain that he's never going to be able to use the system via the web app until his rig is replaced.

What the fucking fuck is this. How could this have happened. How do our it people still fucking have jobs. Better question, how did this thing survive the y2k bug?

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Before becoming a developer, I used to work as a sales rep at this company that spent a good amount of time building what they believed to be an innovative state-of-the-art “code generator”. It was basically a scaffolding tool for generating software.

They were using it to auto generate customized iOS and Android native mobile app templates, along with a web backed.

The problem was that the generated code was shit, and the developers on the team basically spent more time fixing bugs than if they had built everything from scratch. But their passion for the product meant they just kept using it.

For some reason they never fixed issues in the original templates, so basically all the bugs that were found, kept showing up with each new app!

I have never seen apps like this that essentially had more bugs than features. Opening more than 10 app screen meant the app would freeze and crash. Sign up forms were actually dummy forms. The list goes on...

All the apps had the same shitty UI. For example, Product pages had a product image area that was like 5% of the screen view!

Last but not least, apps had a backend IP address hardcoded pointing to a server with an IP address that was temporary. So one day they had to restart the server and suddenly all customer apps stopped working and required a software update to work!

It was amazing seeing how a team of 3 developers trying to fix messy autogenerated code, couldn’t accomplish what was essentially a website on an app that I managed to build in my free time.

That’s how I knew it was time to quit my job and code full time.

Startup company: "We love competing with each other! We (the sales team) play pranks and pass each other mini footballs! Mandatory team social nights (No we won't pay you for it)!

Me, a typical introverted dev: "HISSSSSSSSSSS, away, away!"

What's with these sales people making software companies reminiscent of 1980s Wall Street trading floors?

Make a prototype, no where near ready for customer and sales team sells it!
😢

Just got accepted for a game developer. Ive been making games since I was 12 as hobby. Did a few months of university level of Game Development. Then started as web devloper professionally. The company I work for found a project as game dev for me.

I love my work and the sales team for finding me that job, even though its out of scope of their regular projects.

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.

So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.

I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...

~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.

~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!

~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.

~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.

~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.

~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.

~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.

And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...

Ever fuckinn "townhall meeting" at previous workplace. It was such an utter waste of time that even after leaving that place I still rage when thinking about it.

Every 4-6 months they would setup this useless crap of a meeting that drags on for over 1-1.5 hours of execs talking themselves up and trying to convince how great they are. And since they were cheapskates they would send out an email asking everyone to not join from their desks but congregate in the conference rooms to save on the dial-in. The conference rooms didn't have adequate chairs, vantilation or good enough aircon to handle twice/thrice the capacity of people standing in the room.

The marketing exec would go on and on about how great the media visibility is, how many views/likes they had on a linkedin post last month. The sales exec would blabber on about how their team is great and that the customers themselves are lining up and there is no competitor. Straight after the CFO would lecture on how the year is still difficult financially (in disguise justifying the peanuts of pay). The last exec, no matter who that is would specifically raise a point that the previous speakers didn't mention his/her team while thanking others.

This is also not a small company, the total headcount was just over 900 and roughly 500-700 people would be attending these townhalls. Imagine the amount of man hours wasted on that shitshow.

It's not that my work is hard. Basically, all the work I do these days is something I've done before with a slight twist on it.

I just feel underappreciated.

"bUt u mAkE sO mUcH mOnEy dO uR jObBbb!!"

How much money I make should not suppress how I feel at a company. Two years without a raise, every company meeting is a circle jerk for the sales team, and whenever our work is mentioned it's "Great job to the PMs for getting this to our clients."

Fuck you guys. Lol. This is a team effort from all sides, but to put engineers last on the "kudos" ladder is just so shitty.

My first job. Hired as a designer. It was me and a backend dev (PHP). Company wanted us to build their e-commerce website, but the backend dev had no eye for design or front end chops, fell onto me, so I learned it on the spot.

I also did the mistake of trying to prove myself too hard and ended up doing IT, network and user support, user training, phone sales and helping the print team on designs, on top of my already taxing responsibilities, for 18k/year.

In the end, the company moved offices and I was tasked with finding and installing a new server, IP phone system, and organising the desks following a carefully crafted and approved plan. Spent the weekend doing that (had some friends that didn't even work for the company join as they knew of my struggle) only for the bosses to arrive on Monday, decide they didn't like it, and just said "change it", ignoring the plan entirely. I then left without having another job lined up and never looked back.

I wish I can fucking clone myself.

We have been providing digital marketing services for like 5 years without having a proper QA team. Well because we cannot afford to hire one. Technically I am supposed to check and control the quality of our operation team. But I have been juggling so many balls and couldn't do that properly.

So this year we decided that we have to seriously take care of that. But we are providing all kinds of services and creating a QA team for all those services is gonna be costly. We wanna solve it, but also doesn't wanna hang ourselves with another rope. So we have decided to just found a QA team with leaders from various departments mainly Sales and Customer Services. They are the ones who have talked with clients. So they should be able to judge the quality of the services our operation made.

It is a fucking nightmare. It is like we have doubled the amount of clients. And that extra half of those newly popped up clients are sitting in our office.

The sales team sold a project using our 'innovative framework', which had 'prebuilt components', which we 'only needed to plug n play' with a 10 week deadline. Of course, the framework didn't exist. Guess who was the lucky guy who had to create the framework AND finish the project in 10 weeks? fml...

We have an open office and sales team laughing on top of their voice. What's funny? Nothing. If someone says "I have shit on my pants", they'll start laughing loudly. I have made several complains but the GM says that their laughter makes this company friendly.

I really don't get it.

After 9 weeks of waiting for my much delayed dell xps 15 i opened the box and it's fucking azerty ... While i clearly, CLEARY requested qwerty. I mentioned it 4 fucking times for the love of god make sure the keyboard is fucking QWERTY .. THEY GAVE ME AZERTY .. on top of that shittrain they also forgot to include​ my integrated fingerprint reader which i paid extra for.. man what a fucking shit company .. they might make half decent hardware but they piss all costumers of with their insanely bad braindead costumer service and sales team.

9 weeks of waiting , receiving the wrong configuration, probably again 5 more weeks of waiting.. man im starting to hate this shit company.

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

Being called into a meeting where you get fired for an argument you had with your CTO. But the CTO left 6 months ago and the sales department are suspiciously low on deals in the pipeline...

Shame really, I loved that job and the Dev team was great, shame the directors were bastards.

My current new boss is pretty awesome. When he arrived, we were a lot of juniors dev crumbling under pressure. He directly went to product team and to sales team and totally reduced our workload to something acceptable.
He values sane work environment a lot, and I think that's what make a good boss

!rant

My love for Clojure is so deep that I have invested the whole company. Over the past months just everyone came up to me and asked me, if I may teach them some Clojure programming. With everyone I mean literally everyone working in this company - fellow programmers, the ladies from HR, the Sales Team and even the CEO.

So today I gave a two hour introduction to the whole team on how to Clojure (in absolute basic terms).

The team has just voted that we will do that every friday starting next week for the rest of the year.

If you have passion, show it.

Sales team came in earlier this week promising a client an application with several major modifications in less then 4 months. Guesstimating about 6 months to complete all the modifications.

Manager's answer: "Let's rewrite the application". Top it off he wants to use a obscure language that he only knows.

I am hating hating hating my junior developer job. Most of my work is updating PDF's on all type of internal intranets. So my days are spent working jira ticket after jira ticket.

Internal customer submits ticket to update 3 PDF's on internal intranet for sales team. They are named so badly I can't match them unless I review all 30 links on this page. Most links with report numbers but here's is not also no notes to where in the page.

I do JIRA comment --no respose even though I tag her.

I politely email her asking her to rename the PDF's with the same file names I am replacing.

She asked it I wanted her to rename them 'other'

What??? So I asked her where she sits so I can show how to easily find the file names in the URL.

Responds with the same files renamed with more description but still not the same.

Respond again giving better instructions on how to find it and second request to where she sits.

1 day later no response!

When I get into today I am closing her ticket!

Fuck these middle aged Midwest dumb bitches!

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

Our smart and very professional sales guy strikes again,

I had to do some research on if I could print a pdf file directly from the server (be it php / nodejs)

When I told him I had found a solution he said, good job and went away, I was like...hmm k..

A few days later he came to my senior being mad that the project wasn't done in time.. And we were like.. Dude... What project!?

Apparently he made a deal to have a working demo in two weeks, but we (our dev team) never got that message...

Heard sales manager talking to his team to wash their hands properly after using computer keyboard.

And here I'm sinking my face in both hands and occasionally covering my mouth with one hand and biting my finger tips sometimes.

I really dislike the company I work at.

I want to say hate, but there are parts that I adore (mostly the people I get to work with).

However, I dislike:
- The management
- The way engineers are treated
- Lack of responsibility for on QA for finding bugs, and it falling solely onto the engineers
- Sales circle jerk every All Hands meeting
- The amount of "ring-around-the-rosy" they played with me for a 10k raise (took 12+ months and not what I was looking for when I first asked)
- They lie

Just a shitty company overall. Interesting product depending on what team you're on, but overall I'd rather dye my hair green and become a talking broccoli stock.

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

Haven't ranted in a while so here it goes.

Head of product took me (senior dev) to a high value client workshop/demo session and over the course of two days found the reason behind why the dev team has been pushed to the limit as of late and sales/product team has been making promises to clients without checking with dev leaders on reasonable delivery dates on massive new features.

I tried my best to manage expectations by differing talking about delivery dates by saying "lets discuss that with the team" rather than giving out dates right now. But as soon as the meeting ends he sends an email to the client confirming delivery dates on features that we have done no research on or even specialize in!

Please tell me this is not how well established businesses work or is that the new reality of things. In either case I wanna find a new job :/

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

Company with CULTURE
Company who doesnt allow tech team to WFH but editorial team is fine (or sales)

Sonos playing ALL DAY, and sales team talking all day, next to tech team desk

Dont u love open space offices?

Fuck this
FML

Just found out today that may FINALLY be able to start charging for the development work our team does. 😎

Just have to wonder why this could have happened ages ago.

**Spoilers**
It was the sales team. That's why!

My department vp announced to our sales team that our company would have an online Web based catalog capable of custom style configuration, pricing calculation, quote generation. the catalog would manage all of our customers different discount rates automatically and notify the correct sales rep any time a customer completes a quote. This was announced on September 30(ish) with a launch date of December 1. I'm the only Web developer and I found out afer the announcement. :/

Two things: I wrote a program for the BBC that uploaded all their Top Gear content to YouTube and I wrote a web app that the Getty Images global sales team use to sell content to all their customers. :)

Debating on whether to quit my job.

Part of the reason it's hard for me to make a decision is there are a lot of good things about my job:

- almost all the projects we work on are blue sky; no technical debt anywhere
- great teammates; people help each other out and generally there's a good vibe
- reasonable boss; he's totally fine with me managing my own schedule, and since I get my work done, he basically never questions when and where I work
- about 1 hour of corporate meetings each week
- best healthcare I've ever had; basically everything is paid for
- 3 weeks PTO & all major US holidays
- free food; generally healthy office snacks and such

So why would I want to quit this environment?

- I hardly get to code anymore. About 2 years ago, I got asked if I would mind helping spec out projects. Since then, I've moved from writing code related to projects to helping my teammates understand the business situation so they can build the right thing.
- I'm in lots of meetings. So we have very few meetings for the company itself. We have a bunch of customer meetings, though. And progressively, I've getting pulled into meetings where there's really no reason for me to be there, aside from "we should have a technical person present."
- The sales people are getting tired of turning down clients that our product isn't targeted for. So they're progressively pushing to make products in those areas. Unfortunately, I'm the only one on the engineering team has any experience in that other tech stack. Also, the team really, really don't want to learn it because it's old tech that's on its way out.
- The PM group is continuously in shambles. Turnover there has averaged 100% annually for about 5 years. Honestly, IMO, it's because they're understaffed. However, there has been 0 real motion to fix this other than talk. This constant turnover has made it so that the engineering team has had to become the knowledge base for all clients.
- My manager has put me on the management track, but has been very slow to hand off anything. I'm the team supervisor, and I have been since the beginning of the year formally. When the supervisor quit last year, it basically became obvious to me that I was considered the informal supervisor after that. However, I can't hire or fire; I can't give a review; I don't have any budget; I can't authorize time off. So what do I do now? Oh, I'm the person that my boss comes to ask about my co-workers performance for the purpose of informing promotion/termination/pay increases. That's it. I'm a spy.

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Why would companies ever hire a manager from a non-tech background, at least for managing engineers? After reading @IAmNotARobot's latest rant I just have to ask because it makes absolutely no sense to me. Surely non-tech people should be reserved for managing non-tech roles like sales, HR, and maaaaybe team leads, right? How can you manage someone if you don't understand anything of what they do?

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

* Developing a new "My pages" NBV offer/order solution for customer
_Thursday
Customer: Are we ready for testing?
Me: Almost, we need to receive the SSL cert and then do a full test run to see if your sales services get the orders correctly. At this point, all orders made via this flow are tagged so they will not be sent to the Sales services. We also still need to implement the tracking to see who has been exposed to what in My Pages.
Customer: Ok, great!

_Friday
Customer: My web team needs these customers to have fake offers on them, to validate the layout and content
Me: Ok, my colleague can fix this by Tuesday - he has all the other things with higher prio from you to complete first
Customer: Ok! Good!

_Sunday
Me: Good news, got the SSL cert installed and have verified the flow from my side. Now you need to verify the full flow from your side.
Customer: Ok! Great! Will do.

_Monday
*quiet*

_Tuesday
Customer: Can you see how things are going? Any good news?
Me: ???
*looks into the system*
WTF!?!
- Have you set this into production on your side? We are not finished with the implementation on our side!
Customer: Oh, sorry - well, it looked fine when we tested with the test links you sent (3 weeks ago)
Me: But did you make a complete test run, and make sure that Sales services got the order?
Customer: Oh, no they didn't receive anything - but we thought that was just because of it being a test link
Me: Seriously - you didn't read what i wrote last Thursday?
Customer: ...
Me: Ok, so what happens if something goes wrong - who get's blamed?
Customer: ...
Me: FML!!!

So I was told to look into a new project management tool to replace our home grown one that must be free, decided on visual studio team services because we all have msdn so it's free. We just got everything migrated and we've been using it very successfully for the past few months and it's honestly made task management so much easier.
Get back from vacation and my company just spent $100k on sales force agile accelerator... 😑 I don't understand how upper management works

Sales team wants a discount to go live at midnight, but doesn't realize that requires someone to stay up to push a button at midnight.. It's ok, I don't need a life.

Salesforce. Although I wasn't involved in the purchase or the implementation, I spent many 100 hour weeks dealing with the crapshoot of an implementation. A large company abused that software to the point of no return. They used that thing for everything, and then they didn't even use it right for the one thing salesforce is good at. So I guess I don't have anything against salesforce itself besides its scalability issues, custom SOQL syntax, user model, and pricing. I'm more upset about the salesforce developers/business owners that decided it was okay to use salesforce for things it was never meant for, like inventory, project management, 3rd party sales team, and so many other things that caused what should have been sub-second queries to take 30 to 60 seconds.

Story Time: About Priorities and Sales

So at this point I'm working tech support for a company that makes some super cool networking equipment, think big data / data centers and such.

This company had grown at a good pace but the the support team had not (thus is the way for all tech support evetually). So I get a call from a frantic sales guy:

Sales: "OMG, where are with this ticket?!?!? It's a P2 ticket!!!"

Me: "Well the ticket came in 30 minutes ago, I emailed them some questions, but just so you know I have 8 P2 tickets, and 4 P1 tickets.... so it will be a while."

Sales: "OMG! Make my customer's ticket a P1!!"

Me: "Sure."

-call ends-

-30 minutes passes-

-sales calls again-

Sales: "OMG, where are with this ticket?!?!? It's a P1 ticket!!!"

Me: "Well I haven't gotten to them yet... just so you know I have 7 P2 tickets, and 5 P1 tickets.... "

Sales "ARGH!"

ʅ（´◔౪◔）ʃ

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

Job review time,
(just a random pick from the a list).
---
"Engineering Lead"
Translation: "Chief Calculator Officer"

"Anyone can design or spec a product, get it manufactured overseas and get it to market. But will it be good? Will people buy it?"
Translation: "We're looking for a miracle"

"Take on a top notch team that is going places in Electronics, R&D and advanced product development."
Translation: "Professional Excel engineer wanted"

"This company is a little-known success story that has been operating for over X years, making mission-critical electronic equipment for use by consumers, professionals, government and industry."
Translation: "Design weapons and tamagotchis."

"Working as part of the Senior Leadership team, you will have charge of the I.P. engine and product development team spinning up new ideas and throwing them out the door."
Translation: "You're success is our success. Your failure is your failure."

"The Role
- Generate New Ideas
- Push for new products
- Drive manufacturing
- Manage a cross disciplinary team that includes Electronics, Software and Mechanical
- Project Manage new projects to completion
- Interact with marketing and sales to drive results"
Translation: "We've never hired one person to be a whole team before but we think it will work."

"On your first day, we expect:
- Strong Leadership experience and skills
- Solid Engineering Fundamentals
- Experience taking new and existing products to market
- Experience with manufacturing high-tech, mission critical equipment
- Commercial Acumen
- Bachelors in Electrical or Electronic Engineering"
Translation: "We expect you know where to hide the drugs already."

"Nice to have:
- Experience with Defense or Medical Systems
- R&D background
- MBA, B. Commerce or similar"
Translation: "By clicking on this job ad your background check is already under way."

"In return:
- A loyal and oustanding team will be there to support you
- Extremely knowledgeable experts to guide you
- Incredibly smart founders to mentor you
- The opportunity to work on a real product
- Extremely generous salary package"
Translation: "Our last dev has removed the Warrant Canary. Can you pleeease put it back?!"

!Rant

I will have you know that being part of the mobile solutions team is pretty sweet when you have nothing to do but keep a few databases clean and up to date, test which iPad is best suited for the sales people and buy 20 cases to test them for sturdiness.
Seriously without dumb idiots arguing about roaming costs and demanding help with the most basic shit this would be heaven.
I mean it's apple but still having every color of the 9.7 iPad and of the 12,9 pro stacked up on your desk is pretty cool.

F@#!k my year,

After a year long Mobile app project finally shipped where I served **two lead roles (UX design and mobile dev)**; I had my status meeting with my manager to discuss my next phase of my career. To which I was told I would be promoted to Chief or partner level at my workplace, if shipped on time, which we did.

The response I got was unsettling, I've been asked to "step down" from my architect role and join our innovation sales team since it was discovered I also have an MBA. So much so my skip level manager cut off all my dev licenses week of release. 🤣

The overall need was for me to oversee H1B and contractor resources moving forward on new engagements, as I was now "too expensive". I like coding, but it doesn't sit well with me at all...

This has just happened

general channel to discuss sonos.
I have sales team less than 1m away.

this office is a fucking pub.
free beers, people telling jokes and
having non work conversations, free beer/wine.

The dream! unless you want to code.
if you want to code....ah NO WFH POLICY.

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

The sales team.

A top food chain client wants a feature Fx
and has a deadline on Friday.
We are still working on it and already estimated hours and set deployment on Monday.
(No deployments on Friday)
And the business/sales guy comes up with new deadline to submit it at Friday morning.
And was only discussing with one of my team member already working on it. And i knew there is more hours required for testing and need to deployment pre deployment phase (staging of dev)
I was over hearing the conversation between them and I got pissed off and jumped in and said Not Possible at all.

He tries to argues about giving something to him. I said we can give it to you but will not garauntee anything. Now project manager jumps in. PM and my team already know that we will be delivering on Monday.

He arguing that if the Fx is not ready then I will call client developer to office to test it directly on my team members laptop.
I said, No way. We are not ready yet and havent finished yet. Major work will be on Thursday and on Friday we will be testing till end of the day.

PM explains him blah blah stuff.
He calms down and says no worries we will check the status on Friday afternoon amd roll out something to Client.
PM, developer and I looked each other and I said, sure will deploy but will not garauntee anything. He goes back to his desk.

Seriously.
WE ALREADY ESTIMATED F* MAN HOURS AND WILL BE READY ON MONDAY MEANS MONDAY DONT F* BUILD MORE PRESSURE ON US. F* SALES

When the sales team doesn't do their job so cuts are made in engineering....

I would give myself so much shit for this.

Sales cloud architect, if I needed the money.

I give sales so much shit, like you've got no idea how much shit. I almost lost my job because I called the sales team at my job "soulless husks of meat and sin".

It's not an easy job but damn I was really fucking good at it.

If money was no problem, I would probably become a restoration artist.

I love to restore old homes, furniture, tvs, radios, etc.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

New bossman is looking for KPIs.

We're an agile team who build a back end system for a large corporation. Specifically the system we build is used by the sales guys when they are putting through a sale. I have no idea where to start with KPIs.

Can't measure number of sales as that's down to the salesmen. Can't measure speed of sale as again that's down to the salesman and how much they chat.

Any ideas?

I hate it when I want to implement a 3rd party API and their docs have no hint at how to create a test account.. Why do they make me call their sales team / bother their support for that?

Just make it easy enough for the sales team to understand. If they can, literally anyone can.

My server has constaly 40% CPU usage.... Even when there are NO requests.

I'm searching "wtf is going on" for the past 2 days.

0 results. Clients are unhappy, sales team is unhappy. Noone is happy and I don't have an answer. Grrrrrrr.

*Goes back to reading logs

By server I mean Azure WebApp, not a VM/ohysical server

I just finished posting this but think it deserves its own post.
If you're creating a business or "startup" (as people like to call it these days) don't assume the idea is novel or investors will just jump on board. Focus on the business fundementals, money and cash flow, even before launch, unless you can afford not to. But really you can't afford not to. Selling before launch means that you're effectively doing two things 1 you're collecting new customers and income for the business and 2 you're. raising awareness at the same time. Obscurity is death and failure.

Get you a good sales team and marketer when the time is right.

Have a year of runway.

Identify the sites and groups your target audience and investors frequent. Start conversations now, buzz is the hardest thing to generate.

Start building relations with customers and potential clients now. Discuss launch, ask them if they'd be willing to pay up front before launch, in order to secure a "lifetime membership", offer it as an early opportunity and charge extra. Giving a discount out of the gate is a mistake B/c it says to potential investors that you don't think it's ready or worth it yet. Of course if it's between making 1. Some money or 2. No money, don't let it be a deal breaker, offer a discount. Going from no clients to any clients is a BIG deal. If you can do 1 you can make it to 10, if 10, you can reach 100, we etc.

No one likes asking for money and yet it is as important if not more important than development.

I have been on crunch time for so long, with so many hours I don't even know what day of the week it is. I legitimately had to look it up. I also calculated my hourly rate for the last 3.5 weeks, and I was making the same as a grocery store bagger! Being salaried sucks in times like this. I am paid peanuts.

Last night I woke up every 30 minutes in a panic I was late to work. This job is killing me, and all because the sales team sold the product on an unrealistic deadline, for no money...

In addition, I am gaining weight, haven't seen my family for any significant period of time for ages, and Taco Bell knows me by name and order...

On that note, next Monday I am going to go into my boss' office, and demand like a 50%-75% raise! I am terrified! Haha

Migraines are fun though. THE PAIN PROVES I AM ALIVE!

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

Rant two of monday!!

We are in a new office. Bigger than the previous one. Fine.

We are away from sales team (check previous rants about sales team and their hero #boringman)

Cool. We still hear him and them but it's better.

Boring man stops by tech team table to ask how many lines of code we have done today or in the last <period of time>.

We have solved nothing.

Boring man is veeeeery bored.

Boss changes plan & schedule for this year's projects at least 5 times within 3 weeks.

Since everything changes so frequently, would you mind making the following changes as well:

1) Give everyone a better PC/Mac
2) Get a better PM
3) A sales team that can sell things

Or maybe a more creative, decisive and organised boss so we can have all 3 wishes at once just like Kinder Surprise

Spent 5 hours deploying the product to a dedicated private VPN to integrate with customer's corporate network.
Boss: You have to coordinate with the sales team to deploy it on their computers.
...
Sales Team: This shortcut shows Internet Explorer icon can we change it to our product icon?

Me and my team is facing a weird issue. The sales head is saying

"Sale is not happening because Tech is not working"

And our product is a door to door selling product.

We come up with a solution to let us sell the product and sales guy will handle the software development.

The response was "Its not our job". Its make me angry that people do know to poke in other people businesses but don't want to take responsibility.

(Asking for someone I’ve been mentoring.)

TLDR; Looking for recommended resources on how to code email templates from scratch.

I’ve been helping a friend transition their career from sales to web development and recently he applied for a position as a jr developer for an ecommerce startup. They liked him and they’re willing to create a new position for him where he’ll work with both the marketing department and the development team. He’ll start with building email templates for the marketing department and eventually move on to development as he grows his skills. I’d really appreciate it if I could get some recommended resources for learning how to code email templates from scratch and from PSDs. This would be a life changer for him and I’m trying to do as much as I can to help me out.

Twitter developers will authenticate half of their endpoints with some authentication method and the other half with a totally different one (which doesn't work) and their sales team will have the guts to contact you to check if you're still interested to access their API.

My only interest is feeding your corpse to the ravens.

So I joined this amazing team at a pretty good company. They're solving some interesting problems and improving the company's product. I'd been very motivated working with them from the start.
A few weeks ago the company announced they'd be allocating more resources for sales related teams and turns out my team is one that's gonna be gutted from 7 to 3 devs.
I've been extremely demotivated since I just left a fintech cause I found the space extremely boring. Haven't been able to work, finish tasks etc knowing I'm gonna go back to something I know I don't enjoy.

Not sure if I should leave, just slack off or what since the pay is really good and I've only been here half a year. There was also a small singing bonus I'd have to return.
Any tips?

A friend outsourced a project to us with partial requirements. We developed it as per the requirements and submitted the app and admin portal to his client. I was aware of certain critical features missing in the requirement. Generally we provide an admin portal to manage the backend of the app, but in this project a backend was to be made but the adding or modifying users section was not mentioned in the requirement. My team presented the project and convinced them to create or modify users writing SQL queries on the production DB (they are sales guys with no technical knowledge)

P.S - we won't be responsible for any DB errors :P