Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

So the new robot (Dingo) arrived yesterday. Today I did the unboxing, and damn was it disappointing. I realized the university purchased it not from the company I recommended, and they messed up the delivery.
The robot controller was missing, and the charging cable did not match the charging station input. Like dude, you had one job!
Since the lady in administration decided to disregard my recommendation and order from a random shop, she might as well assemble the robot herself....

I started to get super pissed off to people saying you don’t need a college, masters degree to get an IT job. Instead go and gain practical knowledge, showing your practical certificates projects is much better than a having a degree that doesn’t prove if you can do the job or not.

Is a degree absolutely necessary to get a job? No, I agree on that. You can tear yourself apart to be known make projects loads of people contribute in GitHub spend maybe years on practicing and creating stuff for your portfolio..

But excuse me what do you think people do in college studying degrees? Are we getting it from the shop in the corner on a Saturday?

Respect people’s achievements and titles. Especially Masters degrees push you hard, make you sweat apart from loads of courses you work at least a year on a practical project, dissertation, thesis and only pass if it is your own opinion and findings. It is not like a multiple choice exam certificate or you study watch videos for few months and create a web page.

Don’t throw shit on people’s efforts and accomplishments without knowing how it is achieved just because you don’t have it.

Yes it is not necessary. Does it make you learn? Yes! Is it practical? Yes! Does it help you get a job? Hell yes! Why most companies look for degrees? Do you think they might know what it takes to get it and the skills and knowledge you gain?

Don’t come and say in IT degrees not worth it without even knowing how to draw UML. Without knowing IT management you go and be a leader later on, no clue on how to manage projects, people and soft skills sweeping the floor.

It doesn’t matter if you are a YouTube celebrity or a president. What does the title say? “Master” now go, respect and digest it! Don’t be a sour loser.

Ooh I am fierce today and not done yet

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

Just installed linux (Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS x64) because windows update was being a cunt, instantly, it all fell into place and I got it fully running with minecraft (using generic driver, but it actually works pretty well, don't worry I will get the proper one tomorrow) and a desktop icon for it within two hours compare to windows (update) taking 4 days to do barely any updates, not accepting java or graphics drivers, which it requires because fuck opengl with the default drivers.

Fuck windows. Hooray for linux!

Now back to programming...

Thanks for putting up with me but I just need to vent because I felt like I couldn't program (and I didn't) because of FUCKING DOOLALY WINDOWS 8!

Btw thanks to the local charity shop for introducing me to (SUSE) linux when I was like 11, giving me a hope in hell of using linux. I now have around 11 bootable linux disks and 1 bootable flash.

Just finished a technical interview for a company that asked me to submit a small app.

I guess when they had written the requirements they had anticipated it to be written as a Webform not as a full MVC application 😂. They had expected me to complete and build this single page app in 2-3 hours not in 14... 🫥 Oops

So here we are reviewing it and asking questions about my setup and what I was trying to do. They were impressed enough with it that one guy even admitted that I might be a better programmer than him. 😳 A very kind compliment, but concerning because he's supposed to be my manager...

All in all got through everything and they want me over to meet the team and see what this shop is all about.
I'm excited, they company is seeing immense growth and I might be able to bring in my expertise to expedite some of it.

Did I mention they use SVN for version control? 😳
They want to get into Git soon but they don't know how to. I guess I'll be leading that cause.

Google Business Profile is probably not meant for developers. "Help customers find your business by industry." Dev: set primary category to "Web Developer". Google: We didn't understand your category. Please select from the suggestions that appear when typing. Dev, typing: "Web D"... Google suggests: "Web Designer, Web hosting company, Well drilling contractor, Waterbed shop". Okay, Google, nevermind.
Google: "Update your customers. Keep your customers up to date about your business!" Dev clicks "add update", adds info about that customer should use different phone number temporarily due to broken phone. Google: "Your post has been removed from your Business Profile on Google because it violates one or more of our post content policies." Okay Google, at least you let me add an additional phone number on my profile without requiring to verify my primary number that I currently have not access to. Anything else?
Google: "Claim your €400 free advertising credit" Dev: clicks "claim credit" Google: "To access this Google Ads account, enable 2-Step Verification in your Google account." How to combine idiocy and deceptive patterns in a single UI: Google knows! Apart from their search engine, their unique business advantage is simple that they suck a little less than Apple and Microsoft. Sorry, not a day to be proud of our profession, once again.

You know modern cars, they have these computer thingies that tell you when something isn't working with little warning lights.

How useful !

"Take me to repair shop!" it says, and even sets the SatNav route.

Of course, the place might be closed, but still, its trying to help. :-)

Anyhow, by chance just happen to be there getting said car serviced..

Mention the several warning thingies that sprang up on the way in..

After service..

Which took twice as long as a normal service, so I was hopeful they was fixing things !

Though every time I go and ask how things are, magically its just been finished and I haven't been waiting for no good reason because no one remembered I was waiting..

No, they didn't fix any of the faults...

Why I asked without getting angry..

Because the diagnostic computer said there wasn't any..

But there was !

Come back when the fault returns they said..

But..

If the fault disappears before their computer gets plugged in, they will just say there isn't a fault..

Apparently on the car there is no fault logging, its either, a fault right now, or no fault at all..

This might explain why a few months ago all the brakes seized up ( Its less than 2 years old, it shouldn't do that ! ), if some computer part is playing up..

So, I'll get my own car diagnostic computer and wait for it to play up, and maybe get some more error codes/etc. to pass on to the car fixing place !

Today's lesson, logs are important !

Also, just because a computer says there isn't something wrong with something, doesn't mean there isn't, so go and check it physically !

And, the customer is always right !

Previously had an issue with a part that had worn out, asked for it to be replaced.

Went to pick up the car, asked if the part had been replaced.

No it hadn't !

They thought it wasn't worn out !

I asked, did they look at it ?

No they didn't was their reply..

I told them, if you take it off, you can see its worn out.

I watched them take it off, ( After much struggling, to which I remarked that yes, when I took it off to look at it, I had similar trouble ! ) they then saw it was worn out and put a new one on !

They then struggled to put the new one on, which I also mentioned I had the same trouble.

Being as it was my first time taking off one of those parts, you could be forgiven to think I was just a beginner.

But you might think a professional would be able to do a better job..

You just can't get the staff these days !

The real rant is trying to figure out when the devducks will ever be back in stock.

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

Headhunter called about a rejection for an assignment I did:

Assignment had malformed data examples
Assignment had unrealistic timespan for completion
Assignment used item stocks for a shop setup
Assignment didn't use any prices just item stocks

Who builds a webshop without prices in the first place?

So done with this job hunting assessment bullshit.

Can someone explain to me why non-technical people even work in tech companies ??

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but can you, for example, imagine that someone who doesn't even know what brick is would work on a construction site ?

Or can you imagine working in bike repair shop not knowing neither how to ride a bike nor how's bike is built ?

Sure, every company (especially large ones) needs bookkeepers/HRs/accountants etc. that don't need to know the inner workings of business.

Those people don't bother me, and they are necessary to keep the circus going.

I'm talking about all those middle management individuals.

All those "Project Managers" , "Business Analysts", "Directors' , "Principal Program Managers " etc etc ..

Such thing thing would be unthinkable in every other industry but somehow, in tech, anyone can work as long as they can throw a sufficient number of acronyms around.

I really think 1 hr+ meetings are a fucking waste of time. By minute 40, people's attentions waver.

If I ever run my own shop I will fucking ban meetings that last more than 30 minutes, and have a hard cap of 7 people per meeting and require a fucking agenda. God damn it. Being stuck in meetings where 90% of crap not relevant to me is bs.

#TiltedMonday

My former employer refuses to pay out my vacation time per state law. Left a month ago but they have not disabled my company email account.

Small shop so no active directory but still shocked they have not disabled my access. It’s only outlook/ office 365 no access to network drives.

What kind of small, petty and (mostly) legal havoc can I cause?

Something annoying but causes no monetary damage.

Right to repair by Corsair
My mouse has double click glitch...
To disassemble the mouse, first skates need to be peeled off and destroyed in order to get to mounting screws...
I was unable to find those skates online, so I reached directly the Corsair to check if they sold them. Of course they don't sell them...
Next I tried to find professional shop. I found one willing to replace switch for 50$ while brand new mouse costs 60$.
FUCK YOU CORSAIR

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

turn it back into a dev hobby and get a job in a shop or something

We didn't got your email.
Problem: i had an read reciept.

"Only the strongest gains the right to get the oil". Saw it at the shop yesterday.

This slogan is indeed correct — China soon will be "getting the oil" on russian land. Say bye-bye to all the land south of Ural Mountains.

My main non-dev hobby is listening to music - I've bought quite a lot of music as the world opened up again and it's taking up quite a bit of space. Might become a dev hobby once I get a media server set up but it's just more convenient for me to go in past my local record shop, pick up a CD, and press play.

What's with so many developers using shitty hardware? It's literary the one tool you need for your profession, there should be absolutely no objection to having the best one available. Stop bitching about some software using 50% of your CPU when you're on the bare entry-level HW ffs! And don't give me that "can't afford it" bullshit. If you take your car to the repair shop, you're also paying for the tools needed for the job; the same way, your customers need to pay for the tools you need as a developer. If you can't afford that, there's clearly not enough demand for the work you do, so go find a different job.

When i was fired in a few minutes in my first meeting with the boss since i was working there.
but now im glad im out of there. The kpis they use to see how someone performs are utterly useless.

zero trust blockchain authentication

- looking for a specific device in a single e-shop
- browse the listings of available SKUs
- find the one I want, buy it

And after I buy it, for some reason ad services think I need another one (or perhaps several other ones) from the same shop, as they keep showing me ads with the part I've purchased. And this goes on for weeks...

Talk about AI and clever advertising algorithms........

Feeling touched deprived while eating breakfast lmao. A real mf might just cry in this bagel shop.

Apparently ex twitter employees have created an mastodon instance for themselfs and their family.

So today at the electronics shop I saw an 500Gb on sale. For some reason it also came with a code for Battlefield 2042. The price label was written in a very confusing way, so I thought it was actually ~22EUR instead of ~118EUR off. It sounded too good to be true, but my train of thought was that it's entirely possible that they are really desperate to get people to play their shitty game.

Unfortunately it was too good to be true and it was actually actually 96EUR. What a scam.

In case you wanna look it up yourself, you can also find it online (For a lot cheaper than in that store). "WD_BLACK 500GB SN750 SE NVMe"

For some reason it's cheaper with the game, I wonder why (But it's still a tad overpriced)

I wonder if it's possible to negotiate amendments that forbid your employer to make you work with specific technologies.

"You're a modern dev shop aren't you? What's the harm in adding a clause to the contract that explicitly states I, the employee, will not be made to work with php5?"

Somebody: (whinwy) we need something to log into nonprivileged technical accounts without our rootssh proxy. We want this pammodule pam_X.so
me: this stuff is old (-2013) and i can't find any source for it. How about using SSSD with libsss_sudo? Its an modern solution which would allow this with an advantage of using the existing infrastructure.
somebody: NO I WANT THIS MODULE.
me: ok i have it packaged under this name. Could you please test it by manipulating the pam config?
Somebody: WHAT WHY DO I NEED TO MANIPULATE THE PAMCONFIG?
me: because another package on our servers already manipulates the config and i don't want to create trouble by manipulate it.
Somebody: why are we discussing this. I said clearly what we need and we need it NOW.

we have an package that changes the pam config to our needs, we are starting to roll out the config via ansible, but we still use configuration packages on many servers
For authentication as root we use cyberark for logging the ssh sessions.
The older solution allowed additionally the login into non-rootaccounts, but it is shut down in the next few weeks after over half an year of both systems active and over half an year with the information that the login into non-privileged accounts will be no more.

I've been at my new company for about a month. It's a startup that went from a dozen people last year to over two hundred right now. During the dot com era, that type of growth typically spelled disaster. It's crazy how many people I've met have only been at this shop for one to three months. Everyone is 100% remote, across multiple countries, and vast timezones.

I had this guy. He had an annoying voice and the worst trait of him was he was an Solaris fan. on nearly anything he would ramble that solaris is supirior to any other os. Luckily he was gone after a few months, unluckily i had to take over the stuff he did.

Having the people who hated me die by an aneurysma because they were too upset because of their envy

It’s like all the brokest people shop at Whole Foods ….