A small story on digitalization

I had spent an hour in the bank with my dad, as he had to transfer some money. I couldn't resist myself & asked:

Dad, why don't we activate your internet banking?

''Why would I do that?'' He asked, ''Well, then you wont have to spend an hour here for things like transfer.

You can even do your shopping online. Everything will be so easy!

I was so excited about initiating him into the world of Net banking.

He asked, If I do that, I wont have to step out of the house?

''Yes, yes''! I said. I told him how even grocery can be delivered at door now and how amazon delivers everything!

His answer left me tongue-tied.

He said ''Since I entered this bank today, I have met four of my friends, I have chatted a while with the staff who know me very well by now.

Two years back I got sick, The store owner from whom I buy fruits, came to see me and sat by my bedside and cried.

When u r Mom fell down few days back while on her morning walk. Our local grocer saw her and immediately got his car to rush her home as he knows where I live.

Would I have that 'human' touch if everything became online?

I like to know the person that I'm dealing with and not just the 'seller'. It creates bonds. Relationships.

Does "online" deliver all this as well?

Technology isn't life #BeHuman

For those who are not getting the context, this things happen in India. It is truth not a fact.

Developed an android app for the client. It was going great. Prototype for the initial (and static) content to show to the client was on the way. All until...

*goes back in time to when we were developing the prototype*

The asshole boss: "Wow this is good, just remove the login after the splash screen. Redirect it to the dashboard immediately."

Me: "What? Why?"

TAB: "He (the CEO of our company) said that the client doesn't need to see the login."

Me: "Well, alright." (Orders are orders, better remove it)

*A few days later, we present the prototype to the CEO. He'll be the one talking to the client. TAB isn't in this meeting.*

CEO: "Where is the login screen?"

Me: *dumbfounded and confused, in silence, and pressure rising*

The Good Boss: *whispers* "Where is the login screen? I thought I told you guys it should be there."

Me: *whispers* "TAB told us to remove it."

TGB: *Looks toward CEO* "TAB told us to remove it."

CEO: "Ugh. TAB is sick."

A little giggle. Nonetheless the meeting continued. He was displeased. I was a little guilty. The login screen's code was already there. Just couldn't show it since the app doesn't redirect there anymore.

*A discussion after the meeting*

TGB: "Why'd you guys remove the login?"

Me: "You and TAB had a meeting with the CEO the other day. After the discussion TAB went to us and told us to change it."

TGB: "But the CEO said no such thing! Anyway, let's go back to the office and straighten this out tomorrow."

*The next day, TAB was in the office*

TGB: *Chatting on messenger with me* "He is completely denying it."

Me: "WHAT?"

TGB: "He said he never told you guys anything. And he is persistent. I kept telling him it was his fault, but he denies all of it. He never approached you guys to change anything."

Me: "Well yeah. I guess we magically thought to ourselves and said, 'Hey, let's remove the login screen for fun. Let's show them less content because that's how we please our clients!' -_-"

Seriously, what kind of assholefuckery is this. This shit is a whole new level. I am so TRIGGERED.

I don't really care that the meeting didn't go as planned. Just MAN UP AND ADMIT YOUR MISTAKE YOU FILTHY SON OF A GOOSE. Never listening to this asshole again. Thought he could be trusted. I will always ask my good boss next time.

I’ve been told my rants are being missed, since I left my hellhole of a job. So here’s a filler until something major goes wrong.

Right so here’s what my life is like at the minute. I’m working remotely from home. So this morning, instead of spending 2 hours in traffic, I got up at a reasonable hour and brought the dog for a walk. I don’t know who these people think they are, fucking up my routine like this. The audacity of them thinking it’s no big deal really pisses me off.

I’m the only iOS developer in the company. Normally I get bombarded with “why not use react-native” or “RxSwift is the future” and other shitty tools. Last week I said “i’d like to do X this way”. Do you know what those absolute bastards said to me? You ready? Hope you are sitting down ... they said ... “ok, sounds good” .... the fucking c***s.

Oh oh and the big one, wait for this now. Fridays are demo days, last Friday I showed what I was working on. Afterwards the CEO comes along, stares me in the eyes and without a care in the world what his comments might do to my self-esteem the fucker says “wow great job”. He fucking makes me SICK!!!

Feels good to get all that off my chest. I’ve missed venting. At this rate, I’ll be back very soon!

Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:

- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.

Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?

- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.

What distro to use?

- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.

... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.

I used up all my sick days... So I called in dead

Co-worker has been sick for two days now (the guy that mainly helps me).

This has forced me to do nearly every ticket myself without asking questions.

It's going really great! I'm very happy about it tbh 😊

They announce the results and that was where the fucking plot twist was.

I was *not* on the list. I was devastated, to the point of depression. I refused to get over it, sulked at home, fell sick, skipped college for next two weeks straight. It took a few more days for me to recover.

After several visits from my friends and a lot of convincing, I decided to go back to college. I felt hopeless and had pretty much resigned to my fate. Being the idiot that I am, I missed several other interview opportunities during that interim when I was despairing-away.

Semester exams were about to start and I get a call from my staff saying I had cleared the coding exam for one of the companies that was coming for recruitment the next day. I had written this exam like several months ago and didn’t even remember having written it. It was such a short notice and I had zero time to prepare and my psyche didn’t want to(remember how I had resigned to my fate?).

I did manage to make it to the interview. I was expecting a tough interview (this company had a reputation for having tough interview rounds) but all I got was a bunch of tree and linked list and search algorithm related questions (internship interview). I had two rounds. It did really go well but I had learnt to not get my hopes up. Then I noticed other interviewees being called for a third round and they asked me to go home. I was like “meh”. I was used to it at that point in time.

Very unexpected to me, (but i’m pretty sure y’all have guessed at this point) I get a call saying, they have recruited me as an intern! 6 months later, I was working as an employee!

When I look back today, I realize that my current job, in every way, is waay better than the one I had so desperately wanted! The pay, the timing, the location, my actual job description, all of it! As a bonus I have an awesome manager who trusts me! I work with remotely with a team with such high standards and I learn something new everyday.

In my two years here, I have built a couple automation systems from scratch, I have mentored an intern and got him a full time offer, I have had two free two-week trips to the US and I have been promoted once! I’m so glad I was rejected that day (:

Thank you for reading!

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Two days ago I had a particularly retarded conversation with my father.

Father: Have you heard of [insert some language that will probably die in half a year]?

Me: Never heard of it.

Father: I talked with a friend yesterday and he said people pay millions for it.

Me: And?

Father: You have to learn it.

Me: *At this point trying not to facepalm* I don't think that's a good idea.

Father: Why?

Me: *begins explaining how the industry changes quickly, underused languages die out or how there simply aren't many materials on them*

My father then started shouting at me, saying that I don't listen to him and that his friend (who does stock trading for living) knows what's trending right now. Couple that with the fact that I was sick in bed when this random event happened, it led to me wanting to, ever so slightly, fucking kill myself.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

Small update on my UWP File Explorer:

Got some nice work done on the Navigation Box. A right click (Or long tap on touch displays) gives a context menu with subfolders, as opposed to the Classic application which had a drop-down button (This is not as friendly for touch, in my opinion)

A left click navigates to that folder.

Been a bit sick from my surgery, so not much progress these past few days, but I'm still happy with this.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

My boss trying to fool me on my vacation days. Trying to force me to use them for days I were sick. Bitch. NO!

Getting really sick of brand naming conventions these days, Youtube just suggested me a video called "Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra vs iPhone 11 Pro Max!"

Like what are those, Transformer names? 🙄

So that coworker of mine who got promoted to manager keeps continuing on abusing her new power. She convinced upper management to implement a new policy where you would be disqualified from your monthly performance incentives if you take 2 total sick days a month. She says this is to reduce the number of sick days people take, which of course upper management loved hearing.

By the way, since she's a manager now, this particular policy doesn't affect her - it only applies to us in the trenches. She can still take as many sick days as she wants, since being a manager she can work from home.

Needless to say, save for a couple of suck-ups, she's lost a lot of friends and made a number of enemies in our department, particularly on our dev team.

!rant

Sad to make my first post here a depressing one, but I really hope that some of you have some tips to help in this line of work.

If anyone of you suffer from depression, how do you cope with it? How do you keep yourself motivated and don't start this self-loathing that I'm currently in? Other than antidepressants or therapy (already have meds).

Why I'm asking is because I have a very tough time getting motivated these days and right now I really need to be most active. I need to do a lot of small and big stuff at my work and at the same time try to graduate from school. The deadline for my thesis is at the start of May, which surely seems far away now, but it does not feel like enough.

The more I understand the systems that I'm working with, the more I can see how much I may have f*cked everything up and I build this never-ending list of tasks for myself in my head to try and fix everything. Which leads to a complete lockup with anxiety and I can't get anything done.

I don't believe in myself or my code anymore. I'm afraid of pushing anything to production. I also don't have anyone else to help me with my work, as I'm the only developer in the company (we have a service provider where most of the big stuff happens).

To add to all this, I have been sick for the last 4 days.

I truly am in a bad place right now.

!dev

So a colleage of mine died a little more then a month ago. His brother in law who also works at the company, and has known him for 20 something years (as long as he has worked for the company), had a really hard time dealing with that. My colleage was sick/hospitalized and in and out of coma for half a year+ so this was the apex of an emotional rollercoaster. When my colleage died he was not in a state to work. He actually went to a physisian and now he's seeing a shrink.

He took one week of to deal with everything, including his own mental well being, and you know what the human thing was my employers did. Subtract that week from his vacation days without telling him.

WOW, just fucking wow... I mean - yeah it's sort of legal to do that, but seriously

I'm home sick for 4 days now and I'm starting to become paranoid about being replaced because I caught one front end dev watching Spring Boot videos on Friday.

I'm the only one who works with it there.

Not feeling well.

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

Ever have those days where you are not sick but definitely not capable of work?

If you are sick...

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

It has nothing to do with how YOU are feeling. It’s about RESPECT for those around you.

Especially if you work in an open office. Coming into an open office when sick is like coughing right on someone’s face repeatedly, it shows that same level of (lack of) respect.

Almost every company I have seen fucks this up so bad. It’s the same shit every year....

People are afraid to take days and stay home. They go in and make everyone sick, then everyone is taking days off and we are “short” on people. Then the incompetent CEO is scratching his head as to why this toxic work environment could produce such a toxic result.

And one more fucking thing.

If you got a cold/flu on Monday and your in the office on Wednesday because you are “feeling a bit better” then your a fucking idiot. At day 3 you are just starting to expel germs while still being highly contagious.

If you come into an open office while sick then I would say...

“Smarten the fuck up! And start showing some respect for the people you work with!”

If you have created (or are creating) a culture that encourages this then I would say...

“Fuck you! You should be fucking smarter than that.”

————

If your still sitting there thinking something like...

“Well I have to attend the meeting” or some other shit. Then let me add this to the pile.

Not everyone has had a rosy fucking life.

You may be working next to someone who has a lowered immune system due to past medical problems. What may be a week of sickness for you could end up being a month in the hospital for them.

You may be working next to a person who has a family member dying of cancer. If you make them sick then they can’t visit that family member (colds can kill cancer patients) and you may be stopping that person from seeing their loved ones one last time before they die.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

STAY THE FUCK HOME!

This endless exhaustion is killing me.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

Let's start the story with just a bit of a background: I'm coming from a rather poor family so I always saw my parents working 24/7 to, you know, have a decent future. When I first got into the IT industry, I went full workaholic and worked overtime every day, taking other responsibilities etc. Got promoted fast, jumped through 3 companies, and all is good.

Present day company:
- I'm working 12 hour days
- Managing smaller teams and interns
- Starting new projects incognito and giving them to the execs (for the good of the company ofc)
- Doing lots of stuff outside my responsibilities

COVID hits, I get very sick 2 month ago... I get laid off??? I'm literally 5 employees in one, and, "the fact that I got sick means that I left home and wasn't working"???

This also comes at a time when every family member was also laid off so I had the only stable job.

Not even sure if I even have the will to work hard for someone else anymore, this is fucked up.

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

3 Days Group Project.

1. day (get into matter, collect ideas)

2. day (mate was sick and stayed home, I programmed our Java game from scratch 100%)

3. day (he comes again, gets my source code, changes games wallpaper and sets tick speed to 60 instead of 30.
He deletes my version on all presentation PCs because he thought his was "better")

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Every last 10 days of the year we have a break...

I'm just gonna implement CI/CD in this motherfucking environment and blow everyone's mind at January, I'm sick of working as an amateur...

TL; DR: Bringing up quantum computing is going to be the next catchall for everything and I'm already fucking sick of it.

Actual convo i had:

"You should really secure your AWS instance."

"Isnt my SSH key alone a good enough barrier?"

"There are hundreds of thousands of incidents where people either get hacked or commit it to github."

"Well i wont"

"Just start using IP/CIDR based filtering, or i will take your instance down."

"But SSH keys are going to be useless in a couple years due to QUANTUM FUCKING COMPUTING, so why wouldnt IP spoofing get even better?"

"Listen motherfucker, i may actually kill you, because today i dont have time for this. The whole point of IP-based security is that you cant look on Shodan for machines with open SSH ports. You want to talk about quantum computing??!! Lets fucking roll motherfucker. I dont think it will be in the next thousand years that we will even come close to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

And even if it did, there have been vulnerabilities in SSH before. How often do you update your instance? I can see the uptime is 395 days, so probably not fucking often! I bet you "dont have anything important anyways" on there! No stored passwords, no stored keys, no nothing, right (she absolutely did)? If you actually think I'm going to back down on this when i sit in the same room as the dude with the root keys to our account, you can kindly take your keyboard and shove it up your ass.

Christ, I bet that the reason you like quantum computing so much is because then you'll be able to get your deepfakes of miley cyrus easier you perv."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I worked two months for free, 15h per day, including weekends, due a contract trap. On top of that, client was emotionally blackmailing me and I was feeling threatened and helpless.

I even lost weight, skipping meals to save time and money. One day, my body collapsed. I ended up in bed for 10 days, feeling stiffness, pain, weakness, and shakiness. I even had to ask for help to brush my teeth.

I abandoned the project, and didn't receive any payment. The client went crazy and made me feel the worst person in the world for being sick and unable to work. But didn't put his menaces in execution.

I still remember the joy I felt when I was able to walk again.

That was the worst burnout I had, and also one of the biggest lessons about limits and evil people.

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Got locked out of all systems in the company.

They did not expect me to return after a sick leave and do a handover during my last 5 days in the company.

I wrote them that I'll return today and do a handover.

Got unlocked when I asked if I should go home and never come back 😛

I really wish people valued health over profit.

So I joined a company last month and last week I got assigned to the biggest client we have. The project is quite big and there are no deadlines coming up. I was sick for a couple of days and hence could not turn up at the office. Apparently the client called up my manager and went on a rant about this situation. So now I have to work on the weekends to cover up for the missed work while on meds that make me sleepy.

Fuck such clients.

This is gonna be depressing. You have been warned.

I am getting sick of people, moreso than I usually would. It's getting to the point where I'm feeling like I want complete isolation from people. Why do people get pissed at me then not tell me what I did wrong? How the fuck am I supposed to fix it?

One of my friends, S, has a lot of issues, and I've been friends with her for many years. I try to help her as much as I can because I actually care, but she rarely responds to any texts and disappears for days at a time. Then she comes back and says I worry too much and plays it off like it was nothing. Wtf?!

I give everyone hugs. If you want a hug, you'll get one from me no questions asked. I do this because I'm actually incredibly depressed and the hugs help me feel less lonely. I'm getting tired of caring so much for everyone else and having nobody actually care about me. S says that I care so much BECAUSE I don't want anyone else to feel that way, but it hurts like hell when I'm the only one who cares.

I don't care what people think about me in a sense that if they have a problem, fuck off. I do, however care that nobody seems to actually CARE. I HATE THIS SHIT. I'm getting to that point where I don't want to die, I just don't want to exist like this. Fuck everything at this point. Nobody ever responds to texts, they get pissed for no reason, just fuck it.

I got my promotion by forcing it. I work at a fairly large gov organization and have done so for 2.5 years. I had been asking for a pay rise for years but was always told there’s no budget. I was doing work way beyond my pay grade as many senior devs had left. Eventually I got really sick of it so applied to another company, took 5 interview rounds but I had an offer that was a 30% raise on my salary at that time.

I submitted my resignation fully thinking that i’m going to leave, but what do you know, my division not only found the budget but did so in 2 days to come back with a counter offer. It’s funny how when push comes to shove, money that previously didn’t exist just appears out of no where

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

I'm starting my new job in 10 days, but I don't have the proper internet access to feel really confident about it. My parents want me to move out of the house so they don't have to accommodate for my new job. I'm getting chemo in a few weeks. I'm really sick of fighting shit. Trusting in the plan though.

random question/minirant:

I need something to do on my phone besides devRant and chess and repeatedly checking my email. Suggestions? I'm getting really sick of chess, and there's only so much content on devRant. And email? Nothing interesting for days (and weeks prior) despite waiting on so. many. people. to get back to me.

Bleh.

Random research is a given. And no, mobile games and social media are pointless.

!rant

Had a meeting with the head of my department concerning the status of many of our current projects. Them projects are huge and it is 2 dedicated devs(me and the lead) working on them whilst training our CMS admin in development to help out(dude is talented af and really digs programming) and my manager was so worried about what he was gonna say.

The thing is, she doesn't know how to take a break, she never pushes us, but she does push herself and it pains the team to see her take so much heat. She really is a bomb manager, and we want her to be more at ease.

Well a couple of days ago the vips of the board decided to bombard her with shit since out dptmnt head was on sick leave. The stress they put on her was some military grade bs and even then she never...EVER took it out on anyone.

The head of our department walked in to talk to us about it. Dude is a tall older gentleman, suits up every day(Texas style meaning cowboy boots and everything) and is quite imposing. Has a stern look man, one of them 1000 mile stares and a huge mustache that more than surpasses mine(which mind you, my mustache is fucking outstanding)

Our boss walked into the meeting room, sat down and heard what she had to say, she was not excusing herself. As bomb as this gorgeous woman is she was all about telling him what we were going to show the board on next week's meeting.

He sat there quietly listening to her as well as the presentation that me and my boys had to do.

What happened next blew me the fuck out of this world.

He said that he was sorry that so much stress had come down to her and us whilst he was gone and that he was happy with the leadership showcased by her and the initiative that the team took to put forward a presentation for him and the board. He also said that he was going to make said presentation for us since the vips had no business stressing us out, he asked for our assistance for any of the technical stats since even though he was a programmer he is not aware of all the inner details of our apps. He said that it is commendable that such a small team can hold 2 campus(college level) and that he was aware of the technical proficiency of me and the lead and that he knows that our shit is not something that gets done overnight.

He then said that at any given time that we get antagonized by matters such as timeframes or shit like that that we can direct everyone to him, regardless of what.

.He was also really amazed at the progress we showed him on the current projects(most are on their respective testing phases).
He then reiterated on how proud he is of all of us before biding us a good weekend and leaving to his office

As i sat there watching how the world was lifted from my manager and happy that he enjoyed the progress of my work I could not help but feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for this mysterious man.

I would damn skippy take a bullet for him....just in case my draw gets sloppy that is, ain't no one taking aim at the boss.

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random PTO sick day request on a Monday, approved within minutes.

Schedule a PTO request for six days off three months in advance?

Pending for three weeks.

Sigh.

I'm so fed up of this shitty ultra-ortodox industry

I've worked on many different projects, been in many different teams. It's an ever changing industry, but, surprisingly, it's so orthodox. Dev industry nowadays have some rules, that everybody adopts them as "best practices". You have to work on pull requests, and several of your teammates have to review your shit (as if they have nothing better to do).
I'm sick of people using fucking DTOs in shitty frameworks like Laravel. Using DTOs in Laravel is like putting mustard in a fucking chocolate cake.
I'm so fed up of SPAs and node.js. I've yet so see a single SPA that handles jwt tokens correctly. I'm tired of spending hours and hours, days and days, struggling with thousandls of layers of abstractions instead of being productive and getting the shit done.
Because end customers don't give a shit about your "best practices": They have a problem and you are getting paid for it to be solved, not for spending hours and hours struggling with stupid Javascript and its crazy async nature and their crappy libraries.

Damnit. I say. Now. I now feel better. Thanks for listening :)

New policy at work!!

Now we have to submit a Doctors certificate as proof if someone is taking sick leaves for more than 2 days or if someone is taking sick leave on Friday or on Monday(Seems trust issues LOL).

SMH!

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

I haven't touched my laptop for five days (because I've been sick) and now that I'm better, I've been making so many typos and I can barely type. It's like I'm learning touch typing all over again.

I finally bit the bullet and got a 2018 macbook pro i7 with 1 terabyte ssd. I've been needing a personal laptop for development for awhile. I thought about going full Linux but it's tough finding Linux laptops that support thunderbolt 3 charging.

I tried to make Windows and WLS work. But it's a pain getting my Golang, GCP, and Kubernetes workflow setup on it. I keep having to jump command prompts and it annoys the shit out of me. Going multi monitor helps a lot, but I like to be at coffee shops and code.

I feel sick a out giving Apple more money especially $3,000. But it was money well spent. My workflow is seamless and unlike on my Windows laptop I dont spend 3 to 4 days just setting up my environment.

starting to really get sick of working 12 hour days and nothing to show for it

fucking months go by in the blink of an eye

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

I guess the job I’m at now? I’ve been paid for 8 months and I’ve produced nothing, they’re happy about it and I was given a pay rise. It has taken me months to make deployments and I feel like some days I might’ve well of had a day off. If I had a sick day I still get paid for a full day even if it was for a whole week. How did I get this job and wtf do I even do? 😂💃🏻💃🏻 <= that’s me dancing

Sick, so apparently I bought 5ish days before their imaginary upgrade policy timeframe.

My colleague can be so fucking annoying I’m close to snapping. It’s morning, I just got it, didn’t have any coffee yet and he asks me “what did you do while I was gone?” (He was away sick a few days). So I start explaining to him the code changes we did and he takes it as an opportunity to interrupt me and ask more questions during my explanation. Mostly because he thinks it’s amusing. I continue explaining not giving in to his shit and he continues interrupting me and tries to make other team members laugh at his stupid face. No one does. I finally tell him to shut up and listen and he does.

It’s like having a kid run around, focusing on every sound other than what is important and trying to be funny when all that’s happening is everyone thinking he’s and asshole that should shut the fuck up. ARGH!!! So annoying.

Epic is;
That feeling when u want to compile ur 'C' on Linux distributions for the first time while u are used to windows , and u are sick trying to find out the IDE or turboC++ like thingy and suddenly u find out U CAN COMPILE DIRECTLY FROM THE TERMINAL!!!
{Collage days ;-P }

- 5 days until customer integration test. I finished my work for the test a week ago so I am relaxed. 10 days of estimated work for other team, 1 dev scheduled for this task.
I reminded of the deadline, which seemed not realistic anymore; "Don't be so pessimistic" they said, "Everything is fine", "We'll get it done".

- 2 days to go and half of the system doesn't work, the external test system rejects all data (nobody had time to read the specs -> let's call it 'assumption based development' (ABD))
I reminded of the deadline, and that I would like to have an internal test with all components beforehand; "Don't be so pessimistic" they said, "Everything is fine", "Just some minor issues".

- 1 day to go and dev from other team called in sick... (and I can really empathize this decision); "Someone else can jump in and finish the work" they said.

- An hour later the test was cancelled not even 24 hours before it should take place. We could have rescheduled the test more than a week ago, that wouldn't have been so disgusting and even save our customer some hours of preparation effort.

I hate myself when I was right from the start but wouldn't enforce my position because I'm too kind sometimes.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

We had a school project where we where supposed to implement a software with a heavy client in C# and web services for it in C#, but the web services HAD TO COMMUNICATE WITH SMTP AND IMAP. And do that in 8 days.

We were 6 in the team. 4 had no idea what a web service is, and I and the designated project lead were the only ones knowing what to do. The lead had paperwork to do for the project, so I had to do everything but the UI alone. So 1 guy did the UI, 3 were... Playing Minecraft... The lead was doing paperwork and ranting about how noisy idiots these guys were... And I was sick as hell and could not eat anything, I was vomiting all day in between which moment I managed to make half of the functionalities of the project, despite having to go to the hospital and have to continue working despite the medical request not to work.

So the day before the presentation I had half of the functionalities done and I had to explain them yet another time what web services are so they can answer the questions and cover for themselves.

On the day of the presentation it went kinda fine. It was not finished but it worked like asked.

We were asked for peer evaluation and I gave A to the lead and the UI guy and B to the 3 other lazy asses.

Shortly after I am called by the tutor in the office : "What happened on this project? Were you not working at all? Apart for the lead who gave you an A, every one gave you a D (lowest grade). I demand for explanations"

I said never mind and got back to studying. I got a B, all the rest of the group an A.

Sick and fucking tired of this bullshit.
Previously worked with Laravel, used 'gulp watch' to watch for changes in assets and now they changed things for the better of Laravel Mix as a fucking wrapper for webpack. Now I have to do shit load more stuff to get gulp working, 'cause otherwise my 'npm run watch' shits itself every fucking time I run that shit, doesn't matter what fix is aplied. Battling that bullshit for 3 days now and shit's not working anyhow. Stupid fucking bullshit. Sorry, had to let it out from myself.

I’m in a high-stress work situation where the organization is way too reliant on me to maintain day-to-day operations. We’re working on hiring a second person for my role, but it’s likely to take six months to find someone and get them on board.

And I’m afraid that I’m burning out now. I’m tired all the time and grumpy. Worse, in the last couple weeks I seem to be losing the ability to think. I’ll read an email and be unable to make sense of the words, or unable to figure out what to do with it – it’s just a blank white fog in my brain where I should have words and ideas and next steps. My productivity is less than half what it should be, and I’m horribly embarrassed and ashamed of myself.

I’m taking sick days and leaving work early when I can, which helps a bit, but not enough. I’m also doing all the recommended self-care stuff – diet, sleep, exercise. I’m scheduling a doctor’s appointment for next week.

I have a very good boss, which is the only reason I haven’t said screw it all and bought a one-way plane ticket to Tahiti. (I hear it’s a magical place.) Any thoughts on how to approach this with him? Under normal circumstances I’d try to arrange for some vacation time, but I’m afraid a week or two of rest isn’t going to fix the problem, just delay it a while. Any substantial amount of time off is going to really hurt my department. They may need to bring in someone to cover for me, which would be very expensive. I’m afraid it’d destroy my reputation as someone who can be relied on. What options do I have? What should I be doing next?

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

Hi all,

This might be a long post so bear with me. I work for a company and there was a project for a huge client. I'm junior in skill (been programming for about two years) but my job title doesn't reflect that. Anyways, I got the design about a month ago but I was on deadline for two other projects so I couldn't pick it up until last week Wed. Ironically, that's when the final design was delivered & told me it was due next week Wednesday. I built it as fast as I could. Finished mobile but for some reason, this last part for desktop just wasn't working out and it just so happens to be the most crucial part of the piece. (I was also sick the entire time and didn't sleep for the last two days nor did I eat). I was supposed to demo it yesterday but I still needed to make a few updates and the project coordinator took me off the project & gave it to a dev with more experience. This has never happened to me before. I'd go as far as to say this is my first big fuck up. I've always delivered on deadline and I'm taking this pretty hard. Has anyone been in similar situations? What do I do? Any advice?

Last job search was in mid 2020. I thought I had a pretty good offer: getting 40% more in gross salary. But then I asked some pretty standard/clarifying questions about benefits and all the red flags started coming out 🚩. They really used the pandemic to sell ppl short. TLDR I turned down the offer.

PTO was the dealbreaker. Their PTO was 16 days: 6 holidays plus 10 personal days. Even though any paid time off is PTO, I thought it was pretty gross to count holidays in the PTO bank like that. My friends agreed with me.

Yes, this is a US company.

Then shit hit the fan when I asked about sick days.

Me: What’s the policy on sick time?

Talent/HR: We have a flex time policy, so you don’t have to take time off for a one hour doctor’s appointment.

🤨🚩
I didn’t ask about flex time.

Me: The PTO is really low.

Talent: Well, you could use your sick days for vacation.

🤨🚩🚩

Me: I just asked you about sick time and you didn’t mention sick days. What are these sick days?

Talent: Oh, well technically the personal days are 5 sick days and 5 personal days… [I swear this is what I heard over the phone.]

🤨🚩🚩🚩

Me: 😤 This isn’t going to work.

Talent: I can see about getting you more PTO.

Talent comes back with 5 additional personal days. And it wouldn’t be included in my offer letter it would only be a note in my file. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

The gross thing was this startup was in the healthcare space: it’s a prescription meds delivery service/pharmacy. I know ppl say startups are the “throw money at you and go cheap on benefits” type. But how can you be in a healthcare space and not give ppl decent PTO? And during the pandemic and pre-vaccine existence? They were trying to con me. It was bizarre because it’s not my first job search. I was still employed so I wanted a new job but I wasn’t desperate.

I couldn’t see how anyone would accept that abysmal PTO offer. Maybe if they were really desperate or naive. I suspected this company had a big PTO disparity because I’m positive most employees would have negotiated for more time.

It was hard to turn down the money because I was afraid of not finding a job. Luckily, I did get an offer with really great benefits from a different company later on.

o and btw, yesterday was my birthday lol.

realtalk: if you want me to feel special, dont fucking force me to be more social than on all the other days together, or i will rewrite the year without eightteenth february.

you fucking corksuckers, i dont want to go to that place my grandma (same bd as i) goes to to celebrate. fucking mediocre pizzaria isnt fucking worth it, so atleast give me a choose.
and on the very Least, could you please quiet up? its not by telling me ten times per hour to be more proactive at school that you will help me like school.

o and also FFS WHEN IM FUCKING SICK AND EVEN OFFERING TO GO TO THE DOC TO SEE, FUCKING DONH SEND ME TO SCHOOL ANYWAY, ESPECIALLY IF IT IS JUST BEFORE MY BIRTHDAY

(you just got an insight into my life. wanna see more? i dont think so)

Never decided to change company so fast.

- i am a freelancer but I have working hours
- i am a freelancer but I can only be absent 21 (unpaid) days/year including sick days
- starting hour is x... Time x-1 "let's have standup right now!"

I am leaning more and more towards the idea that most corporates don't care about the revenues, they just try to make everyone miserable

Since few days I’m sick. Literally, I look like shit and feel even worse. Some combo disease with fever, diarrhea and things like that. And despite that, I tried to work from home today. And surprisingly - I’ve made everything I planned to do: 100% PHP multi process server, which sends push messages via GCM and APN, emails and SMS (using different operators API and talking AT commands directly to modems). I’m a bit proud of myself. And now I feel like I’m dying, so it’s time to get some pills and take a looong nap ;)

Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:

If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.

TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.

I was working on a project for a presentation and had a really bad cold. I was building something in JavaScript and the framework was all new to me. No one else wanted to touch it so I said i would have a go.

Basically I put everything I could into it and the director walked in and started using it, ignoring me who wrote it, talking straight to my boss about loads of changes.

I sat there and quietly and thought whatever I did they would change it again as they don’t know what they want.

I felt crap the next day because of the cold and the previous days experience, so I called in sick. I got a load of abuse about the deadline for the presentation and this time I gave it back and said maybe someone else should have stood up and taken that project then. I wasn’t taking anymore of that crap.

So I was just about to post a whole long rant about something breaking with an update. But I literally just found out, the whole thing was my fault because I changed something. I feel so fucking stupid. I went on a rant in a Discord chat with a couple friends, blamed fucking everything I could possibly think of.

Then I remembered when I tweaked a config file just a few days ago. "Maybe that has something to do with it....?" YUP, I'm a bit stupid.

Basically I changed an environment variable, and the variable I was referencing in it isn't being set (which is an issue itself, but I can figure that out), so instead of looking in that folder, it was looking in the root directory, and I was getting some permission denied errors cause..I was running the program as my normal user. Of course I shouldn't be able to write to root as a normal user.

I guess I'm a bit stupid sometimes when I'm sick.

Someone please kill me.
I'm sick of myself.
A few days ago in the prize distribution for a past coding contest, I denied my prize and eventually accepted after fucking around a bit.
Now since two days, I'm straight forward wasting my time. My grades are going down exponentially and I'm involving neither in CUDA (which a started just a while ago) nor I'm getting into studies and even getting in competitive coding.... Fuck me!!!!!!

The last time jeeper posted at all was seven days ago. He said he was sick in his last comment.

I'm pretty sure hes dead jim.

Should we start planning the funeral?

I spent 2 years working on a streaming platform and it finally went live but i got sick of using angular so I rewrote the entire thing in 3 months. With a better frontend (sveltekit) and backend (cloudflare workers).

Adding new features takes hours, rather than days. And it's incredibly fun.

Deploying to digital ocean and AWS was fun and all but just a waste of time using K8s and docker.

Cloudflare pages, is the future.

I am working my ass off for past couple of days to set up our new office. Today I got sick and sleep walked most of the time. Thank god my colleague was there with me. I'm home now and took a day off. 🤒🤒😞

Go assign a super simple ticket to your "product owner" or "manager" or whoever the hell claims they "work so hard" and "have the vision" or whatever blah blah blah when in reality YOU'RE the one working 12 hour days, completing the features used by THOUSANDS.

Just try it. They'll never complete it. I guarantee it. Here I am looking at one that is three weeks old asking to update the f&*(@#$ credit card credentials for a simple log service to be reactivated.

So sick of this backward world where us devs never get any credit.

Who wants to start a software union with me?

Sick for two days, stuck in bed like a blanket burrito unable to code. :-(

Recruiters or their bosses with sick ambitions and zero feedback.

Do I need to say more?

Spent few days to make my site looking good on desktop/mobile with few screenshots and even video to show my working projects in production. Even more few days to make really detailed 2 A4 CV with my previous job and what I was doing there. All generated from markdown.

I even saved money around half a year to go and live month in other country (Ireland, Dublin) and then on site send about 150 applications on various sites, emails, linkedout and local IT meetings.

Null, nada, nil, NaN accepted applications.

Is it some kind of joke? All companies almost cries for new workers and they don't even answer someone which founded and have no problem with growing own IT company for almost 5 years with self learnt, practically applied in production linux, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Go, bash, KVM and Openvz virtualization knowledge?

What they really want?
Astronaut with Brainfuck and Cobol with fluent backwards speaking Esperanto riding on monocycle with 3 hands and no need for sleep for -1 whoopercoin?

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

Waking up in the morning, sick as fuck.

Happy because I don't have to go to my IT job for the next few days.

Depressed because I'm feeling too weak to develop or learn anything at home.

So worried people will fuck things up in work when I'm not there. It's causing such tiredness and such long days. 🙇I think it's caught up with with today. No holiday leave taken for 9 months and not a day off sick. 🏳

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

More and more of my friends and family are finding out I'm an Android Developer. I'm so sick of hearing, "Hey, I have a great idea for an app...". They all think you can build a good mobile app from scratch in a few days.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

from the last two days I havent been to office because I was sick. didnt code, missed devrant. I hope tomorrow I will get salavtion.

I told them to increase my salary from 8.125€ an hour as a DevOps engineer into 16.25€ an hour

They said they will pass this information down to financial bosses

Ended up telling me they offer option 2: they can do 17€ an hour But this means i would have to open my own LLC or some shit like that and they deposit that salary in that smaller firm under my name. This means i would have to pay taxes myself, which means 400€ at least gets burned on taxes + accountant. And also i would no longer get any paid vacation days, paid sick days, etc. And also i would be paid exactly on the days i worked. So every month my salary will vary. For february i would be paid for 28 days. For 30 day months i get paid for 30 days and not 31 etc. This is the shitty part

But even in that case of all those unpaid vacation days and taxes i calculated i would still earn more than i did before when all of this was taken care for me

What should i do. Is this offer smart to take?

Thursday: Made an appointment with doctor for (painful because no anesthesia) outpatient procedure. Sent message to team slack saying appointment would interrupt part of my day.

Friday: Boss decides to launch website. Launched.

Saturday: Fixed many broken things.

Sunday: Fixed more broken things.

Monday morning: Texted team about fixing more broken things WHILE BEING OPERATED ON!!!!!!!!!

Monday afternoon and evening: STILL WORKING ON MORE BUG FIXES!!!!!!!

There was a time i disliked middle managers (because i thought they were useless and just making bank for sending emails and doing meetings) but then a couple of them took sick leave for a few days and then i realized how important they were. When they came back, i was almost crying with joy 🤣

Out of days off since I got sick earlier this month, so have to work from today to friday.
Well, "work" is a big term for someone who's currently paid to finish his website in the company's office :D
There's almost no one here. The company chat is showing 9 people online out of 150. Everything is quite, the 3 other guys in my office are talking quietly, I could sleep without troubles in such conditions.

I'll definitely bring my Nintendo Switch tomorrow, though.

!tech !dev

9 months in 2023 and its getting worse everyday.
This year is not my year. its just a bad dream which i want it to end so much :(

lets go from latest to last

sept 8(today) : was moonlighting with a good friend , who said he will be giving me work for 6 months. he fired me after just 1 month. reason : "we won't be needing your services bro" . actual reason: I made a logical argument over a small thing that triggered his OCD and hurt his ego

sept( few days ago) : the only other group of 4 friends that i had got angry at me because i refused to tell them why i was hurt with 1 of them and called him irresponsible . yes, this is as stupid as it sounds.

Sept (few days ago) : mom was driving our new car and got it bumped by another car on red light. she is a newbie , wasn't able to peddle on time (or idk what happened), but another guy bumped into our car. She got scared and ran away !?! again as stupid as it sounds.
fortunately, it costed us not much as it was on the fibre body, but mom's confidence got broken and i might have been very harsh at some discussions.

August 5-31 : Whole month went into going to the hospitals , and coughing/fever/blisters

August 4 : One stupid friend made a trip plan. 3 other friends rejected it . i could not come up with a reason, so he forced me into going. on trip day i got fever but he still forced me to come. during trip my health got worse and the friend was busy enjoying his trip. i had to come home by taking an emergency cab and that drained my whole month's saving. plus i got sick even more

july18- aug3 : this month again went into coughing and recovery as on july 18 i went to my cousin's engagement in another state and their food didn't agree with me

may-june-july : these months went into distress and anger as we bought our first new car and our neighbours were making car parking a nightmare for us. we involved police and this asshole lawyer friend of mine, but no significant action is taken as of this writing

april : the only happy month for me : I went to a solo trip all by myself , and had a great time. the people i met there were nice

march : switched job . went from WFH to hybrid WFO . can't say if this was a great or a stupid decision.

feb : went into coughing and recovery

jan24-28 : took a trip with mom to different state because company wanted me to switch states in order to continue working. it turned out to be a worst trip as mom got all vicious and angry on that state and decided that we won't be working from that city and i should resign. i also caught some cough that later turned into full blown sickness

jan3-jan 24 : again went into coughing and recovery

dec 27 2022 - jan 3 2022 : religious trip to a different state. was a very nice and happy trip till the very end , where our flight got cancelled and we were stuck in a stranger city. mom panicked but i handled the situation somewhat. at the end of it i caught some cough that turned into full sickness and mom had the worst trip of her life

I fucking hate going into work after being sick feeling 80%. It sucks because i dont want to use my sick days when I'm doing fine, but i feel so off my game and out of my element.

!Dev

So the winter break is over and im supposed to be in my uni but no! It is flu time!

Since a human is a machine, and we have certain tools to fix it when it misbehaves lets try to debug that problem! I will tell you a story how
it ended.

*4 days ago*

Both of my parents return from a trip, dad is horribly sick (windpipe infection) so i isolate myself in my room, put on a mask when i have to be near him and wash my hands 3 times i leave my room.

Nope that didnt fucking work, the next day i get flu symptoms(high temp, fatigue, musle and joint pain)
Nothing too bad i can live with it, so i took paracetamol and called it a day.
But im still pissed at my dad for being a fucking idiot and walking everywhere in the house coughing everywhere...

The next day (yesterday)
Took paracetamol again but this time i got a stuffed and runny nose... So i take nasal decongestants, and... they dont work at all...

Today
I wake up with stuffy and cloged nose again. Aparently those nasal drugs i have been taking only make your nose less runny by drying it up, making it 10000x more difficult to unclog your nose...
like wtf? So if you have a runny and stuffed nose you have to choose which one is better?! Nah i take nasal drugs again and clean my nose with saline water, so far so good!

Also paracetamol started working weaker and weaker... What the hell is wrong with me? Im trying to solve 1 problem and my body finds another one! Curing a human is like coding a app, it will go to shit sooner or later.

Impostor syndrome is too real. I frequent feel stress about tasks that are getting delayed. Saying yes to any task given to me (even if there isn't really time for it).

Most recent I had a 1 man project (which I hate, cause I always think it's better to work in teams). It was estimated to take 1 week and ended up being done 2½ weeks after. Remembered I took 1 sick day, just feeling awfull about the project being so delayed and couldn't get my self to go to work.

Well week after the project was done, I had a "employee development conversation" with my CEO and my boss. (like I do every half year). As always they loved to have me on the team and thought I was doing a great job. Same thing I always hear to these meetings.

Deep inside I know I am doing a good job. Keeping up with new things. But my problem is always taking to much on my plate. In the middle of all the code and stuff, I always seem to forget that I am doing a good job and doing my best and start feeling worse again. It's a really bad cycle and causing me to take "fake" sick days just to cool down again. (which often makes me feel even worse, for letting the project getting delayed more).

// DevRant / DevConfession

Soooo, thought I had the greatest idea in the world - fell sick for 3 days (minor fever NOT covid) and the idea don't feel too hot now
Plus im out of beer and I have to do actual work for a client :(

Has anyone experience with true full remote working?

I keep searching for job postings, but they mostly have huge BUT(s)

- remote BUT you need to be resident where the company is
- remote BUT you need to have a valid vat number and it won't be a contract, just a "we will ask x hours per month, you get no vacations or sick days"
- remote BUT you need to be in our timezone or work at our hours.

I am lately thinking a lot about what to do with my life due to the possibility that i will move with my sweet half and... We live very far apart so it's like... A bummer to be bound to a place. Especially since they love where they are, but i have a free house which I inherited, so... Could be nice as a fallback

Edit: the vat number thing is not necessarily bad, but one of the main reasons to work as an employee is that i get sick days and stuff, if i have to follow your hours, get no sick days/vacation days/benefits i may as well be a freelancer and gain more, lol.

Just used WPS for the first time. This shit is wicked.

Fucking sick. Hate this shit. But I slept a bunch today so I'm better than I was before.

Also for the past few days I've been playing Factorio cause my brother got me into it. I actually really like it. I like that it's more involved than games like Civilization. (Plus it's on Linux with pretty damn good support ya know)

Bad English aside I am so sick of incompetent customer service reps. Holy shit it's like they will hire anyone these days.

Here just read from this script and not the code version. That's all the tech you need to know right here on this single piece of paper.

Fucking incompetent bastards need to go work at a non technical job like Burger King because tech support is beyond them.

They'd probably fuck that up to. That's a completely different rant, those who can't even do fast food jobs right. At that point just go get on disability because your fucked.

To be fair I will occasionally get someone in the tech support sector who knows their shit but it's few and far between and its always a welcome surprise.

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

I'll never use code hacked by another dev for work.

I got code that only solves one single fucking use case but there are way more to consider ...

The way the problem is solved ... not dev friendly to use, clean code is non existend and did I mention that it doesn't solve many other important use cases?

All has to be refactored and rethinked and everybody complains about why it takes so much time and the code should not be a technical masterpiece.

I'm sick of these bullshit devs, not taking their role as professionals serious.
Devs should not only learn how to code but also to work as a professional. Soft skills shouldn't be optional and the way how IT is seen has to be reshaped.

There are reasons why in these days the developed software has a lot of bugs and is not flexible. Everything has to be done now, changes come so often that they conflict with previous ideas and nobody knows the complete customer specification so the conflict shows in dev phase up.

Most devs work like they are in a hackerspace. Stop doing this.
You can do this in your freetime but stop doing this when you work in a professional environment.

How do you guys motivate yourself to work out.
Its been 2 times... First i tried 2 years ago in Aug 16.
Back then , my college started and i got busy in that so left the gym after a month. I blamed myself, the tiredness it gave me and lack of friends/work out partners there at that time.
Second time, i tried more hardly in jan 2018. This time, i had my gym companions, nd i was doing better. At the start i was handling the stress well, since it was just the clg and gym,then came along the internship, but i still handled it. But after the internship, i felt the need to up my skills and do more personal projects which was still not happening because of the gym tiredness. And then came along a scholarship into one of my favorite courses, and then the papers, and then.... A lot of 'other' things started happening, so i leftthe gym jn may 18.
I am concerned about a few things. 1)These days, I am usually entangled between entertainment, clg work, self learning/ scholarships. I used to do gymming in evening hours after clg and self learning on weekends, but now i am like everyday am straight to home from clg, onto bed, into the sheets, laptop on, and am doing scholarships task till late night. I fear that my work is now so important that i cannot push it to weekends. How do you guys manage learning and maintaining your body together?
2. Gym is a sick environment. We see pumped up people with 8% body fat , skin sticking to their ugly muscles while i am there , juggling my belly fat on the treadmill. For 2 months straight i was just doing the cardio. It gave me some results i guess, my belly got a Little loose but no one really saw much changes. I am not concerned about other people or fast results particularly, but when combined, i feel like am going to a royal house party everyday, where everyone except me is a beautiful king or queen , except me, a lowly peasent . Those pumped up kings are beating their bodies and getting more beautiful, while i am trying to beat these dead belly meat which won't flatten up .

Meh.

I've always been a strong critic of the mac operating system and apple in general for they're overpriced products. few months back my old laptop kicked the bucket and repairing it was not an option as i was sick of charging the laptop after every 3-4 hours and had to purchase a new laptop immediately. loooking at my options around 50k rs or 700$ all windows laptops available in indian markets sucked (except for lenovo 320s) so i made the shift to macbook air 2017.my daily work involves photoshop illustrator and a dash of premiere pro. I also work on nodeJS and python using the pycharm and atom IDEs. After using it for a month i feel in love with mac platform and macos. Its a wonderful experience. gone are the days of crashes and the windows updates (ugh). the boot of the laptop is like magic and softwares like wmware imovie and notes keynote are f**king awesome. Long hours of work have become fun rather than hell dealing with constant windows gimmicks and bad battery optimisation on linux.

An explanation why all developers (except for the ones who require high powered gpus) graphic designers should shift to macos rn.

Advantages of using mac

No forced updates update whenever now or a f'ing month later no probs.
better battery optimisation than linux
no more installing os again and again (ubuntu)
better vm than virtualbox (vmware)
terminal for running bash commands
no crahes
Xcode platform
trackpad is worlds better than the best windows trackpad

Disadvantages

some softwares not available for macos
storage is generally less on macbooks
UI is simple (less elaborated than windows)

Workarounds

get a vm and install linux(vmware fusion 8)
ps. u may not need it though
wine and wine bottler for using windows apps
get a microsd to sd adapter for macbook and expand storage

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

I'm getting addiction sick, I'm visiting my family and haven't had opportunity to use my laptop, I've been 3 freaking days without even using computer, much less coding.

Ticket: here's something wrong with the export of transactions, please check.

Very useful description, let me just go over this logic I've written months ago.

Yeah, I went extra sure that everything's right, besides the ones for created during the initial testing that we left. Took me a hell a long time to prove because there's such a vague description but ok.

Of course I have the time to make an eyecandy of an excel spreadsheet for you.

Only for you I'll also go and fix these entries manually. If you want me to do it so badly, I'll gladly do it.

Oh what, you're upset that I wasted 5h for this complete bullshit? Well fucking go and learn the database structure yourself then or get sued idk

Hope it was worth that 1€ difference the customer paid himself.

Not to mention that I also had to do an emergency setup to work from home because those people who are responsible for giving me an appointment for a covid test sure like to wait days after my sick leave is over. ffs, I just had a cold...

Also fuck all this bullshit mac software required to work in this network, half of this shit flat out requires you to use the same software and ofc it's all closed source to the point where I'd be glad to have an electron app for everything.

Just finished coding/support/putting fires down marathon that lasted 2 weeks.

Basically I launched 2 gaming servers got around 600 online players and had to spend 2 weeks around 12 hours everyday supporting them doing hotfixes and etc. I had no time for life. Ioved the work, debugging, responsibility and making impact. Also made some money.

Now I feel completely drained, sick and tired. I think I hit a burnout. I thought I will enjoy my time off with my gf but I just wanna lie in bed and dont do shit for at least 2-3 days. Extended stress over time did a number on me, I am now a nervous wreck.

How can I bounce back asap after a burnout? I have 2 weeks to rest and will have to launch 2 projects again and deal with christmas/new year bullshit...

working at an MNC is like dating the hottest girl in campus. everyone stares at you, but only you know of the tantrums and the expenses that you have to take.

Every random aunty and uncle I come across gets a wide smile on their face when i tell them my company's parent company name. i goto this temple , and there, one uncle was introducing me to his wife "meet X ji's son , he is at Y company" .
previously when i worked at a startup, most of the time , people were like "huh? what does this company do?" and when i would explain them how our DBs are sending billions of notifications and interaction each second, they would be like "oh , so you work at IT" , YES DUDE, YOU WANNA GIVE YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND NOW?

And this mentality is sick. i loathe the place where i currently work. i loved my previous org and now am just here coz my mom is too scared to let her son live in a different state.

The only reason a person works in a company is money and WLB. Indian service based MNCs don't give a penny more than basic industry standards. and when they want their employees to be available 2 days a week + x number of days when any CEO , ED or other sugar daddy is coming to office, you get an idea of the shitty Work life balance.

my previous company was a b2b startup, it always paid me more than industry standards and we had wfh until a notification came to enforce hybrid working bh end of 2024. till now not a single person from my team has relocated. All i had to do was to *plan* for living in a state and my mom got cold feet :/

i think so much about my future. i earn decent, so i wanna spend it to live and grow.
i wanna go party at friday nights and go on night outs. i wanna meet this cute school crush at anytime after office and don't worry about the 9 pm curfew. i wanna go look for a new home in a different area and get out of this parking hellhole. i wanna prepare for exams and do a hugher studies from aborad.

everything needs money and growth mindset. money makes money and i am trying to earn every minute. but a chained mind cannot fly . a non growth mindset will not let you evolve. and someone needs to tell it to people who control my every . fucking. action

i have seen people switching from one big name to another. i personally feel that you are just too comfortable in the environment of big names and deliberately ignoring the smaller names which are doing the actual build fast and break reality stuff. reward is proportional to risk and if you are okay with just attributing to a big name, then that's on you

I fucking can't keep this to myself so I am writing this piece of shit...

People are now working from home as much as they can and some non-remote companies here are now considering allowing their employees to work from home.

"That's great", you would say.
No, it fucking isn't.

I am working from home full-time.
"Great, so you have nothing to be worried about!"
I wish.

My brother still has to go to school. They fucking allowed everyone who just arrived from holiday 10 days ago, mostly in Italy to stay. If you ask someone nicely, almost nobody will listen. And that's exactly what happened.

"Why won't your brother just stay at home?"
Well, because my mom is one of those "Fuck it" people, who will not do a single thing to fight something she is not dying from (and maybe even if she was). She is very strong believer and she says every time I want to talk to her about almost anything serious "What is to happen, will happen". And that's fucking it. With this approach the phrase "What is to happen, will happen" is going to turn into "What is to not happen, will find it's way to you anyway".

Fortunately, my country doesn't have many infected. Yet. But it won't last long. Sick people are already here and we only know they are here, because they are responsible. People who don't care, or weren't tested after coming from abroad, deserves to be burned alive.

I just hope, we won't end like Italy and people coming from foreign countries will take the 14-day home quarantine seriously now when our government is going to fine people who don't give a fuck.

At first i was told to go to college BY PEOPLE WITH NO COLLEGE because i wouldnt be able to find a job without degree

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i sacrificed my life for school

Then later i found out PEOPLE WHO FINISHED COLLEGE told me i just need knowledge in order to be hired, and turns out degree is unimportant

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i studied and worked on practical projects and gained knowledge

Now when I try to get hired, they admitted that i am able to complete complex projects and i know how to solve the problems even if i see them for the first time. But they rejected me because "im not sure why the car leaks oil".

I have to understand and know what the whole framework is doing under the hood, how everything works, how dependency injection works under the hood, SOLID principles under the hood, decorators how they work under the hood etc.

So now it turns out
- sacrificing life for school is not enough
- sacrificing life for degree is not enough
- sacrificing life for learning and gaining knowledge is not enough
- now the new trend is i have to know not only how to drive a car like a professional formula F1 driver, i also have to be a mechanic and know how to fix the car if it breaks.

MATRIX IS A BIG FAT BULLSHIT AND A LIE.

I feel like they're looking for a senior developer knowledge to pay him junior developer salary

WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?

I sacrificed 10 days of my life for their bullshit to build this project from scratch as a technical interview. They never said congrats on all the parts that were built right, but only complained about the small portion of bugs i didnt have time to fix.

ALL OF THIS FOR A SALARY OF $1500/MONTH THAT I ASKED. THATS LESS THAN 20,000$ A YEAR. THEY EITHER GAVE ME AN OPTION TO WORK FOR WAY LESS (500-600$/month) OR CALL THEM BACK IN A FEW MONTHS.

I JUST FINISHED COLLEGE AND THEY EXPECT ME TO HAVE 20 YEARS OF SENIOR DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE.

WTF IS THIS SLAVERY BULLSHIT?

HAVING A 500$/MONTH AS ENGINEERING SALARY WITH A DEGREE IS BELITTLING OF THIS JOB.

NO I DONT LIVE IN INDIA I LIVE IN SERBIA. MY DOG IS SICK AND IT COSTS 100$ A DAY JUST FOR HIS TREATMENT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE WITH A SLAVE SALARY IN THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

I tend to be a perfectionist, and I have a hard time coping when I feel like someone isn’t happy with work that I’ve done, or when I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own standards.

I’ve been at my current job for a little more than a year, and for the vast majority of that time, my supervisor and coworkers have seemed very pleased with me. My performance reviews so far have been completely positive. But I’m aware that over the past month or so, I’ve run up against more challenges than usual. I’ve taken on some new projects that I haven’t felt entirely confident about, there have been some organizational changes, and because this is a busy time for my department, I don’t always feel like I can easily get help when I have a question about something.

To make things worse, I struggle with anxiety, and while I’ve been working very hard to manage it, all it takes is a few bad days to put me behind on things. I really want to step up to the plate, and I’ve been worried that expressing concerns would make me look like I’m not capable or like I’m a complainer. But the truth is, I’ve been getting in over my head a bit, and I worry that it’s reflecting poorly on me. I haven’t made any terrible mistakes, but it’s taken me longer than usual to complete or follow up on tasks and I haven’t been as organized as I usually am. My supervisor hasn’t gotten upset with me, and she’s expressed understanding, but I’m worried that she has less confidence in me than she used to.

To be fair to myself, over the past couple weeks I feel like I’ve been doing a good job at catching up and getting back to my usual level of efficiency. I feel optimistic about my ability to handle things from here on out, at least for the most part. But I’m scared that a few “off” weeks will damage my reputation and workplace relationships, and that people are thinking poorly of me now. I think because I’m so hard on myself (I feel guilty whenever someone praises me, because I don’t feel like I deserve it), it’s hard for me to have an accurate perception of how things actually are.

Also, do you have any tips for addressing challenges when they come up? I struggle with asking for help or clarification sometimes because I don’t want to come across like I need my hand held. And do you have any suggestions for how to deal with it when things just aren’t going smoothly? I know that in the workplace, what matters is results. The fact that I might be having a bad day due to anxiety or a late night with a sick pet isn’t an excuse. But while I think I’m generally good at managing stress and anxiety and that bad days are uncommon, I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever go through a tough time and that that won’t impact my focus at all.

The company I work at severely limits the days we can take off, like most requests I put in will be denied. Additionally, I don't get paid that well or even get paid for time off or holidays. Obligatory: the job I work at currently is co-op, I'm still in college.

Yesterday and today I was severely burnt out so I said I was sick when I wasn't really so I could get some (unpaid) time off. It's likely that the current release we're targeting at work will be in jeopardy because of this. I feel so guilty, should I be? I really needed this time, I doubt I could have continued much longer without this.

TLDR, please help me justify not giving a shitty job my unconditional 100% and being shitty back every once in a while

So, my goal for 2023 was to survive it without a burnout. I spent 8 months on sick leave with nearly constant migraines (approximately 25 days a month, episodes lasting the whole day). I guess I'm kinda wondering did I succeed in my goal or not...?

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

So im new here and trying to find my way. There is one colleague who's been sick for a couple of days and just came back.
Note on the appearence of this person: big, tattooed bearded, but im not scared easily ;)

Trying to introduce myself: "Hi, let's shake hands: i'm [name]"

Colleague: "Are you sure about that?"

Yeah. Great week with awkard interactions so far!

Was just doing 'work from home from hometown' since end of last month...

Using a Macbook Pro since couple of years now, it was such pleasure using it for developement!!

And suddenly the damn thing start to not like the humid climate here. Thing just don't turn on until it's like 10.30am and the humidity lowers a bit, since last few days.
No key combinations would help anymore!

Guessing I'll have to blow it dry from here on!!! Humidity doesn't know about the standup meeting, the damn aluminium piece of shit should!! Hope the goddamn thing won't suddenly give up on me forever during these sick times... :(

Never seen this kind of shit happening to a non-macbook!! Such marvelous things of design -- my ass!!

Goddamn quarter eaten fruit like piece of shit!!!

Taking a sick day here.

Checked work email and
BOOM! I can't get a rest any more...

!rant

Imagine your company would spend 100$ more per employee to rent a bigger, nicer office. Imagine how much additional space you'd have there. Maybe individual offices for everybody, or at least not more than two or three employees per office? Telephone booths for long calls, or a library to work in absolute silence, to do research, or to study something new there.

How would that affect your productivity and overall happiness? How much better you'd feel there? How much more relaxed would you be? How much less sick days would you have, and how much money would your company save resp. make more due to higher productivity?

Or would you rather have a salary raise of 100$?

!rant

In my country the law says that you get paid sick day after the 3rd consecutive sick day.
Meaning that if you where sick 2 days in a row you won't be paid.

In your opinion:
In the yearly terms update talk.
Is it acceptable to ask the company to pay from the first sick day ?
( It's allowed by law and a lot of companies acctually does it)

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

heading back to work after a month of absence (10 days sick leave, holidays and paid leave) wish me luck and grant me strength not to kill someone or myself, fellow ranters

Where have i been?
school > home > school > home > school > home
every day for 7 days a week.
Learning the Java Android API just finished learning about checkboxes and switches
my first school i started in when i was little got hit with rona (covid)
my sister's school 4th grade class got hit with rona (the whole class tested positive except for my sister's friend which tested negative Lucky by a strand of hair. if he wasn't in the morning annoucements then he would be sick)
didn't shut down the school to at least clean or did contact tracing just resumed normal work stuff
wearing a mask everyday to get a face breakout
the bathrooms and schools itself are getting damaged by devious licks which includes stealing and or damaging school property even taking bathroom toilets and soap / towel dispensers and selling or using them hmmm anyone else have anything thats worse than mine?

Ahhh, this kindda makes me sick...

Wrote something.
Wrote documentation - 2 weeks.
Changed few things and refactored - 3 days.
Refactoring and updating documentation - week and counting.

I’m leaving the company I’m working for this week. Git really sick yesterday. Pinged hr about it and told them that I know that it looks bad being sick on the last days. Asked if I could use the sickdays we get, got refused and had to use a vacation day.

I have been using 10 sick days since I had sth… I can use 5 more days legitimately and even 10 more dishonestly. What to do?