I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

My classmate is a real SAVAGE!!

He (team leader) and his team participated in hackathons several times and kept losing.
He noticed something common about winning team, majority of those team members were women, even if they were non technical and their project was pure bs, they were winning in the name of women empowerment.

This time he came out with a plan, he fired his boys and invited women into his team, and even made one girl the team leader.
Result? HE WON!!!
NOT ONE BUT THREE HACKATHONS BACK TO BACK

AND

His so called women team was invited by Google to pitch their startup idea.

Now, if they gets funding, he's gonna kick out these women and bring back his teammates

People are fucking idiots. Had agreed to a meeting on Monday morning at 9 with some generic startup. Agreed to listen to their pitch after they had bugged me with hundred phonecalls and emails. It happened that my kid got sick during the previous night and this being the only meeting I decided to work from home and stay with the kid. I sent an email at 2am as apologizing, canceling the meeting and proposing a new time for another day this week.

Well at 9am I get a call from reception that my guests have arrived. I call the contact and she's angry at me that I didn't show. When I asked about the email she snaps at me: I don't have time to read emails on Monday mornings.

Well I don't give a flying fuck about your shitty pitch. Go fucking peddle your shit somewhere else if you can't handle your affairs and start snapping at me. FUCK.

Friend: "You are good with computers right?"
Me: "Yes...."
Friend: "Can you put an eye on my computer? Mint crash at every startup"
Me: (Oh Linux! For this time ok) "Yeah, show me"

My friend open the pc...
Pc: "KERNEL PAAAAANIC!"
Me: ".... WTF!?"
Friend: "Can you repair this?"
Me: (shit.)

That was a long day...
(My friend closed the lid without the drivers and then the pc from the standby did not wake up correctly)

Was writing a first product for my best friend and my first company/startup. (that one is on hold now by the way).

Spent about a month doing a full-time internship and also programming after that the entire day. Weekends full of programming as well and after a few weeks I noticed that when turning around/walking quickly, I lost my balance.

Went to the doctor who immediately asked if I worked loads and loads to which I answered yes.

He took a look at my daily patterns in general and then told me that I was having a thing which you were only supposed to get at old age and that I was heading towards a burnout because my body was highly not used to/ready for this.

Continued for a little and people started asking why I looked so white (my face lost color) and unhealthy.

Started to take care of myself and voilà, within weeks I was getting better :)

Me 5 years ago : "Guys we are gonna have a perf..."

CEO : "Not now, we need to deliver that functionality asap"

Me 3 years ago : "Guys, performances/scalibiluity will hit us like a trucK'

CEO : "Not nowem a new functionality needs to be done ASAP"

Me 1 year ago : "We are gonna be hit by a tank. We won't even understand what happens"

CEO : "I'm sure we can manage"

2 Days ago : Plateform quasiment down, response time in MIONUTES instead of milliseconds, database on fire.

CEO : "WHAT THE FUCK !!! GO FIXC I ASAP WE CANNOT HAVE THAT SHIT HAPPEN".

This is a brief summaru of working in a startup.

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

Being a programmer on a non-tech startup company is not too bad. That means aside from coding:

- You have to check if the office printer works
- You need to figure out why the phone lines aren't ringing
- You have to teach a stupid colleague on how to unzip a file
- When they give you a task, they'll say that it's "not urgent", but, they just "need it by tomorrow"
- You have to be a "mind-reader" because if something goes wrong, they don't know how to describe what's going on. Or probably, they're just too lazy being specific. They'll just say, "Hey, I have a problem.", and you will be like "What problem? Your dog is sick? You shit your pants? You lost your faith in God? Fuck what?"
- You don't have a time to "focus", because everyone interrupts you for just about anything related to "technology". Yeah, because you're the IT guy
- You always have learned and applied the latest practices/stacks, but no one gives a fuck
- You will start to re-think your life and devrants make you feel better

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

1. Try to stay sane in startup chaos
2. Use more vacation days
3. Separate work and free time a bit more
4. Get out into nature more
5. Hire 50+ good developers & get company to 15M active end users while doing all of the above

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

I'm a freelance iOS developer / UI designer and working on a pet related startup. I deal with lot of pets. My parents thinks that I'm full-time dog care taker.

Anyone else out there embedding an artificial delay in a splashscreen, just to shorten it in a future release so you can add to the changelog: "optimized startup time"?
#muahahaha

Just got my first IT job (I'm 19 y/o)
I am a C# programming teacher now :D for teens aged 15-18
I like it but I've had the chance to give the first lecture and there's this kid
Who is constantly interrupting
"Excuse me, programming is boring, when will you tell us how to break passwords"
"Excuse me, I have this neighbour I don't like, how do I put his printer on fire using code?"
"Excuse me, so we now know what classes are but can you tell us how to run fork bomb on system startup?"
afohsdofhidsfoidfsg
I suppose the kid will be becoming famous here over time

Also, out of rant, what do you wish your lecturers said to you when you were just getting started?

Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.

I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.

But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.

After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

I worked with this guy at a startup one time, and just to annoy me, he would write commit comments describing how I was such a bad developer, or how I was such a horrible person. After like the 15th time he did this, I decided to be totally unprofessional and do the same for him... our commit comments quickly turned into a conversation where we would just insult each other (as a joke).

The original developers of the startup no longer work there (including me and him)... I wonder who's reading those comments now.

In highschool we pasted a shutdown batch script in someone's startup folder. Never seen someone more confused than when his pc force shutdown every time he restarted. All fun and giggles until system admin walked in

I was contacted by a college senior guy (he was part of the core team of the club that I recently joined in my college).

Him: Do you want to launch your own startup?

Me: Yeah, I would love to.

Him: Nice, Listen. Even I want to start my own company. If you don't know, the current trend is ML and AI . So, I would like to base my startup on an AI application.( He was in his final year )

Me: I haven't tried any ML or AI stuff before.Sorry.

Him: Take 2 months time to study the AI concepts and do the app.

Me: But first, tell me what the AI app is supposed to do?

Him: It can be anything I have to think, you take the AI part and the UI and integration; with your skills and my idea let's build a startup and I will appoint you as the head of Application Development in my company.

*wtf, seriously dude? you want me to build the whole app for you and all you will do is put your fucking startup's name on it. I am building an application all by myself why the f would I ask you to publish it for me*

Me: Okay, I am getting late, I have to leave..

Made sure I didn't meet him again

and I have also came out of that stupid club..

I attended a data science meetup recently. There were many suits walking around the corridors because of some startup night taking place at the same time.

After some time a guy appeared infront of me, telling me he was afraid at first that this was a meetup for suits only. Until he saw all the dev and rock stickers on my notebook. He was reliefed that there was some nerd at least.

He asked what I was doing so I told him about my startup about optimization of heat generation plants jada jada. I asked him back.

He replied, "Well, I'm also part of some small startup. Among the things we develop processors and stuff. It's called Intel."

Well dude, that was nicely played. I had a lot of fun that evening.

I was working for a startup that needed to update 300 machines that had just come from the factory. We had to open all 300 boxes and update them one at a time. I made a simple script that would run a folder full of shell scripts then keep track of what it ran so it would not run the same script twice. It made it so we could just plug the machines into the internet, they would query some server, download my program, and run it. It saved me from having to ssh into every machine and run commands. Well the head programmer guy saw what I did and implemented it as the main program that would update the entire machine. I didn't program anything into it to verify updates, the shell scripts did not return any indication of success or failure, and I made it in less than 3 hours. It was supposed to be a temporary program to be used for those 300 machines only, but ended up sticking around for 2 years.

You guys made my whole day for the first time since I joined. (yes all of you!)

1) I had a 'fight' with a guy I'm making a startup with. Had to explain some of the story of my life, just to clarify that I'm not evil or generally unwilling to understand - regarding me, having the need to keep using practices

2) I've found that a whole niche-community of people seems to ignore the rest of the community and won't tag along. Having spent several months to be able to help, and receiving shit or absolutely nothing, for finally trying

3) Was in a bad mood the moment I woke up, because I fought with my girlfriend last night because she fails to communicate simple things and won't realise it.

Sorry for the bad punctuation, I tried and smartphones aren't a nice way to edit such things.

So my rant is basically a thank you! Not a rant.. But still, I think you people are the best for being so relatable and making me laugh, and feel like there's more of 'my kind'.

I also just fixed a bug in my app by (finally!) asking the framework maintainer what's up, and got a response which made no sense in a logical manner.. That's a rant for another day, I'll aggregate all the 0 fucks given, when I'm finally able to leave this thing behind, and give you a proper curse-filled shit stack of the nonsense I'm experiencing!

The bug would still live if I weren't so energized by devRant

EDIT: '!' != ','

! Rant

I'm getting married on Friday.
I proposed half a year ago.

What have we done since the proposal?

- Adopted a Cnaani dog with a lot of issues and recovered her from most of them.
- went every Saturday to skydive for the whole day (almost finish the license!)
- moved apartment
- Plan and execute the wedding
- build wedding RSVP and teaser sites
- work full time as developers (me full-stack and she's an automation expert)
- go abroad twice
- I have work on a new startup with a friend (in version two right now)
- I hade my driver license classes
- went to salsa courses twice a week
- built our salsa wedding dance
- I studied Clojure, ruby on rails, Angular 2 and a little bit of React.
And more...

So why does it feel I haven't done enough?

Once a CEO is 24*7 a CEO. For me it's Chief Experiment Officer

And only dreamers can have that title. One who dreams at night and work it out the following day.
Having a startup is much more than just having an idea
It's about revenue,
It's about value,
It's about team,
It's about impact,
It's about growth,
It's about compliance,
It's about being finance, marketing, HR and tech expert at the same time.
It's about respect the supporters,
At the end it's about the money you earn as an individual.
For playing all the above roles, you need to dream real big.

To me startup is about falling in love with your work first.

-
By an Indian CEO

Today I left my job in which I spent these last 5 years.

My boss wasn't very pleased with me leaving the company today. But well, it had to be done

Now it's time to focus in freelancing and my own startup. Surely my work will be paid more accurately than these 5 years, one of the reasons I left.

When I was in college in 1996, one of my roommates had a “Web 101” class. At that same time, the office of a government agency I was working for had asked me to publish a website to let the public know what they were doing. Prior to that I had bought an HTML 1.0 reference and had been fiddling around with some things. I got excited about it all when I realized that just within 2 weeks of using the book I had passed up the entire class my roommate was taking and apparently knew more at that point than the professor. I published the agency site, then went on to build sites for the Uni and freelance clients, and then to apply to teach a more advanced class in the Continuing Education courses the Uni offered to adults in the community. All of that got me a job at a startup which led to the rest of my career. That was pretty dang exciting to me.

I had a short gig for a startup where I was meant to migrate the entire backend to serverless. It was my first time learning what serverless was and I had just been working on the app for around 2-3 weeks.

Boss rolls in with his leased Tesla and sort of hints at me being finished with a certain area by the next day, giving me a wink as if he's just trying to motivate me to keep on struggling.

Turns out he decided that he wanted a fully fledged demo and went off on me because I hadn't finished migrating the UI for that certain section (just the backend). I decided that there were better things to work on while I was at it migrating the backend. Had I known that he expected some form of fancy demo, maybe I would have done things differently.

He then proceeded by letting me know that he could have finished my work in half the time it took me and decided to remind me that I had a probationary employment. I left the company two weeks later and the app never got released.

New HOE came. He “streamlined” the processes and “standardised” the policies. And in turn.. fucked up the whole startup feel of my company.

I saw it happening right in front of my eyes in a matter of only few months.

Earlier, things were flexible, work was fun, people were even ready to put in more hours because we were all having fun. Now, work feels like work, fun is gone, frustration has become normal, and the most frustrating part is that.. WFH is now a “privilege”.

Fuck this shit man! That fucker exhausted the whole company in just a few months. Given enough time, he will be the end of this company.

What a developer does on friday evening, when he sees that his manager is in a meeting.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Want to make some friends quickly?
Just go to any pseudo startup incubator in a university (all business people with an idea), mention you are a coder (mimicking the typing on a keyboard to make sure they understand) and all of the sudden you'll have a crowd of people around you that "need to talk to you"

The other guys working with me have to physically protect me every time someone finds out

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

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

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

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

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

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

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

Long time lurker, first time poster.

My goals for week 200:
1. Get engaged to my girlfriend
2. Finish my ems
3. Begin plans for launching my startup
4. Leave my deadend retail job, get a real job, and actually use the degree I spent 34k to get.
5. Keep learning cool new shit.

I recently left a company where we had 2 hour long standups. I was so tired of them because half the time was deprioritizing what we prioritized yesterday. Everyday there was something more urgent coming up. It was a startup with 6 engineers. Sometimes the conversations were just random stuff that could easily take 45 minutes.

Now it feels so nice doing 15 minutes standups and then having the time to do the actual work.

Once had a manager who would refuse to review anything on the basis he "didn't have enough time". Not just code reviews, but also customer comms, support messages, documentation etc. - anything that it's good to get more than 1 set of eyes on. This was a small startup so me working pretty much solo - it wasn't like there was anyone else able to review anything like this.

Fair enough, you might say. He trusts me. Just put it out there.

...but then *as soon as* it was published / sent / committed / whatever, he'd then magically find 5 minutes to glance through it and point out how rubbish / unhelpful / ridiculous the work was, and how it should have never gone out in the first place, and why didn't I read through it before sending as I'd clearly realise how stupid this was.

After a few rounds of this I actually flipped out on him in the office, called him out on his BS and told him to think for 2 seconds about how ridiculous this situation was. In fairness to the guy he did back down, take note and it didn't happen again, but damn, those times were some of the most frustrating of my career to date.

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

Welp. The startup I'm working for is going under. Ceo gave us zero hints.

I'm the lead dev and been working here for 6 months. Always built features before deadline, zero bugs, and going an extra mile. Can't say the same about the sales and marketing guys.

Kinda scared its gonna look bad. Oh you led a failed startup? Must be your fault.

Guess my side business is becoming full time now. Until new job.

#startup #9/10 #icebergahead

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

Because I’m a fucking cowboy and a charlatan, and because I hate sleep and despise feeling refreshed and happy, I’m working pretty much full time as a contractor (I’m the full stack dev. I do everything) on a (well funded) startup alongside my day job.

Tonight I had to make some quick (lol “quick”) changes to a core piece of the platform.

Now before continuing please refer back to the first line of this rant.

So instead of writing new functionality, I copied and pasted another section.

I renamed all references of “new_order” to, cleverly “new_order2”.

I know.

I deploy to production...

My phone starts blowing up. In short, everything is fucked.

I’m going over the query, checking the production database. Why is this manifesting like this? It all looks correct.

2 HOURS of broken sales, pissed off customers, pissed off service agents and I see that there was still one reference of “new_order” that should have been “new_order2”.

I am a piece of shit.

back to devrant, yay!

closed my account when i entered a really nice company, but after a year it was taken over by another one that was not-so-good at all, started working for another startup and, BOY, i really didn't miss ranting about work, but now i NEED a place to let this all up, little by little, somewhere, before my brain melts

current startup is one of those founded by rich dudes who had an "amazing" idea that, as time passed, turned into a monster that not only eroded the team from inside, but also made us see how spoiled the bosses are

I will be pitching my startup idea for the first time in my life to potential investors one on one after qualifying for a second round in a business competition.
I am nervous 😬, desperately need to get the fund, and haven't been a good presenter.
Background: the business is still on prototype stage.
I stutter by default if I am slightly nervous.
From feedback my prototype is great- but my pitching might not be too great.
Damn I just have less than 6 hours to pitch.
Fuck this nervous mess.
Dev wish me good luck😶

Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.

Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...

I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.

Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

Hi all. I have such a problem, I need a reliable company that will help me and my partners create a mobile application. We have our own startup and really don’t have time for marketing research; maybe someone has already used someone’s services and can recommend something. Outsourcing will also suit you. The most important thing is the deadlines.

Competitive pay

This has happened to me.
When startups post job they write competitive pay in thier posting.

Then later after interview they off er you $20/Hr.! And thier excuse we are a start up so can't offer much.

Then why the hell did you just throw that word of competitive pay in job description. Just because Amazon and other companies have that in thier posting.??

Don't you feel that competitive pay is a misused term. Almost all job posting have this. I don't get it. What is the competing with ?? MC Donald's ?

P.S. I have 2 yrs experience and worked with a startup and a full time job. And I am not arrogant about it. But when you ask me to do something I am good at I demand a good price. I respect my work.

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

I am a firmware developer with 4 years experience. C and sometimes assembly is my bread and butter.

Like 2 years ago, I was really interested to make a switch to application development. Got referred by my friend to her startup.

But I was a bit rusty with my data structures, high level languages and interpersonal skills.

The first question was to find the number of occurences for each word in a paragraph. The language choice was Java. But I was allowed to use C++ since it was the closest relative to Java that I knew.

And I started implementing a binary search tree from scratch and started inserting each tokenised word into it, wrote a traversal algorithm.

The interviewer, luckily, was a patient guy. After I completed my whole mess, he asked is it possible to do this in a slightly better way with constant time access without traversal.

I said yes, we can with a hash table but I dont know how to implement one. He replied I dont expect you to implement the hash table but see you use it. I asked him if I am allowed to used the standard library, for which he said ofcourse.

*facepalm*.

Finally I understood his expectation, referred cppreference.com and used an unordered_map.

Later there were some quesion on databases for which I tried my best to answer. And I frankly replied that I am not comfortable with JS frameworks as of now. Got rejected.

So the mistake is I never asked basic questions like what is the time complexity expects, if I was allowed to use standard library, didnt spend some extra time on studying stuffs needed for the domain switch and most importantly I panicked.

Best of NPC recruiter, 4/11:

Recruiter: I was impressed with your background and industry experience and thought you would be a perfect fit for our series A startup *10 minute drone of how awesome they are*
Me: *eyeglazing over* What role is this?
Recruiter: What roles are you looking for? Where do you see yourself in 3 years? We're looking for a program manager or dev lead to manage a team"
Me: I'm looking for an SDET role.
Recruiter: ......*silence* so you want to run scripts, hmm.... Well, looks we don't have an exact fit at the time, but let's keep in touch for future opportunities! You never know when you'll -
Me: ... Why did you even contact me? What about my profile struck you as being aligned to anything you were looking for?
Recruiter: Well, you have a master's in CS and worked at [BigN#1] and [BigN#2] and -
Me: Thank you for your time, been a pleasure *hang up*

I want my 15 minutes back.

So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.

It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.

I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.

4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.

Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊

Working for this startup as a remote dev for last 6 months.

This month they delayed my payment by saying that they are still waiting for crowdfunding payment to be processed.

After 3 days my teamlead who recruited me quitted with 2 more people saying that its 'personal issues'

1 week later (today) I received a letter of termination saying that my contract ceases its effect after 30 days and I will receive my payment after 45 days as all service providers.

I reminded those fuckers that in contract there is a clause saying that they are supposed to pay me within 24 hours of invoice receipt (because this is not my first time with startups). Then fuckers responded that I will get paid as soon as they receive the money.

Contacted CTO today and he told me the truth. Turns out that venture capital that supposedly raised funding of around 10 million usd last year actually didnt raise shit. In the end startup did not receive this funding because VC convinced investors that this project is shit and not worth investing.

VC's plan is to starve out the startup by giving it bridge payment injections. At some point they want to buy out the startup and resell it for profit.

And here I am fucked in the ass. But for some reason im not mad at that VC because shit happens. Im mad ar startup managers who kept us in the dark for 2 weeks and dropped us like shit :)

I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.

Just left a senior position in a YC startup for a middle position in my local company.

I believe that this downgrade will relieve some of my stress and give me more free time to heal my depression.

After fixing my uncontrollable consumption issues I can finally stop being a wagecuck. I don’t care much about my salary anymore while focusing on health and happiness. I saved up a lot of money so I finally can afford not to live paycheck to paycheck.

I’m slowly shifting towards living off my side projects only.

I have a friend who likes to change his tech stack every time he reads about a new technology online.....He started working on a startup idea of his.....He started with Larvel.....then came NodeJS...Then came .Net Core......Then Go.....And yesterday he told me that he is thinking about making it in Vapour.

Him: how long do you think it will take me
Me: ........Forever

Have a couple I want to air today.

First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...

Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).

Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.

The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.

One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.

To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:

switchport access vlan add XYZ

My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.

Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...

Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled.

I used to work IT in an entertainment startup, and now I’m an iOS dev at a big entertainment company. Several people from my old company have been reaching out to eagerly tell me about their new app idea I just have to hear, asking me to help code their app— and have even hinted at me quitting my nice safe job to join their great new startup that doesn’t even exist yet.

I know this must happen to app devs all the time. What do you say?

How do you deal with telling these nice people who just don’t understand it doesn’t work that way, without crushing their dream? I have a coffee meeting planned to tell one of them “You should learn to code so you can make a proof of concept,” but I fear that won’t be received well.

What’s the standard protocol for telling people you won’t be able to code their magic app idea?

This was interview in so called startup.

BTW I don't get point in company calling themselves as startup when they are 5-6 years old, just call your self small sized company.

1 - online interview with HR, Normal.

2 - online technical interview - 1 hour of discussion with Lead.

3. On-fucking-site technical interview - ~1 hour of detailed technical discussions.

4. Coding task- submitted successfully

5. Zoom meeting to discuss on coding task - just told it was good and started discussion on their dead project which was unrelated to job position but I've worked with that kind of thing so it was fine.

6. Trial Day Onsite - Gave me to draw a fucking BPMN chart - fuck you motherfuckers - I knew it was waste of time.

Fuck this kind of Hiring process which takes >1.5 month.

So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.

Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.

The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..

This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.

But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.

Took me year to recover mentally from this.

Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.

When I had to postpone the release of v2 of devRant UWP for 3 months because I changed a few minutes before the final build a "loaded" event to a "loading" event.
Something that for some stupid reason I thought will make the startup faster (maybe by 2ms) has caused crashes on mobile and some Windows 10 versions.

Of course I didn't spend 3 months to find this bug, but at least a few days in December and then I didn't have enough free time so I had to stop until mid February when I finally fixed it.

To find the reason I reverted the code to the previous update and started to add every feature one by one.
So much time wasted for a fucking "-ing".

I no longer give a single flying fuck about whether this company I work for lives or dies, whether it succeeds or fails. My compensation has been piss poor compared to the level of dedication I have put in and the level of stress I've endured. Up until now, I was thinking like "well, it's a growing startup, maybe if it succeeds it can have some doors open for me". But fuck it.

I keep hearing about software developers doing pretty well for themselves, but I can barely pay my fucking bills with this shit company in this shit country.

I should've started doing this sooner, and I'm a stupid-ass motherfucker for not having been doing it, but I'll be looking for jobs with actual respectable pay now. I'm not bound by a notice time in my contract, so maybe I'll be telling whatever other companies that I can start with them immediately if they need me to.

Seriously fuck this company and its low-ass compensation. If I'm going to be paid this low, I might as well take a less stressful job with less skill requirements.

I will be jumping ship and I won't be caring one bit if it fucking sinks.

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

I joined (still under probation period) in a startup founded by an 18 year old.

I work after my full time job for them and thought itd be fun but the kid made a slack channel and asks for progress updates everyday and feels a bit in a haste to get the product up and running. He seems to think I will be working every weekday from the second i come back home till i sleep. I have a party today that im going to and im sure he will ask for progress updates and when I tell him im out and wont work today he’ll probably say something like “the faster we do the project the better”.

Im not sure if i should leave now while its easy or i should stay for the money ($900 a month). Like i really dont feel like tolerating a demanding kid who cant wait for his app plus id much rather be working on other things just for fun like making rust crates. but at the same time the extra money is nice.

Thoughts?

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

Long story short a guy texted me on Xing, he had an interesting idea, I joined in and now we are founding a startup.

Short story long, a guy texted me on Xing. I usually don't give a fuck because there always just fucktards that want to offer me modern enslavement. No thanks you lifeless greedy hamsters! (no offense) This time was different though. It was not the usual kind of words and the idea sounded pretty awesome. So I gave it a try.

We met in a Café and talked about the idea and about my role in it. It went pretty well and we basically had a nice little chat, coffee and cake.

I was still not convinced. It sounded to good to be true. Why would something like this ever happen to me? You know that kind of feeling. It was like "Hopefully I'm not selling my soul to the devil now."

We now work on the project, already have 5 customers and are a step before the first financial investment. I'm pretty amazed how that turned out!

Now to disappoint you a bit more (or maybe to give you hope?) All I've worked so far (except that one little one-year internship) happend by, me talking to someone that had a job, me being honest about what I want and me rejecting anything that runed my guts inside out. That's it. I never really applied for something. I just get to know the people and with that comes the opportunity. Just be respectful, curious and honest. The others will notice. Chances rise that you'll find something you love todo.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Managed to land 2 interviews:

The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).

The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.

Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.

The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)

He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.

Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.

I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.

After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.

I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/

Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.

As the founder (both biz and tech) of a startup, here is my timer list everyday. It reminds how much time I left before the day ends and how much tasks waiting for me to finish.

you wanna know what the most hilarious shit is? hackernews users AKA the 6 figure startup bros that "rule the world" in terms of code and software...

trying to argue the best way to build a website 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

here's some select quotes:

"I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php"

^ this guy must not know its 2023 now

"Unless you are a web developer I don't see the point of a CSS framework, it's much easier to roll your own."

^ this guy must not know the pain and suffering that is 'rolling your own' in CSS

"Sadly, I just don't have the time to generate the content I wanted to do, so the site sits."

^ this guy just... wait, what?

but you know what? these guys clearly know WAY more than me in terms of software, it's good they get infinite salad bar and prime rib every day at silicon valley's best and brightest!

please fucking kill me i want it to end

I just got trolled by Amazon.
LOL and FML.

Be me, super busy with tons of things to do trying to prioritize tasks and jiggle jaggle from one thing to another.
Then i get a call from an Amazon representative, which I know:

Her: You should join the AWS Founders Club, you will get a lot of benefits.
Me: I don't really want to, I already looked into it and the process is long.
Her: You should do it, you got what it takes. Just register through this link..
Me: O.k.

1 day later

AMAZON: Unfortunately, we have to inform you that at this time we aren't able to accept your application. Though your startup story is impressive, your startup isn't at the right place in its journey to benefit from what the AWS Founders Club can offer.

WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME!
I didn't even want to join in the first place!!! What is this next level of trolling?!

I was given a take-home assignment during the interview process of a startup.
They gave me a vague 24 hours to complete it and submit it the day after.
The instructions read like - most candidates don't complete the assignment, so if you finish 70%-80%, that's good enough.
I read the instructions; I was supposed to follow the "mock design" they sent me. It looked a tad bit ridiculous. But still, I thought I'd be able to finish most of it.

I worked on it for around 10-12hrs total (including procrastination because it was such a slog). I finished most of the "features" they mentioned, so about 70%-80% done.
I submitted it the next day. They got back to me saying they're not moving forward because they expected more features considering 24 hours.
🤨
They didn't expect me to spend 24hrs on it, did they?
I learned a few things, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time.

I had my first ever dev interview yesterday, at a local cybersec startup(FullStack Python position)

I think it went smooth, they said if we continue the process they would give me a small dev task to complete to prove my abilities, and asked how much time of notice to give my current employers before leaving.

I can't wait to leave 4 years of sysadmin and finally move on to be a (professional) developer! 🤞

I quit this startup side job coz I was over worked and under paid for 3 years and I decided it wasn't worth the mental fatigue and anxiety. Plus I didn't feel like it added any value to my life other than stress. Gave them at least 2 months notice (since February effective April 30th) coz as the only server side engineer+team lead, I did ALOT. Now they brought this hot shot new CTO who wants me to basically rewrite the entire app before I go while maintaining the existing system and making sure everything functions smoothly (there is a ton I chose to optimise to make things easier for the new dev who they have not hired and I have 4 weeks to go) . The app was built in mongo db now he wants it in mysql. Can't believe ask me this after breaking my neck and falling in and out if depression for this job?!! I want to laugh and scream at the same time.

I freelanced for a startup one time, and found out they had ten of thousands of records stored in their DB about dental patients, inducing name, address, social security #, some medical history, etc. All in plain text. Worst part is they hired me after a 20 min phone call, and didn't even sign a NDA!

Makes me paranoid to use the Internet knowing what some of these companies do.

The craziest deadline I've ever had is DEFINITELY to learn Android programming AD WELL AS iOS programming to make an app for a startup i currently still work with, and the time limit i had was a week. This week included learning both languages, and creating the 3 screens they had ready for me. I somehow managed to finish it!
Toughest week EVER, so far.
Thanks a lot, bosses -_-

So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.

Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).

Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.

The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.

Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).

Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.

TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.

So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there

I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

I am just sick of the things that's been going on.

Joined a mid level startup as full Stack developer working on angular and node js . Code base is too shit and application is full of bugs(100+ tickets are being raised for bugs)

Since the product owner(PO) wants to demo the application he is pushing for bug fixes.

UI code:
1. Application is not handled for responsiveness all these years, it is now being trying to address. Code base is very huge to address though .
2. The common reusable components of UI has business logic inside. Any small change in business logic we are forced to handle in common components which might break up on another components.
3. Styling in 40+ components are made global. Small css change in component A is breaking up in component B due to this
4. No time to refactor.
5. Application not at all tested properly all these years. PO wants a stable build.
6. More importantly most of developers have already left the company and we are left with 2 developers including me.

I am not in a position to switch due to other commitments adds up a lot to frustration

Mixing lazy loading with event-based code == events won't be handled because the class won't subscribe to events until it's initialized hours after startup

Thank you, my dear lazy-loading lover, who keeps introducing hard-to-spot bugs everywhere. I wish your hand was as lazy as your code, that would have saved hours of debugging time.

So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).

So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.

Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.

They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.

He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.

The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".

The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.

They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.

This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.

After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.

The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.

Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.

When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.

It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.

It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.

Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.

I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.

Well , this isn't a rant or a joke , so I just thought I should post it here in case people are going through a similar situation . So I know this guy , who works at this startup , so he had just joined the company and made a huge impression on the boss ( My friend is fantastic in developing ) , so as great as that sounds , it doesn't . After a year or so , he's been promoted and is now kinda a face for the devs of the company and this made his boss very cocky , like he would take so many projects or requirements of his top clients and place them on the shoulders of my friend and give a bad time limit , which is impossible but he always managed to just finish completing it . Naturally it affected his sleep cycle , his daily life and as a result , his mental health . As time went on and as more and more projects were being placed on him..........he finally broke , he used to miss so many days of work , not return any of my calls or texts , miss lunches , have breakdowns . I became very concerned and didn't want him to end it , I went to his place , spoke to him , found out that he had suicidal thoughts . Fast forward a year later , he's still going to a shrink , everyday but he's better now and after forcing him to talk to his boss and now his boss gives him plenty of time to finish the projects and said to be straightforward with how he feels and so on . I know this isn't what you would expect to find here but I just wanted to say after having this experience , please do not keep quiet , be straightforward with your boss and don't overburden yourself , if you're an introvert , tell it to someone you know , to tell your boss , and if you know anyone in a similar situation , do be out there for them . I'm sorry if this kinda spoils your mood , but people have to be aware . Be careful , lots of love people

I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!

Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.

This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).

People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).

To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Now it's story time...

---------

I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.

We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.

The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.

So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...

"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"

So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...

"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."

10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.

We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"

So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.

(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)

PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."

ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."

<PO then shuts up in disbelief>

ME: "So are you finished?"

PO: ...

ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"

PO: Yes, for now.

ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.

PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?

<I expected this>

ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.

PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.

ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?

PO: I have other things I do then.

ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.

PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.

ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.

Then I walk away.

That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...

PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.

ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.

FUCK THOSE PEOPLE

Can someone explain to me why most design like apps are build in fucking electron. This is like the second time this week.

Me: *sees a super designy looking app*
Me: *Downloads and install*
Me: *Starts* * Slow startup*
Me: This has to be fucking electron again.
Me: *looks in resources folder* YES it is.

I'm not hating on electron. Its just that native apps are so much faster but way more ugly :P

BTW, apps were laverna and hyper

Stupid fucking idiot startup asshole hired me as an intern. Promised me the money after the work is done. We were friendly during the internship. The work is done and now it's been a week and still no money yet. He's saying it'll take some time. To beat you to shit it'll take some time you asshole!

Lesson learned: Never ever be friendly with the guy who hires you. Like never!!

Also money later isn't a good thing.

Want to jump to my startup for full time

Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

I'm a first year MSCS student, and working in a startup as a part-time engineer. The founder insisted to mark me as a "Senior Engineer" since I was leading a team of 3 student programmers. Deep in my heart I knew I'm at least 4 years away from competent enough to own this title... Today, I got an invitation from a well known company asking me to join their new team as a Senior SDE II, and I suspect this is the reason. I don't know what to do right now... Frankly I only want to ask the HR if he’d consider adding me as an intern instead LOL. I have no working experience in large professional companies before, and I think I will embarasse myself if they interview me about my experience as a "Senior Engineer" which in fact I was merely a Junior dev...

"come work from the office! we now offer an on-site masseuse with quick massages!"
WTF? No. First of all, the office is in the wrong fucking continent. But let's focus on the bogus "masseuse" crap for now.

We are a 3000+ full-time employees company. If all were to come to the same overpriced pile of fancy rocks at the same 60 hours interval (spread over 5.5 days), it would mean 1.2 minutes per massage per person per week. So to let each person have a single 15 minute massage session per week, there would have to be at least 12.5 masseuses available at all working hours.
Let's say 10 masseuses to account of those people who would not have a weekly session.
Now, let's say each masseuse is a no-strings-attached independant contractor making USD 3000 per year on a 60hour, 5.5 days full-capacity work week without breaks, vacations, benefits or sickdays (European readers may faint, but it is not so uncommon in other parts of the globe).
So this shit costs 30k USD per year.

I would much rather have 10 more USD per year than this useless "look how young and hype we are!" startup horsecrap.

"it would actually be more like 2 USD per year" was the rebuttal to my (way more politely phrased) argument above. "there is the whole overhead costs thing, and, besides, we will only have one masseuse available at a time"
Oh. So besides all the marketing, the whole point is to let a person have like four sessions per year.

Office Perks. Are. Not. Real.

I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.

One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!

I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.

She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”

When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

I no longer work for a startup company. On Monday I’ll start work for a real company, one that values project managers and their infrastructure. As a DevOps engineer, I value the IT resources that power my old companies SaaS platform. My old position is not being back filled and they’re hiring a full time dev instead of and Ops engineer. They have chosen to proceed with zero employees who know Azure or the platform their own software runs on.

Word to the wise when choosing to work for a startup. Ask these questions:

- Do they have a dedicated product manager/owner , who isn’t also the CFO?

- Do they value infrastructure and their IT resources ?

- Do they have decent powered laptops to work with?

- Do they have too much technical debt because they’re always building new features ?

- Do they work 18 hour days because they set poor work/life boundaries ?

- Who handles Support tickets , and what’s a typical support issue like?

- Do they have a branching and merging strategy? Don’t accept “we’re too small” as an answer! It’s a trap that they don’t want one.

I’m 2 months into my current job at a startup, and I’m starting to lose it. My PM doesn’t have any background in tech, features keep changing every week, and more requirements are added every other day.

To make things worse, I’m the only dev on board right now, despite the company burning ~$80k on a sweatshop to deliver code that’s barely half working.

When I asked if they’re getting another dev onboard, the co-founders said they couldn’t justify another dev since they blew a fat load on that sweatshop…

Time to get on the leetcode grind again 🙃

If you are more interested in “being right” (aka winning an argument) than learning from experiences (both your own and others), then I will not waste my time on you.

Story time:

As a member of a startup accelerator I had the privilege to run into many types of people.

There were 2 entrepreneurs who liked to argue a lot. They would argue not just with other members but with advisors, investors, EIRs, everyone. They were much more interested in “being right” than learning from the experiences of those around them.

They flustered many people, but sometime we would have REALLY seasoned investors or entrepreneurs speak to us. Those folks never got flustered.

I needed to know why...

So I pulled aside one of the bigger investors and asked him why. This was his response.

“I’ve invested and advised on every type of company you can imaging, with every type of entrepreneur. There is a lot to be learned from that experience. But if you are more interested in winning and argument than learning from experiences and creating a good business then you are not worth my time.”

He would give his advice and then go right back to his email for those folks.

Smart

1 of the 2 entrepreneur I mentioned actually turned it around. Once he found out that the investor had invested in and almost identical company in the same space and that they had sold for 100M+ he finally started to listen. You could see him really fighting the urge to argue, but he did it. That guy ended up being successful and is on track growing a company today.

The other guy had no success and is still on the Slack group of the co-working space arguing with anyone who will engage him.

I know which one of those I would want to be.

PS. If this hurts your feeling and you feel like commenting. Feel free. You’ll look very cute.

I am back after 5 years

It's been a long time

After working for a shitty company, I ended up working for a startup for an interesting big project as a software architect

It was a good experience just for some stuff, but I hated every moment we needed to build some demo or prototype for potential customers or allies

I was tired... 2 years of demoing is too much. And finally I got a Senior Devops in this company working in Kubernetes

I finally discovered my role and my position, I want to solve problems for other devs and myself. I help anyway in the final product, because fast and reliable build and release cycle need to be a must

I wish everybody could find their main role. I took 12 years to find mine lol

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and want