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.

Client: We're gonna be hosting our site on [Overly popular shit host] via a shared hosting account.

Me: Well the performance isn't going to be stellar with WordPress on there, but if that's what you want, sure. I'll enable all the cache rules possible and make sure PHP 7 is running it, but there won't be any further optimizations I can do to make it faster with such limited hosting access.

[Next day after launching the website...]

Client: The website is super slow. I thought you were going to optimize it?

Me: That is the loading time with the optimizations I said I can apply. That host isn't great for performance unfortunately.

Client: Well you're going to need to find us a reputable host as a replacement, set up the account and move the website there so we aren't waiting forever for a page to load.

Me (in a reply via email):

A few days ago, I had a trashed laptop, lost my wallet with University ID and my debit card, a thesis and a poster not started, and no real content to put on either. I'd need money to get a new univ ID but no debit card. Same ges for buying a laptop. Also homework and shit due. Which required a load of Python.

Fast forward a week.

Laptop on its way, thank PayPal. Got new univ ID. Library loans out laptops. All homeworks done. Even got the replacement fee on my debit card waived by being nice to the customer service person.

I'd like to thank devRant for keeping me sane. And I'd like to say I'm fairly proud of my adulting abilities. They're not stellar, but they're pretty okay.

Why

Do

LinkedIn motivational

Posts

Look

Like this?

Why are you

guys making me

fucking

unfollow you?

So I have 600 LinkedIn contacts.

Most are recruiters.

So my feed is flooded with recruitement rants.

And success stories like this:

How they hired the guy who had

A 10 year gap in his employment.

Because they had to take care.

Of their sick pet hamster.

Hiring him was one of their best decisions.

He was a stellar employee.

Looks like Keybase now also has its own shitcoin. Isn't it about time for that cryptocurrency wank to end already? How many more BitconneeeEEEECT's do we need?

But but but.. this is the next big thing! It will go *stellar*!

Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.

I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.

So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.

I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.

Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.

Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.

Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.

Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.

Sometime ago I was introduced to that game "Stardew Valley", as a way to relax and unwind since it is a dynamic-pace simple-storyline and even simpler interactivity open world.
Well, it worked like a charm (sarcasm). I have a save where I am a profit-maxinizing capitalist who tries to score a million gp in an year - so a regular gamer approach. It wasn't the goal here.
So I got a second save where I just go along, getting enough to get by and no hurry to build farm buildings and whatnot, but slowly building up NPC relationships.
Man, what a good metaphor for life. That approach actually unwinds me.

But the dev in me is just like "just, woah! that is an stellar use case for GPT+3 APIs! You could have NPCs with dynamic adaptative dialog! *And* you can monetize it (piracy-proof!) by charging for API calls! No shops, no collectibles, just a unique but scalable experience!"

What is wrong with me? I gotta change into the second-save mindset...

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

A while back a buddy and I were keen on making an MMORPG that for a variety of reasons just didn't work out.

Game development is an exercise in futility unless you have a LOT of time and a LOT of willpower. Unfortunately, where the project would have taken at least both of us, only one of us was able to actually do the work. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which one of us it was :|

It sucks because it was a stellar idea, the art style was going to be amazing, and I had already began working hard on a lot of the music. My best musical work to date, just sitting private on my soundcloud, unused and collecting dust.

Listening to them now still fills me with that glimmer of hope to a degree, but it's bittersweet.

People hear talking about shit like "*high level stuff* SUCKS. YOU *big tech company* FUCKTARD." And I'm just here trying to graduate without failing a CS course because my teachers want me to mug up the code and not understand it! Needless to say, I don't mug up but it's just so fucking irritating when people in your class are mugging up the code and definitions like it's Redbull and scoring stellar grades. FUCK THIS SHIT!

“Huddles don't work in safari 🤡,” Slack said.
Develop → User Agent → Google Chrome.
Boom, huddles suddenly work in Safari, and my today's huddle went absolutely fine.

Yep, I switched to Safari as my default browser. Previously, I didn't use it solely because YouTube's full-screen mode acted weird, but now I quit watching YouTube altogether.

Safari is a stellar browser. First, it wipes the floor with everything, even including Thorium, in the performance department (on Apple Silicon at least). Second, it's really beautiful with its new inline tab panel, where you have just one line of icons on top, instead of having two (tabs and url bar). DevTools are amazing. It can also connect to my iPhone's Safari via Wi-Fi and inspect the opened page — a must-have for heavy layouts. Plus, if my website works fine in Safari, it sure as hell will work fine everywhere. Safari is a great hack detector, as it won't tolerate dirty hacks. Works wonders for your code discipline.

I am all burned out on everything having to do with websites. I need a new career path. I’ve never been a stellar programmer. I have no idea what to switch to that I could be good at and that comes with a paycheck and benefits to provide for a family of six. Feeling painted into a corner with no way out.

I've been absolutely impressed with the latest kde plasma desktop on my arch. The plasma team has done an absolute stellar job. I've been using xfce mainly it's very simple and less resource hungry.

Happy fricken Tuesday devs!! You guys are awesome and I hope you have a stellar day and rest of your week.

About stellar too

I don’t know if I can fly
to the moon or to the stars
but I’ve felt how moon tasted
in the year nineteen forty one

darkess
war
despite, moon

white light
white snow
white bread
that isn’t there

no bread is there

it’s peaceful now
I’m eating almost every day

but the moon looked tasty
but the moon tasted white

macOS - just nothing makes sense.

You try to go away from the deprecated stuff, use the new shinier API to stop and start services with launchctl (bootstrap/bootout vs. load/unload). And how does this stellar OS thank you for that? By crashing your service. Thanks for nothing.

From developer perspective this whole OS is just such a nightmarish clusterfuck. If you want to set up code signing with some special entitlements and you try to use the provisioning profiles as advertised, it's like pulling the one-armed bandit. It will plunder your coins and sanity. You try to compile it, it fails or the executable will be killed - you enable and disable the automatic codesigning in Xcode, or delete and download you old code signing cert and suddenly it works. It's just random - and you have to perform random walks on the Xcode project settings to make it run. So Apple turned us into Xcode clicking monkeys...