Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

Sorry if I make a typo, my hands a still a little shaky, just had to stop myself from crying.

This morning I came in, opened my email, saw an automated response from Jira saying .... saying ..... saying the backend team provided details about their new endpoint.

After a year of screaming, they finally did it. It was so beautiful I fell to the floor and wept like a baby.

Thank you all for your support through this difficult time. Together we can accomplish anything!!!

I haven't told anyone I know yet but yesterday I got a call from a user and she asked me if I could come down and take a look at some software I support. I did and fixed the issue.
She then asked if I could take a look at her computer because help desk and PC team had tried to fix and couldn't.

5 minutes later I fixed it (every site she went to gave cert error in both chrome and ie). I stood up and there was a couple seconds of me and her just facing each other not saying anything. She was smiling ear to ear the whole time. (This issue was weeks old I think). Then she walks towards me......

And hugs me.

A client’s server crashed so they called us. When we checked the logs we found a user was logged in 200,000+ times. We told them the user and a few minutes later we get a picture of a cupcake that was on the enter key. They got cupcake DOS attacked. My team isn’t in charge of the login functionality but I can say the team that is got a fairly aggressive internal support ticket.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Mark.

Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:

"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"

...and then I would have a message saying:

"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)

I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:

"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"

...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...

"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

Private chat pops up. (- separator for new message)

Hello
- (1 min)
Can you help me?
- (2-3 mins)
Please it's urgeeeent!!!!!
- (1 min)
Come on you're online, I see the green dot.
- (5 mins)
Ok then I won't be able to work. Will write this down in the ticket.

- (15 mins) - new private chat pops up
Hi, we need to talk.
- (3 mins)
Regarding ticket XY, why aren't you responding? It's really urgent.
- (5 mins)
Please notify me as soon as you're available, it's really important!!!

- (20 mins, new private chat opens)
Hi mate, I think the devs are up to mischief. Said you're not reachable, I'll try to poke them with the stun gun.

- (60 mins, message in the official and only endorsed support room)
@all We broke staging, <Me> never responds and <Team mate who tried to use the stun gun> wasn't helpful either.
We really need this now!!!!!!!

- 30 mins later... la me:
@all I was in a meeting with the stakeholders as we had an priority meeting... What was so important that you not only ignored the rule of not messaging privately and even ignored <team mate>s instructions?

- 5 mins later, answer
no need to be so unfriendly.... We broke staging as we had to test stuff out for next week's sprint review [something which is still 3 days away or sth like that]. We really need to take a look in the team at it and for that we must have staging working now!!!!
- (La me)
If you need it urgent now, you didn't plan ahead. And if you didn't plan ahead, you have to wait for others. The sprint review and all other important days are planned ahead for a reason.
- (Silence)

- (20 mins later, private chat, team lead)
Will you finally fix staging now?

- La me
If it could wait 3 hours now and you / your team ignored all netiquette, it can wait till next day, too. We had this discussion more than once, I don't think I need to explain this further.

(Silence)

All in all, the joys of communication...

Now the fun stuff is when this not only happens with 1 team, but many teams....

Having 35 - 40 private chats and chat window looking like a christmas tree thx to the immeasurable amount of notifications and colors... Yay...

Did I mention that I hate the ego some programmers have -.

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

Rant! I found a bug in payment provider's api. The bug involves sending an invalid (!) Stripe ID to that API, (which I send on purpose btw) Which causes a complete white page when you login to their systems and view the details of that customer. Btw the API will accept that invalid Stripe ID without questioning and returns a 200 status code back.

So I send a mail to there support saying "look I found this bug by accident, this is how you can reproduce it"

And the support team send me a message back saying "then don't send an invalid Stripe ID"...

You don't freaking say... *sigh*

To all IT-guys out there, be it the desperate sysadmin or the kind lady of the support team, I whish all of you and your family/friends a merry christmas! 😃

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

FUCK GOOGLE.

FUCK THE GOOGLE PLAY REVIEW TEAM.

FUCK THEIR BOT GENERATED EMAILS.

FUCK THEIR DEVELOPER SUPPORT.

I am trying to launch a fucking action game. There will be fucking guns and muzzle flashes shown in the screenshots. Stop fucking rejecting the app. There is no blood in the icon or screenshots. Stop sending me bot generated emails and tell me what content is being flagged.

A little information on the whole scenario: My game was rejected so immediately I contacted the support as to what was the issue. The guy told me 2 screenshots were flagged because they had the muzzle flashes and damage indicator (call of duty type which tells the direction from where the bullets are coming from). So I removed the screenshots and still the game was rejected. FUCK THESE ASSHOLES. SAME GOES FOR APPLE.

So just about to head to the pub and I got the dreaded call from my boss.

The support team had developed some fixes. They "tested" and deployed without letting us know... And you guessed it there was failures all over the shop!

So it turned out their testing was running on a local base install with no integration compared to the live system with 15 years of customisation and complex integration. My they thought this was acceptable I don't know...

And the best part was the developers who made the changes didn't understand their own code (I found the tutorial they copied online) they just blindly copied it without understanding how it worked!

So 4 hours later we found the bug, nothing like having a query and s SQL connection but not executing the query....

There goes my Saturday evening. Now we're was my beer!

The top two:
* the laziest intern ever!! He lived 100m from the office but was always late for the daily. Even managed to forget his fucking laptop at home!! His mommy had to wake him up!!! He was so useless that I thought he was on the first year of his bachelor's degree and later the team said to me that he had finished it.

* some frat bro, got an internship thanks to daddy inside my ops team. He managed to insult everyone in his first week!!
So I had to tell his daddy, that his son will work under the office support team and will be in charge of the first level support for his branch. Daddy fired his son sorry as after two weeks!!

During a company wide status meeting where all product managers, architects and directors assemble:

Me: *A product architect leading a team of devs*

Directors: So are there any issues or risks you see in delivering the next build in target time for Client 1?

Me: There are too many changes in feature requirements. First they said we can use a shared NFS for storage. Now they are asking to switch over to SFTP pull mode.. blah blah..

Directors: Oh I see.. well we can support both solutions then.

Me: But the deadlin..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Will be a good marketing point for future.

Me: But there are too many regressions in integra..

Directors: *ignores what I say* We should also meet deadlines. That is the most important thing.

Me: Its not as easy as 1+1=2.. The team needs more time to..

Directors: *ignores what I say* Ok lets move on to the next point. What about Client 2?

Me:

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

When I left university I got a Graduate Developer role at a local start-up. For the first year there i did html and css, second year I was in the support team.

Not a problem because sometimes you have to eat some shit to get where you want to be. But third year I got moved into the Dev team properly.

A month in, the Support team, without someone with a devs brain and a "devs" knowledge of the product, started falling really far behind and struggling and the MD told me I'd be going back into Support for another 6-12 months. So I told him to fuck off, and if he did I'd just leave. They never did and I stayed. 👍

I put a sticker under the optical mouse on one of my team mates then he started to rage when his mouse is not working. Then he started calling technical support and they, too, didnt know what cause the mouse to not working. I wanted to laugh so hard, but I must resist. Ahaaha xD

A third party manages access to a web application I’m supposed to begin using. While accessible from the Internet, they whitelist IP addresses, so it rejects the login credentials if not coming from a whitelisted address.

I provided my external IP address to their support team but the application was not letting me in, so I called their help desk. A support technician said that my IP address was 10.x.x.x, a private IP address. I’m not on the same network as this application, so I did a quick check and realized they are reading my internal IP address from my X-FORWARDED-FOR (XFF) header (yes, my employer exposes this).

I explain to him that the application is incorrectly reading my external (connection) IP address and is instead reading my internal IP address from my XFF header. I also explain that it’s not a good idea to add a private IP address to their whitelist as it somewhat defeats the point as anyone can assign that IP address within their network and expose it via an XFF header.

After talking to numerous support personnel, I came to the conclusion that not a single support person on their team understands basic networking and private IP address ranges.

I finally just said, “Fine. Go ahead and add my internal IP address but keep in mind it will change a lot.”

He then proceeded to “explain” to me how my IP address is assigned by my ISP and should change very infrequently. I explained to him that the IP address their application is reading is actually assigned by DHCP inside my network, but I was clearly wasting my breath.

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Okay, so I was helping an elderly woman with her laptop + internet today (with payment). Problem: Laptop connects to WiFi, shows internet connection, but you couldn't even go to google.com.

The router wasn't the issue as my phone worked on the same WiFi. After a lot of troubleshooting steps, I noticed that Windows forced IPV6 for all WiFi connections for some reason. The router doesn't even support IPV6... So I disabled it and everything started working again.

WHY THE FUCK DID WINDOWS NOT TRY TO LOOKUP A IPV4 ADDRESS IF THE IPV6 FAILS? BOTH WERE ENABLED! WHO AT THE FUCKING WINDOWS 10 DEVELOPMENT TEAM THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA?

I've been an IT Director for a medium sized company for 11 years...
2 years ago we decided to custom develop an app for online ordering through a third party... This company quoted $36k, I told the team that I think it will be $100k and here is a solution that will do 90% of the needs for $50 a month per location... boss says he doesn't care if it's 200k he wants 100% of what we want and the ability to change it to perfectly fit our needs.... FFW to present... $36k app built by committee of 8 people.. = $400k... and counting for maintenance and adjustments. We now use that $50 a month solution as well to cover another need that would be too costly to code into the original app SMH... and now myself and my team are learning to code to support it internally because.... why would you just hire a qualified person... anyhow, I'm a few months into a self paced online bootcamp and loving it. So ... bright side found! Rant over

Post Anger Rant (Beware, Long rant ahead)

So there is this project we have been working for months, most of the devs involved are jr students so I was leading them in the architecture and what to do and they were doing it, the progress was slow but safe and fun.

On the team there was this guy, someone I trusted and in who I had special interest for his skills, so I let him own the github repo.

So the day of the first demo I pull the backend changes ( I had been working on front end ) and I realize that the code was different, so I started using my super awesome forensic skills to find what happened,and when I say different I mean a totally different architecture different database connections, different service pirts, basically other project, so during my criminal investigation I found out this guy I trusted had never really worked with us, from the beginning he went solo working on his own project and changing everything because of some tutorial he found on the internet, so I decided to reset to the previous version just to find out that he had already deployed the code and that a lot of fixes that we should have were only on his version.

So I went and confront him telling him that he did wrong and he had to learn team work and that I was trying to teach them good practices and he waits and asks me "so, my code was wrong?" Seriously what da hell dude? I'm talking about team work and all you can think about is your code.

Finally he admitted his mistake and repented (I think), but seriously how arrogant must you be to ignore a whole team, specially when on your first real project.

the fuck kind of manager are you that you tell your leads not to fucking answer their damn phones when services need restoring????? If your fucking team member can do his damn job like a grown ass adult, but sees that you (his lead) made a change and has questions, your ass better answer the phone, or i will rocket launch it up your ass, straight into your brain so it's the newest, latest, fucking hippest trend and hooked into your system so you answer every fucking call hands-free. Even when fucking "Windows Tech Support" calls you every 30 minutes because your keep expired.

There are people counting on you, worthless fuckwipe. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself. And do your fucking job.

Edit: phone tried to censor me

* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches to working on it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Switches team member to it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Gets dev team to help with it.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Asks CEO to help on ticket.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Cries.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* Prays to Mecca.
* Urgent support ticket comes in.
* ...

I then find out two more urgent support tickets are about to come in.

And then another one.

Help.

Nowhere near my worst co-worker, but still funny.

The Dev team were all in a separate glass walled room with the business & support staff out in a bigger room outside. As is our wont, we wore headphones while working a lot.

One of the non technical folks asked me why and I said it helps me focus by keeping out distracting noises.

"Oh, I thought you were listening to code or something"

😮

It was kind of an eye-opener as to how little clue a person sitting just 4 meters away had of what I did or how I did it. And actually it helped explain some confusing interactions...

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Perfect job is when sandbox and production api endpoints works the same.

Fuck all api endpoints where their sandbox works differently than the production.

Fuck all those error messages that appear only in production, despite faithfully following the documentations.

Fuck the gateways where their sandbox is more stable than the production.

Fuck the endpoints whose api parameters differ in what they accept between sandbox and production.

Fuck those manuals that does not document these diferrences.

Fuck those developers and support team who don't know how to support integrators. They don't even know how their apis work!

"I can't replicate it therefore your hotfix for the customer shouting at you is unnecessary"

WTF?! I had to lead this guy to the records where I'd replicated it myself in both the customer system and the demo one! There's a real sense that the core dev team in this place automatically disregards what the rest of us say (support had already mentioned it was replicable but clearly hadn't realised that they needed to spoon-feed this guy).

This place has a huge silo problem, glad I'm not staying much longer...

edit: these tags shouldn't be reordering themselves, not cool

Client support ticket: we printed the ID cards without leading 0’s can you fix it with software?
Me: unfortunately we cannot because the ID number can be any length. ID 123, 0123 and 00123 can exist. What barcode would 123 go to?
Client: this is ridiculous we will cancel our contract.
Me: i’m sorry we can’t correct for a mistake on your end.
(Side note: I know allowing 0123 and 00123 is dumb but my team didn’t design the business logic)

Fuck my manager. >_<

I'm a fresher at a medium-sized company. Our team is relatively new and we don't have a dedicated support team for the product the team developed (before I joined the company).

So when I was allocated to the team, I was put into support, citing it as a good learning experience (and it was). But it's been a few months. And the support work got boring and uninteresting, looking at logs which don't say anything, dumps which are completely normal and most of all, dealing with unresponsive OSEs, when they claim the issue is super critical and really tricky.

Anyway, there was this tool (among other things) that had to be developed as a support tool for our product and I ended up being paired with a guy who ended up being in charge of it. We started working on it slowly, designing and implementing a framework for the tool.

This goes without saying, I love development.

4 days later, my manager says "why are you developing it? Who's gonna look at support issues?"

Fucking hell. I was hired to be a developer and you got me just decide to up and shove me into support for the next 3-6 months while others are at least enhancing our shitty ass product? And I can't even quit for another year and a half because I signed a bond!

Oh, the depression.

Transport management system support team:

Me: Good day, how may i assist?

Client: Hi, Can you help me setup my printer?

Me:* Sighs deeply with great discretion*

Me: Sorry mam but we don't do that here, we
only deal with issues regarding the TMS.
You would have to contact your IT guy

Client: but you are our IT guys

Me: *Sighs even deeper*

Me: Unfortunately mam we are not your "IT
guys"

Client: Well, This issue needs to be fixed

Me: Yes mam, yes it does *Hangs up phone*

So one of our clients is changing the IPs of his systems (3 servers and one VPN).

It was scheduled that we should support them yesterday. They have tried to change the IPs yesterday for almost 16 hours, don't know they have done in all of that time.

Today I woke up at 8AM on a Sunday (in weekends I just want to sleep!!!!) to continue and hope that we finish fast.

BUT NO! THE fucking VPN IS NOT WORKING!! We are trying to do this over Team FUCKIN VIewer.

But guess what... they cannot either connect to the new IPs from their local systems.

Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!

Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.

I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."

Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:

- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit

I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.

CTO: Research, problem analysis, customer need validations, and data based prioritisation is stupid.

Me: So, then why should we solve this problem?

CTO: Because my team invests a lot of time in here (read "because we build a shitty system in past without thinking and we are doing it again").

Me: I don't see this as a good idea.

CTO: I become emotional when I request product to align and they don't. We must solve this problem and not what customers want.

Me: I am not participating here.

CTO: And I want you to work on weekends to support my team.

Me: *disconnects*

So yeah, we released our app for 26k people to use two days ago. Due to circumstances not under our control, that was developed way faster than it should've. Today we're two days in and everything is going horrible. 26 thousand people are having trouble using it (not every problem is our fault, but ofc they don't give a shit) and our support team is not big enough to handle every request. We're not able to find any more people to help us handle it, so some developers are being used for support. But that slows the bugfixes a lot. We're at risk of losing our jobs because we will not be able to make it work in due time.

In Italy, at the beginning of the year a particular type of invoice became necessary and to handle that everyone needs a particular kind of email called "certified", you know, because Italy, and today our certified email server went offline for the whole fucking day because the provider was an overload of feces. We were overwhelmed by the amount of people that needed help.

I don't even know what to say, if we don't fix it we're fucking fucked, like literally.

I really hope everyone is having a nice new year. For us, this is going terrible.

I get frustrated when I get reports from the support team/clients

"[insert application name here] is not working"

thats all no information on which module or segment ... 😭😭

then I just waste time getting all the information ...

When i worked for a large, international bank (whose name rhymes with shitty), I always had to use the following formula to estimate projects.

1. Take estimate of actual work
2. Multiply by 2 to cover project manager status reports
3. Multiply by 4 to cover time spent in useless meetings.
4. Multiply by 2 to cover user support and bug fix tasks.
5. Multiply by 2 to cover my team lead tasks.
6. Multiply by 3 to cover useless paperwork and obtaining idiotic necessary approvals to do anything
7. Finally, multiply by 3.14159 to cover all the other stupid shit that the idiots that run that company come up with.

It's only a slight exaggeration. Tasks that required less than a day of actual coding would routinely require two weeks to accomplish and get implemented.

This begs for a rant... [too bad I can't post actual screenshots :/ ]

Me: He k8s team! We're having trouble with our k8s cluster. After scaling up and running h/c and Sanity tests environment was confirmed as Healthy and Stable. But once we'd started our load tests k8s cluster went out for a walk: most of the replicas got stoped and restarted and I cannot find in events' log WHY that happened. Could you please have a look?

k8s team [india]: Hello, thank you for reaching out to k8s support. We will check and let you know.

Me: Oh, you're welcome! I'll be just sitting here quietly and eagerly waiting for your reply. TIA! :slightly_smiling_face:

<5 minutes later>

k8s team India: Hi. Could you give me a list of replicas that were failing?

Me: I gave you a Grafana link with a timeframe filter. Look there -- almost all apps show instability at k8s layer. For instance APP_1 and APP_2 were OK. But APP_3, APP_4 and APP_5 were crashing all over the place

k8s team India: ok I will check.

<My shift has ended. k8s team works in different timezone. I've opened up Slack this morning>

k8s team India: HI. APP_1 and APP_2 are fine. I don't even see any errors from logs, no restarts. All response codes are 200.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ .... Man, isn't that what I've said? ... 🤦‍♂️

I am a senior a DevOps engineer who took the production stack down for ~10 minutes today because of a bad code commit. I could use some encouragement! It’s a fierce world of competitive engineers and I wonder why my company doesn’t replace me. The mistake was missed by two other peer reviews... but that doesn’t stop me from feeling this way.

Have you crashed prod? Did your team support you or tear you down?

In order to reduce support costs, manager instructed his team to remove all logging/reporting of errors in the company’s CRM application.
Team’s support tickets went down 80%, manager received an award for his efforts, but mysteriously, DBA/support workload increased, bad/missing data,
increased support tickets in other areas of the business (shipping, etc. that relied on correct data from the CRM) and other side-affectual behavior.
Even after pointing this out this correlation, showing before/after code, no one believed the two were related and I was accused of not being a ‘team player’.
“You and the other teams need to learn from his example!”. As ‘punishment’ was I was moved to the team managing the CRM application.

I'm actually a Dev, mostly just a shell scripter who needs to support 500 servers which run our applications. I install the new versions and check whatever is wrong if there are customer issues.
One release weekend everything went wrong, Development had to make new builds on the fly with hardly any time for testing.
It took 18 hours with no break.
It was extremely hard to concentrate, but being in the Skype group with everyone and finally getting everything fixed was quite rewarding.
Everyone just opened a beer and we stayed on the call for about 30 more minutes just to relax.

I like our Dev team way better than I like my actual colleagues, who merely mess things up and call me for the smallest thing without even thinking.

So, I'm a Jr. Webdev started one year ago to work on a €200mln. retail platform. Our development team consists out of my Sr. dev who designed the whole platform and it's basically his baby. Now he's leaving and it's expected from me to do new developments, support, meetings with managers from all over Europe, roll-outs in new countries, deal with all the issues SAP has, eat their bullshit when they can't upload a .csv file because they are too stupid to check for missing leading zeros. Listen to important their new functions are that they want because 120% of the salespeople needs it. How stupid can this company be to take the financial risk? I'm done.

Passionate programmer attends one of the toughest interviews ever and solves lot of algorithmic problems coding in different programming languages. Impresses the interview panel providing solutions with as much as efficiency as possible. Gets selected, completes induction and gets a nice Dev machine allocated.

Manager walks in and says we got to work with the production support team on fixing a UI bug.

Best Hardware support team.
I hope every one of you got such team.

My keyboard was not working properly.
programmer's most used special character ; is auto typing anywhere that is obviously keyboard issue so I called H/W support team.

me: *explained above problem.*
supporter : Ya we know that issue ,YOUR HARD DRIVE IS CORRUPTED. We have 2 option
1) either we can formate your system.
2) We have to change hard drive.
Me thinking : *devrant stuff found*
Me: that is really sad part. How many time you solved such problem?
S: This is my first time in this company ,previously I solved such issue more than 10 time.
Me: you really look smart.
S: thank you,any how I will resolved this issue today.
Me: today I am going earlier but yes we will meet on monday. thank you for quick response.

Fuck you google android IME team and fuck their open source policy..

So recently i had a chance to work with AOSP LatinIME code, basically our Android keyboard was forked from very old code base of LatinIME and my job was to change its base version to latest Version available on AOSP repository. Downloaded latest Android 8 codebase. Did 2 weeks of deep investigation of what improvements we will get from upgraded code base.

And I came to know that those Google fucking cunt sucking dick heads deprecated that project and broke the whole thing to a pice of shit. Half of the code is broken with fucked up todo stuff and motherfucking missing method implementation with not implemented warnings. What those motherfucker did is that they abandoned the open-source project after they released Google GBoard, and fucked the stable code by adding quard gram support and dictionary download with multi account features which was never completed by those motherfuckers..

Those misguiding donkey shit fuckers kept a depreciated project in AOSP build tree which has not received a single fucking commit from shitty ass Google IME team, is said to be reference model of Android IME implementation..

What kind of fucking shit is going with open-source code in name of making competition high with thirt party Android keyboard developers ..

Fucking shit fucking ime team .. fuck you .. wasted my fucking time reading your shitty code base .. Fucking shit

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

Security startup...
'Which football team do you support?'
'Not sure how that is relevant.'
'It is very relevant'

me: *starts receiving emails of clients having technical problems and errors and asking for help* wat, im being flooded with all these mails!
me: *sends email to boss* umm... i think im receiving the wrong mails...
boss: nope! from now on, you'll be in-charge of tech support for our clients. good luck and merry christmas!
me: *dies internally* happy holidays to u too

Just because I know how to program doesn't mean I know how to fix your goddamn computer. We have an IT support team. Call them!

Don't come to my desk asking about a computer problem, then stand there with a vacant stare when I say I can't help you. I've given you the support team's contact info several times already. I assure you, they specifically get paid to configure your emails, install printers, setup your VPN, etc. Now where the hell was I at...

This morning, I felt pretty good. I had a healthy breakfast and I took the longer U-bahn journey into work so as to enjoy the Autumn scenery. I get to my desk after greeting my colleagues with the customary "Guten Morgen" and I began to plan my work for the day. I see there is a new ticket assigned to me which relates to a HTML issue. The customer support team are able to use a HTML editor to made changes to a section of a user's dashboard and from time to time, I get asked to fix their mistakes. Usually, it is something small, but it makes me cringe every time I see the markup. "Tables...tables everywhere!!!", sighed the once happy dev.

Time for a coffee break and a sit-down with the support team

ComputerToucher: *opens Jira ticket* Dev team needs tokens for the APM for a new app with multiple tenants. Ezpz. Hey, developer. Do you want one golden token for all of your app tenants or would you like us to generate one token for each?

Developer: Let’s have a meeting to discuss it.

CT: It’s…an exceedingly simple question. One token or 4? Which does your app support?

Dev: Yeah I think we should discuss with this with the platform team, can you set up the call?

CT: (Internally) I am the platform team? Do you not know how your applica-never mind I’ll just ask the PM directly.

CT (in chat): I’ll ask PM to schedule the call.

*Goes back to Jira ticket, changes priority to 4, removes ticket from sprint entirely, picks something else to work on*

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

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

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

SH: But what if it happens again???

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

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

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

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

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

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

Quitting job because of Java and legacy corporate OSGI codebase. Being junior developer I'm just done with no documentation, terrible team support and non existent code review. After 18 months I can't justify staying any longer. Never had luck with Java and I guess some things just stay the same.

Joined only because of Javascript part, just to be thrown into fullstack position. Stayed way longer because of COVID. Good old simple PHP I loved and foolishly left because of money.

After months I finally received an email from the external partner's support team!

```
Please be informed that we consider your Incident "XXX: How to Y?" as closed with status: Closed.
```

Why thank you.

Leading a team of 10 people, 5 environments (3 non prod 2 prod) to support, 25 formal deployments per week, and all I have is one fucking repository in fucking svn.

introductory rant

So I am new here, hi! :)

So the devRant android app does not seem to support this mail format:
user+devrant@domain
(the important part being the "+devrant" thing)

Now I waited 2 days for a confirmation mail that wouldn't arrive and was greeted with the "please confirm your fucking mail" popup every damn time.

"Okay, let's just change my mail to user@domain and deal with it", I thought. Guess what: You can't!

So I contacted the devrant team via e-mail.
And I waited.
2 days.
No answer.

Okay.

Delete account, recreate with other mail, be happy.

Don't worry, I'm not mad. It's just really fucking ironic.

Looking forward to a great community! :)

Support Team Member opened a ticket.

> This customer's image isn't loading.

Load image, it's white and transparent on a white page.

Saw new issue on jira. When look, they are like my computer is slow or I cannot any buttons in Excel.

For fuck sake, don't send stupid tickets, we already got stupid projects the company took from the others without consulting to the IT team.

There are about 600 tickets every month and most of them are issue because of their stupidity not the software (they never read the error message). And no we are not IT support, go ask those ppl for your computer issue.

Working with a new team and I don't understand how this is normal or ok.

Me: Does anyone need help troubleshooting the broken build or can I revert this change that broke it so I can push my change out?

Dev: Stop build shaming me, I wouldn't leave the build in a failing state.

Me: Well, I wasn't sure how long to wait, before asking.... it's been broken for 4 hours.

Dev: It's the development environment, you should expect development to be going on.

Me: Yes and appears that this project architecture doesn't support any sort of isolation for development. So nobody can deploy anything except through the development branch.

Dev: That's what development is for IMO, so it doesn't bother me.

"We need to have a meeting to clarify your role"

My head: Just give me a raise and then leave me alone

My mouth: Yea, sure. When works for you

Context:
My job is a little confusing.
My title on paper is support technician and I'm on the DevOps team but I have my own project to automate health checks. So most the accurate title for me would actually be Automation Developer Attached To [department name] DevOps

Several years ago I joined the company I currently work for, as a software support person, with the intention of eventually moving toward the development team.

After a few years doing that, I gradually realised that working in the development team for our products didn't seem that appealing after all, so I went for a more technical support role (essentially debugging all the really complicated problems and reporting the bugs to the devs) which I find fascinating - trying to solve these puzzles is an interesting challenge. It can take days, sometimes weeks to get to the bottom of something really inexplicably weird.

As part of this I get to do some internal dev work on the teams projects (nothing that gets used directly by external users though) and have learned loads of things from my boss over the years (even before I joined this team).

It has its frustrating moments of course but I am definitely glad I didn't follow my original intentions of just being a developer on our main products.

Sometimes what you think you want isn't actually what's ideal for you :)

Our team talking with a Mr. KnowItAll...

Mr. KIA: What concerns me about this huge system transference is that the devs won't give us the JS scripts files decompiled.
Mr. KIA again: I'm also concerned about Win XP end of support...

Us seeing each other: WTF is going on?!? Where are the hidden funny cameras...

A tip:
If you wanna pretend you know it all...you'll fail...

A humble dev never get humilliated

So I tried to bye a ticket from mobile app which seems not to be working so I contacted tried to contact the customer support team from twitter because they were not picking their phone and this is the response I got. How the fuck am I supposed to know who made it ?😡😡😡I wasted hole day to argue with them.

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

I joined 3 months into a project that was expected to be done in 6.

As the day passed I learned about the scope a little more, 30 days in I decided to step aside, I slowly learned that they wanted a whole bank built from scratch.

User support ticketing systems, the banking core and an app like "revolut", everything with a team of 4.

To this day I have not seen them launch, and it's been over 5 years.

my job went from being a programmer ==> technical support girl for the whole company D:

its kinda annoying because its mostly about amazon ec2 instances and i have to chat with the support team from amazon when something goes wrong while following the steps (that the others could have followed instead of going to directly to me to make me do it)
now i have to try and fix all the problems occuring in the servers :((

Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMAScript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for 20 years. The operator is **... It will also become much easier to search for data in a JavaScript array with Array.prototype.includes(), but support for async functions (initially announced for ES2016), has been deferred until next year's release. "From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team," reports Softpedia, "since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year."

Database is being slow AF again. Team lead is investigating. This is happening more often lately and affects both production and dev because everything is just in one gigantic database. So clients are calling support being angry about the speed they get and us devs get to twiddle our thumbs while waiting for our own data to load.

var _self = Object.create(Rant);

Hello devs I'm back

A few months ago I joined a software development company and I was pretty specific that I wasn't going to do support or maintenance only feature development, well, this past 3 months I've been doing dev helping stablish good practices and a better architecture for the app, but guess who is joining a support team tomorrow, they sold me the idea of a refactor team, I was trilled and accepted, now they tell me it's a legacy bug fixing team, damn I hate this crap, hope y'all doing better

So, today in the office we all decided chipotle for lunch. We create the team order and sent it out to the entire office.

First thing we noticed: online ordering looks really good and has finally been updated.
Second thing we noticed: it never got tested and it doesn't work

Result: 7 angry developers who just wanted some burrito bowls start emailing chipotle tech support

First dev job is my current one.

I'm a software engineer in test, writing automated UI tests for web and mobile apps.

Its pretty great. I work from home with flexible hours. I have a boss but he doesnt manage my dev team, he just checks in to make sure I'm getting support, training and have all my questions answered. My dev team is myself and 2 other people, both of which are cool, and all the work is dev-driven.

Might just stay here until retirement, that sounds easy.

Someone blocked access to AWS RDS database and for the past few weeks I can't access the database from my machine when connected to our company network.

Created support ticket to internal IT team and someone closed the ticket. I re-opened the ticket and in the comment someone wrote "Their team doesn't handle AWS access".,

Wrote email to the director of infrastructure and that asshole replied to me asking some questions and after that his been ghosting me for past 2 weeks.

I'm tired and I don't have energy to do any more follow ups.

I work for a big bank. I'm going to say pretty much the entire Support team is incompetent.

Oh something went wrong? Escalate to devs... cuz we have no idea wtf to do and don't have the most basic technical problem solving skills...

Bunch of useless monkeys... btw guess what time it is now? And what I'm doing?

I work in a large organization that previously didn't have it's own development team. Therefore various business areas have built their own solutions to solve problems which mostly involve Access and Excel.

Many of these applications still exist and we are expected to resolve any issues with them and update them when necessary performing this support role while still expected to meet our (very tight) development timelines.

I can't tell you how much of a pain in the tits it is to be trying to power through a priority development only to be interrupted with an urgent instruction to fix a 17 year old Access database that's running slow.

Of course it's pissing running slow, it's 17 years old, has nearly a million records and you have multiple users accessing it across the country!! I think it's time to peacefully let it die.

I used to think our IT Support team is the most insufferable. I'm wrong and very sorry; if you guys are here to forgive me.

On the chart now is the security team.

The head of the security team doesn't simply understand that you can fucking not mix some programming languages in the same execution environment.

He is flipping making arguments on executing Javascript in a Java environment. He simply thinks Java is fucking Javascript. Yeah, I know you can make some drifts with GraalVM; sure not in our use-case.

Cross-Site Scripting has a fucking limit. You can't just pass any piece of code to mixed with a complied code and expect it to execute. Except if I'm wrong then I need someone here to show me how because he couldn't tell me how as he was just cynical in every damn way. moda sucker.

Frustration at its peak !!

So the CTO of the company I recently joined, whom I considered to be cool personality of all the open culture in the office and open communication, seems to be all wrong.

Few days back he suddenly dropped a mail to all the tech team members mentioning that we need more streamlined process in the company and many more blah blah stuffs... to which all of us agreed.

But. But. But. The last line(small font size) mentioning that from now onwards we need to come on Saturdays too until further notice. I mean WTF !!? Seriously.

But today in stand-up when one of the guy asked the agenda, he just tossed the question saying that we need to be more active attending "client tickets". Goddammit. We are devs, not tech support.
To this one of the other dev, said the exact same thing that was going in everyone's mind. Call the team that are required on Saturdays. To which his reply was, " Come on Saturday, we will speak then".

I was like 👏👏👏

P.S. Not that we are not ready to come on Saturdays, but at least take consent of all the members in the team, if you all babble so much about open culture and shit. We have friends and family too to have fun with, and need to take little rest on weekends.
And most importantly, tell us some firm reasons to be there on weekends, not just "You have to come, because we said so!"
Period.

The longer I work on front-end the more controversial my opinions become:

- Styling a button with display:flex is dumb.
- The DOM is not hard, unlike what the React team wants to have you believe.
- Specifying a <form> action matters, even if it's empty
- ES5 was the real JS revolution, ES6 mostly sugar-coated marketing
- Disciplined BEM (S)CSS is simple and flexible enough for most needs (vs CSS-in-JS, CSS modules)
- If editor support for Jsdoc were as advanced as Typescript, you wouldn't need the latter.
- There are cases where using floats and inline-block displays is better than the flex CSS box model

I get some error when deleting an azure service so I put a support ticket asking for help. Just as I am about to close my computer for the day I receive an email saying:

"Product team will disable the account xxxxx from backend".

The xxxxx is our subscription number. The subscription that hosts not only that service but also production servers and databases, storage accounts containing backups, etc.

I replied to the email so hopefully disaster is avoided otherwise tomorrow wont be a happy day.

Hello, devs! I'm an intern at a mobile games company. I used to work with the game development there, but today I started my work in the support/tools team. Am so glad I can use Linux and ruby there *-*

At a previous job I had, there was a bug in the payment code, we did not know anything was wrong until the customer support team began receiving some crazy emails stating that our company emptied their bank account. Then we investigated further and thousands of customers had their banks emptied. So the payment team went big hunting, found the problem to eliminate further chaos.

Unfortunately the person responsible for this huge screw up was not fired immediately, but did resign soon there after.

When you raise a ticket with your support team that your prod server is currently down and they mark it as a medium request, like dude... seriously?! Get it sorted ASAP paleaaaaase

Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...

Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.

Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.

This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.

The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.

I miss coding already.

Story Time: About Priorities and Sales

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

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

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

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

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

Me: "Sure."

-call ends-

-30 minutes passes-

-sales calls again-

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

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

Sales "ARGH!"

ʅ（´◔౪◔）ʃ

Update: for those of you who know cougar woman/ my self proclaimed "work mom" in my previous posts (bitch who keeps stealing my lunch), yesterday she really tipped me over the edge. So I'm fucking hauling ass on my sprint work because I had to take over another team member's tasks (because he "doesn't have time" for it being prod support but all I see him doing is shitposting at his desk) and someone from another team asked the cougar a question about something. she comes up to me all demanding like "HEY you, you got the worksapce open?"
I was like um... no I don't. I'm working on the other application.
and then she's like "Look at my laptop and show him". Okay bitch let me just drop everything I'm doing to help a random person. The fact that she commanded me instead of just asking me pissed me off. Not even a single sign of "please". I'm tired of her truly. She is a snake. Even to her friend on our team. Every time he's out she's like "hey where is _____? huh why isn't he here??? hmmm" in an instigating way to remind everyone that he might've taken off for no reason. When I was too sick to volunteer at an event she organized in the morning on Saturday, she asked me the following Monday, "oh did you drink too much? lmao. a spiteful, grudge holding bitch for sure

We are moving from Oracle 10g to SQL Server 2019 because Oracle doesn't want to provide support to our legacy 10g database.

It doesn't much sense well anyways god bless us during data migration.

Oh one last thing, fuck business analyst team.

When the support team flirts with you so maybe you will forget about the issue (that your website has 30 minutes downtimes everyday). 🤭

Took a day off and came back to find my team and I were moved from frontend to backend (which I always wanted to be).

Manager says we get to learn Java, Mongodb and even Hadoop.

I am so so excited.

But the only little hold back is, there is limited support for Java in sublime text and I should instead use eclipse. I had dozens of shortcuts customised with all those beautiful themes in sublime, but eclipse takes the fun out of coding(no offense to eclipse lovers).

The customer support team in my company just put a shit description about the issues and expect the devs to solve it. The screenshot is in a German language that is officially said to be not used in the company yet it is still used. The zendesk has no images or context. Do these customer support think we are magicians?

In my firm we've got a shadow IT team where I'm part of. Sometimes we need to call the "IT support team" who are lacking the knowledge of common IT sense. Some weeks ago I called them up to extend our ip range since we've got no rights to do it ourselve. They replied with: please disconnect the cable and reconnect it. (Bear in mind our lease time was 24h)

Some other guy called me up to check my pc for viruses... he was looking for the task manager so I pushed ctrl shift esc and he asked me wondering HOW did you do this? He even didn't know things like %appdata%. I had a talk with him and gave him as much tips as I could.

The poor fella

Thanks for reading my nonsense post

Worst mistake I have made is accidentally wiping a database table by messing up a SQL script. This was caught after it had been deployed to around 30 customer sites, most of which had no technical staff on site, and we didn't have remote access to. I bought our support team cookies for fixing that one.

So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.

First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.

This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.

If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.

On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)

Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.

So i work in support (do dev stuff in my own time). Spent 3 months seconded to another team supporting in project clients.

First issue i had in that team was a client with serious data issues which took about 30 hours +/- to diagnose and write some scripts to resolve.

After they went live and got handed over to support they had the same issue again but instead of support picking it up they sat on it till i came back on Monday.

Ive spent about another 10 hours or so picking through audit logs. I get all the shit no one else can either be bothered or capable of doing and to top it off i didnt get the promotion i was going for because i hadnt closed enough tickets, because they keep giving me all the shit to fix for everybody else

Two (2) senior developers and one (1) senior tester left our team and I am left with two (2) Java legacy applications that are hard to maintain. Here is a list of things I hate about these old webapps (let's call them app A and B):

1. App A depends on 80% web services. If one web service for a product or warehouse goes down, work flow is impeded while prod support team checks with the core services team for repair

2. App B is a maven project with multiple modules dependent on libraries that are dependent on company's internal libraries. So if we want to upgrade to OpenJdk 9 and up, the project will definitely produce a lot of errors due to deprecated/unsupported codes

3. App A is dependent on Tibco and I have no experience on that

4. App B's continuous integration build tool is Jenkins and the jobs that build it has a shell script that wasn't updated during the tech upgrade enhancement. The previous developer who did the knowledge transfer to me didn't tell me about this (it should be considered a defect on her part but she already resigned)

5. App A when loaded in eclipse IDE is a pain to work with since it is only allowed to build a war file using ant. I have to lookup in quick search instead of calling shortcuts (call hierarchy) because the project wasn't compiled via eclipse.

6. It's impossible to debug app A because of #5

7. Both applications have high priority and complex enhancements and I have no other teammates to help me

8. You never know what else can go wrong anytime

Me: API support team, 3% of our requests to your API during a load test are getting ECONNTIMEDOUT errors. Can you check why is that?

API supp: Please check connectivity to our API

....
I don't know how it makes me feel, but it is not a good feeling.

Making a ticket support system using wordpress for a uni group project. I go away for a week and team tells me they have done loads of work.

so I take a look at out github to find that they haven't used a single wordpress function and have just written there own php application with their own tables and db class, and now they don't know why things aren't working.

I'm going to need several litres of coffee to get through this

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

OpenSSH has announced plans to drop support for it's SHA-1 authentication method.

According to the report of ZDNet : The OpenSSH team currently considered SHA-1 hashing algorithm insecure (broken in real-world attack in February 2017 when Google cryptographers disclosed SHAttered attack which could make two different files appear as they had the same SHA-1 file signature). The OpenSSH project will be disabling the 'ssh-rsa' (which uses SHA-1) mode by default in a future release, they also plan to enable the 'UpdateHostKeys' feature by default which allow servers to automatically migrate from the old 'ssh-rsa' mode to better authentication algorithms.

Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.

Little backstory. Starts with a question.

What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?

Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.

Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.

Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.

I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.

Realized I could of prevented an entire day of our team dealing with a prod issue that could've been quickly resolved if I had noticed the Support guy actually restarted the wrong server...

Prod Issue + Friday == BAD... My brain has already logged off as of this morning...

attention to details == 0

Assuming someone else will fix it/do things correctly == 100

Product owner: when will you have that script written and submitted to DBAs?
Me: if nobody bugs me, hopefully COB today.
Product owner: great!
*user support*
*user support*
*user support*
*user support*
*user support*
Team lead: write this other script.
Me: I just finished user support, I have another script to write first. Does yours take priority?
Team lead: yes.
Me: ok....*sigh*
*writes 2nd script*
*submits 2nd script to DBAs*
Product Owner: you done?
Me: *face palm* ......NO!

We are currently refactoring our application in order to use multiple languages. The application startet 1997 and later it supported 2 fix languages. So it's one defined language or the other, this was used in uncountable places. Now a team of 6 developers has to refactor all the code of the last 20 years, where labels are used and an old translator was magically used out of nowhere..
Turns out it's a ton of work to get the software ready for really multiple language support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, where do I even fucking start.

Today, my account been hacked by some prick because i wouldn't send him fucking nudes. I quickly emailed discord and they keep sending me automated emails. I got so fucking pissed and then they emailed me "how did they get your info?" BITCH HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUCKING KNOW? THATS WHY ITS CALLED HACKING IDIOT!

I sent them 5 fucking emails, no response.

Discord Support- Actually, DISCORD IN GENERAL IS A FUCKING HORRIBLE APP!

Message from discord: I am isabe*******@Gmail.com. I'm fucking pissed how your damn support team won't fucking just give my goddamn Discord account back. KEEP IN MIND I HAD A YEAR OF NITRO, A YEAR AND DISCORD CLEARLY DON'T GIVE A SHIT! YOU GUYS ARE SO FUCKING UNFAIR! LITERALLY YOU GUYS DON'T SOLVE ANY DAMN SITUATIONS WITHOUT IT TAKING MONTHS, OR YOU JUST DONT FUCKING REPLY!

Our Support Team is currently processing your inquiry. We'll contact you within 1 business day.

23 hours later:
Is it still not working, or the problem was fixed by itself?

Note to self: Next time remember to clean build when CMake is throwing an error, before you start whining to the library support team.

How 2018 brings an aww bug.

At my company, we've a reporting application. Which kind of provides analysis of client's weekly business. When you open the application it shows their business trend starting from Sunday to day of week.

As usual their is an endpoint to get the data basis on start date. As soon as date changed to 1st Jan, it stopped showing data. Given that it was a long weekend, no one was available from the tech. Support team got tremendous amount of tickets for this. Later on Tuesday while debugging we got to know while forming the date in the application the logic was like this

- get current year
- get the date and month on start of week

Combine these 2 and request the data. All the time it was fetching data starting from 31 Dec 2018.

😒😒😒

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

How can you be expected to develop software and monitor it whilst providing customer support. How about recruit. (2 man team)

:/

I've been working for a contractor company for the last half year, when I first started I was on a development team, happy and making progress, since I'm still a student I get perfomance reviews each month and I aced them all during my time at the development team.

Last month I was transfer to a supposed development team which turned out to be a support team, I use to write more code in two days with the other team than in all my time here. On my last performance I got an awful grade and I feel like I'm stuck here.

Recently, our COO left the company and we got a new one. He is, for some reason, a freelancer which I find very odd as a C-level employee.

Anyway, fast forward 3 months and we the scrum master (or project manager), 60% of our dev team, one tech guy responsible for installations and our intern IT support department all got fired.

Now they gave me the decision for a raise, extra training (that they pay) but I have to find/figure out or an e-bike. Does anyone have some advice?

Not a true dev rant but still thought I'd share:
Systems team installed new software product I've been asked to setup and test. Within 15 minutes of getting into the software I've already had to open two support tickets with the vendor. Fast forward two hours and I'm putting in a third support ticket. SMH.

There are no meetings at the company I work for. GASP!!!
Well...we have one, now and again, but it is just an opportunity for the boss to update the support team with changes to the product and we (i.e. the software engineers) come for the free pizza. GASP!!! I would prefer that we have technical meetings, but it falls on deaf ears.

While addressing a Senior Dev's (SD) query from another team.

SD: why is this field mandatory? Can't it be just optional? Any other work around?
Me: Is your code changes already pushed in Devo? In that case, we provide a value which will work since you are not concerned about it.
SD: Yes. It's pushed till production. And, I want to test changes in Prod.
Me: (shared some codes) and explained that this feature for testing is only available in Devo.
SD: I know that. (Shared me a ticket) I want this field to be optional. That's it.
Me: (read the entire ticket. Didn't find anything related their) Told him, I will discuss with team. And meanwhile, for Devo, you can use this value.

Next morning, I accidentally came over some other ticket raised by him only which had the correct doubts regarding request to support this field in production
Now, I don't know why did he share a wrong ticket with me.
And, how will it even help him if that field was even optional.
THAT JUST WONT WORK IN PRODUCTION.

I will discuss with my team and see what can happen.

Researching a new communication platform (Twilio, Vonage, etc), I started with Plivo. Created an account, they offer from free credits to try out the platform, so I set up a phone number and attempt to use their API, didn't quite work. I contact their support through their online portal (being very detailed about what I'm trying to do and the issue I'm having)
A day later they reply asking "Could you tell us how you are using Plivo and the issue you are having?"
That would be OK, but my question from the online portal was in the body of the email message. My first reply started with "You not reading the <bleep>ing message is my issue right now.", but I copied and pasted the same message. I even included a screenshot of the API I was having a problem with (so they could see what I see).
Next day I'm trying out a different area of their API and there is a banner "Incoming and Outgoing phone calls are disabled on this account. Contact Support blah blah blah"
I thought, OK, its a trial account, they probably want some additional validation before allowing anyone to make phone calls. I jump thru the hoops, next day I receive an email "Thanks for sharing the details with us. I have reached out to the Product Team to assist us with this and I'll share more details with you as soon as they revert."
Revert what? The block? Waited until next day, banner still there, so I replied again. Not another reply until the next day.
"Our internal team analyzed the account details and unfortunately, we would not be able to remove the restrictions from your account."
WTF!? Plivo, we are going to give you *money* and you can't answer my question! I'm not asking for free stuff, not asking for help finding the 'any key', your API is supposed to support XYZ feature and it's not working...OK. We're done.
I try to close the account (has too much of my personal info I don't want these clowns to have) and I get an error 'Unable to close the account'. WTF!

I'm currently the only dev that works with a client's dev team. That's not really how we usually work, usually it's a whole team of ours.

Three aspects why this sucks:

1) the client's dev team is made up of juniors and junior to intermediate devs. All of them are new to scrum. I therefore have to constantly support (dev & agile workflow), check all the PRs and have to think of everything in Refinement meetings.

2) the client's based in another timezone and the PO is super busy because we're the only agile team in their company. Therefore this is going to be the third Friday in a row where I have meetings until 6pm.

3) I also have a specific time frame I have to start working for my company, so I constantly work extra hours due to the time difference.

I'm just tired.

A dedicated team has built an "infrastructure" for creating UI for c++ developers in the company. What looks like a poor attempt at recreating what Microsoft did with XAML at first glance, it actually is a horrible exercise in force feeding people the stinking pile of shit that their code is.
The idea is to make it easy to create UI for developers who aren't used to front end development. They should just need to declare the layout. Very noble.
But.
If you want to do anything more than show a checkbox or a radio button, if you dare to define relationships between the UI controls or worse, if you get ambitious with creating a simple UI that uses a lot of similar controls and similar relationships with dynamic content... be prepared to eat your own barf from eating too much of their shit.

Not only do you now need to write front end code (including JS among others), you need to do it with limited or poor support and you have to make sure that it sits well with the house of moist, crumbly cards the team proudly created. Or resort to some very stupid and performance costing "bypasses" that further cripple your application code. Usually you have to do both of these things.
To think that scores of other teams have welcomed this amazing enhancement with full support without any resistance. It's sickening.

I waste too much of energy (and good jokes!) with these people.

Development: we need Nginx installed on *insert server list*
Me: ok, let me get in tough with the platform team.
Platform team: This should be installed in the userspace, Unix teams don't support this.

And here I am, trying to get a reverse proxy running on servers on which I do not have sudo rights.
Since it doesn't work, it's my fault, both sides block the door.
I installed it locally on a virtual machine, but the compiled or installed code doesn't work once copied.
The joy of being an "application engineer". This job title means nothing!

Oh man, stands out first in my memory. Was going ok until my original boss got transferred in to another department... The first replacement was one of our HR managers 🤔

The person she then made as similar to a team lead had issues with me when I had just a bit of a different perspective about a problem to solve - I soon found myself in technical support. Go figure...

I'll never forget what one of the directors said to me a little while after they shifted me:

"Not everyone can do what they want to do if they are not good at it..." I look back on that heart breaking moment and say with pride: FUCK, YOU.

Customer: The quality of the software you’re delivering is going down
Me: That’s because we’re developers, support, and spend all day on meetings without mentioning that deadlines are defined by you, not the technical team
Project Manager: I have added more members to the team so you can deliver faster
Me: That’s just slowing us down because this inherited code is shit, there’s no documentation and we’re always in a rush, without time for a proper ramp up
Customer: *throws money to our faces* I’ll remove two weeks to this delivery so we can test it better
Me: …

I work on an webapp that should manage a huge ton of data, and some page needs to display a big part of them.

On this page, we had some checkboxes lists to display, so even more data. One of them wasn't behaving correctly tho, so we ask the support was could be the problem.

Answer : It might have too much data to display.

No shit Sherlock.

Answer : Please provide us a lighter version of it.

Ok, I'm gonna do a lighter version with a very few data so you can test a situation we will never encounter. Thanks !

Spends 9 months on the side developing a library for analysis of a specific programming language. No help, entirely my own work. There's various tools built upon this library. Incorporates project management, an effective build system capable of parallel and distributed builds, a packaging system...

Beta release the library. Wait four months. Ask the community for who's been using it so I can get feedback and other comments. Majority of the comments follow a specific pattern.

"You don't support X, how dare you!?"

One, this is free software, pay me if you want specific things.
Two, I'm the only developer of a project usually undertaken by a small team.
Three, yes it does you fucking invalid... Every fucking time someone claims it doesn't support some feature, it's something I've already written and validated. I swear to fucking God users can't find something themselves and instead of checking the Wiki or asking for help, they blindly assume they can't make mistakes and it must be my defect.

DB team: We will have someone reach out to you and set up a call for your database support request.

Me: *this will suck...some dude with a super strong accent, audio that sounds like crap on a 56k modem, and horns beeping in the background*

DB team: The support engineer is actually from your same area.

Me: Nice! *maybe an American*

DB engineer: "uh yes ello dish is ramajadeshava and I will be supporting each and every request"

Me: *fuck...but at least there's no horns in the background*

Definitely landing the first real gig.

I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.

About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.

On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.

Infrastructure took away our read access in S3 to data that we own and our ability to manually delete/upload to S3 in that prefix (which we own). Without waiting for us to confirm that we have alternative means to read and change what is in there. And I had no warning about this, so here I am doing a midnight mod on an existing solution of mine in hopes that I can finish it before tomorrow morning for some legal reporting deadline.

Things would be so much easier if the infrastructure team let the emergency support role have those permissions for emergencies like this, but they didn't. I guess "least privilege" means "most time spent trying to accomplish the most trivial of things, like changing a file".

*Email chain forwarded by support team to our dev team*
Hi,
Please assist our customer. He is unable to reset his password!

*Went through the emails turned out that customer is asking for password reset request for legacy website for which we don't work at all*

Scrum master sending another reply to look into the matter on High priority.

We again double checked for the customer but he is not registered on the new website.

Apparently, both scrum master and support team and entire company is aware that our team is not working for legacy website.
But No one reads the email properly and keep forwarding to dev team disturbing the entire team.

Some times things like this are done by product manager and her associate, but they keep replying to each other on unnecessary things till they come to conclusion and scrum master try hard to keep up with them with his own agile disciplines.

I was adding a new API integration into the product today, half of the API Documentation is written like shit, and has mistakes in them.

Okay, I kind of solved what ever errors there were in the documentation and got the API to give a response.
Tried to simulate an error response and all I get is 'Internal Server Error'.

What fucking pieces of shit wrote an API, which doesn't provide a correct error response.
I had to write to the support team in order to get everything clarified.
The elements that were indicated as optional should be there in the request it seems, if you don't want to enter any data for that, pass an empty string to it.
Atleast they could've given a proper error response / their documentation could've been better!

Well started on a support job about 1,5 years ago. Two days ago I had an interview about a new position in the same company, as a c# programmer. :)

I really hope I get it and I think I will. On Monday they will ask the rest of the crew what they think on the scrum meeting.

I'm just self taught on php so this will be fun. I hoped for this when a took the job, but I didn't think it would happen.

I have worked a lot with the development team the last year, with tests and I have also done some TSQL work so they all know some of my knowledge. But still I'm a little nervous.

We have a lot of small projects with different domains that we maintain and develop. Most go into maintainence mode now and get no new features. Now our new department lead declared us the SWAT team bc there are no new good projects. This baiscally means we get pushed to other team's projects that have issues with deadlines and support there. So basically we get to projects with fire on the roof and as reward for extinguishing, we get another burning project.

Either that or in the first department meeting where our new boss introduced himself and managed to say in the same paragraph that due to corona we "shouldn't expect any salary increases bc these are hard times" and "his department has so much money and doesn't know where to spend it"

So yesterday at a client location, our support guy called me and said this thing is trimming the characters whenever I save it. It was a ckeditor in our application, so basic troubleshooting was to check the system configuration for that page and the ckeditor configuration.
Checked the system configuration, ckeditor configuration, found nothing.
Out of curiosity, checked the schema for the table in which the data is stored, so one of the idiots took the backup of original table and appended it with the date time on which it was backed up. And created a new table with field data type of varchar with a 255 limit.
This was in UAT server as well as Production server. Changed the field type to text again in UAT. Asked to team to get the same thing done on Production server as well.

So Thursday our first beta client is supposed to go live. Tomorrow there is a team meeting to discuss the status. Team lead wasn't in at work last Thursday and Friday and gave me his work to finish, which I need to proceed with mine. I hardly made progress on it. So now I have to tell him about that tomorrow. And I'm dreading it so hard. More so because for some reason HR/support sits in on our meetings and will be on my ass again I'm not meeting deadlines. I did say last week it looked like it wouldn't be done in time but I was told it just needs to happen because the release date was already announced. So yeah the coming week is going to suck. And I'm on leave myself this coming Friday so I expect people to explode. I know I should just stop caring and get on with job searching but the whole injustice of being set up for failure by others and then being blamed really makes me mad.

- Am a junior dev in an awesome team & exciting project after my apprenticeship and while having just started my part time studies
- Have restructure in company so I land in an other value stream
- Get laid off by new value stream 6 months later (now) because they have a serious budget cut
- Take time to come to terms with situation. I could finally work more on my side projects or focus a bit more on my studies. Hey actually I will have 5 months time to look for something while being paid by the company and they help me brush up my CV. Pretty neat!
- Now my former boss wants me back because of my experience in the project, but only as a production support and not as dev (because budget and they're bleeding with tickets)

Not sure if I should take the offer as it feels safe to have an income and the team is cool. However, it feels a bit like a degradation as prod support sucks in that project and I'd like to code (which wouldn't be possible then).
And as this is still my first company I'm working in, it would make sense to look for something else...

Grrr need to sleep about it... Decision-making isn't exactly my strength.

Fuck you, you fucking fucks!

Brilliant idea #23 to deliver more features than can happen without a time machine.

Let's take the team, assume minimal support is required for the brand new thing you just built, split it into four teams with two of them run by Sr Devs who've never seen your app and work on four things in silos. That way, you'll deliver faster!

How did you even get you job?! You want to fucking wreck the team we worked so hard to build, convince the hot shots to leave, AND destroy the app the company is counting on because you're an incompetent fuck-tard!

Hey, fine! But you'll do it without me and I'll work daily to advertise what you did to the people above you that actually CARE about the fate of our company!

So 90% of the Tech Support team is off today. So I decided to jump in to help the guys out:

Me: *solves issue
(one less ticket to solve)
Reporter: "thank you for your help!"
(re-opens the ticket)
Me: *recloses the ticket
Reporter: "thanks again"
(Reopens ticket)
Me: smashes head into desk

How am I supposed to get tickets solved when most of the open tickets are "thank you's"!

Yesterday I was invited to rackspace's offices in San Antonio.

Their people are so nice and they're full of great culture. That's truely a fanatical support those guys offer, also their IT security team is so reliable, they take their work really serious and I mean REALLY serious, I'd love to work at rackspace some day.

Best place ever.

If I weren't a dev I'd be doing IT support.

Back in 2018 when I was doing level 1 support as part of an internal IT call center, I applied for two jobs elsewhere in the same company, one doing level 2 support and the other in a different department doing cloud infrastructure engineering or whatever they're calling it now. I almost took the support job because the cloud job was really dragging their feet with my final interview with my boss-to-be.

I probably should have taken that as a sign of things to come, since it ended up being such a pain to work for him until our team got moved under a new manager.

The support team starts pressuring me for an answer and I eventually fire off an email to the cloud guys saying, "I already have a job offer and I can't delay any longer. If I can't be interviewed soon then I will have to withdraw my application."

Got my interview the next day, and he made the offer the same day. Turned out to be a very good choice in the long run, but man were the first couple years full of massive frustrations.

One of my seniors is leaving the team. Honestly, I did not talk about personal stuff with him but during this lockdown, he was the only one whom I talked to this much. My most projects are with him, so in the team I kind of only know him. And now he is leaving, I feel so heavy.

I was anyway feeling no interest in my work, and now this, I really don't want to work at all. I don't want to be in this team, really without his guidance I can't do good. And this reminds me now I don't have anyone in the team to guide me. It's the same feeling as you get old and now no one to support you and you need to support yourself and slowly others. It's frightening.

On a good note, I hope things will turn out to be good for him, he's a nice person after all :) Everyone respected him, and he was trusted so much.

FUCK YOU MyThemeShop FUCK YOU with your shitty licensing solution. I'm just trying to develop a fucking wordpress site on my own fucking local computer. Why TF will you not allow me to fucking sign into my own account. all it fucking does is infinitely load and it does not do fucking anything. you advertise 24/7 support but it takes your fucking bitch ass support team over 10 hours to reply to my dead fucking simple email. ALSO why the fuck can I not change what domain my theme goes to from the online panel. I'm trying to fucking use ngrok and now i cant because it is by domain and not by site. FUCK YOU AND YOUR LAME ASS FUCKING COMPANY GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY BACK RIGHT NOW YOU FUCKING BITCH.

I really hate all kinds of tattle that sweeps the hallways of corporations, the gossip behind one's back, BUT this colleague of mine starts pissing me off. Recently joined that team where he should support us getting the Agile thing going. And he can go on for hours of how it should go and how flawlessly it worked in his previous company - all that needless meta talk - so much that a team member jokingly even said: yeah, shut up asshole. But he is all talk. When the name of a library was dropped his experience in using it went to upstream patches. His Linux experience lets us speechless. He is so convincing, I'm even doubting my accusations. Yet his only contribution in code wouldn't show and other team member wasted hours upon hours to recompile plugins to show that shit. Man, just leave us alone watching your youtube live-streams so we can get the shit done.

Hi Team,

Can't we avoid 24/7 shift and on-call support while working as a system administrator???

I need peace of mind and my health goes for toss

!rant I'm lucky to work with 2 of the best back-enders in my career. We were royally pushed/screwed over today due to PM's last minute demands for a phone app that they were demoing to 1000's at a conference. Guess what, certain elements broke. But the guys jumped in to get the API fixed. It's a bit much being the only phone dev on the team but with such strong backend support, it makes it a pleasure to come into work. You know who you guys are. Thank you. Remember a little support makes all the difference in the workplace.

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

So some big customers are getting problems for a given software project. The relevant dev team, customer support and I, part of another division of QA, need support from a specific QA team. We work for a multinational company employing above a thousand of people around the world.

None of the members are giving signs of life. Nobody from any QA team answers my emails, slack messages or anything. Management does not seem to care either. Did they suddenly die without my knowledge? I am just trying to do my job and find solutions to problems.

I am an inch close to giving no fucks and start playing video games. lol

When the business team promotes the robot: “programmed in Arm Assembly with support for all UTF-8 Character Sets”
(Seen in the info of my high school’s robotics team)

Finally after almost two years they changed me to another team. Now they have me solving customer support issues 🥲

So the people in charge of staff allocation came into our room the other day and straight up stole most of the front line support team for iOS. The team now has one member, and the manager of the team found out about it 15 minutes before it happened. This was done to fill requirements on other projects that they are struggling to get staff for.
Meanwhile I've been sitting here for months wanting to get out of this project and they cant find anything else for me. All because I wont travel 4 days a week...

Fuckin damn it Google! I setup a transparent proxy and for some fucking reason Google home doesn't like that at all. I think I have a fix but it's a real fucking pain in the ass. I call your support people who I specifically tell that I'm running a fucking proxy and they tell me that I need to talk to their Google WiFi team. It has nothing Todo with my fucking wifi bitch. Its your price of shit price of crap hardware that doesn't like fucking proxies.

I'll update everyone what the fix is when I find it.

Btw, this is a HTTPS transparent proxy and HTTP transparent proxy running on my pFSense firewall box.

Just spent two hours pulling my hair trying to get a PHP library made by another team to work. Turns out they dropped support for PHP < 7.0 WITHOUT updating the docs! The commit messages weren't any help either.

while(true) {
$us->me();
}

Damn it. I'm stuck on an infinite loop and can't get out. I'm starting to feel unmotivated on our first project as a team. No financial support from client. Disastrous planning phase. I really do want to drop this project. But I won't because of my dev friends, we started this together. Another thing that frustrates me, they don't know how to use Git. If there are changes on the system, we have to transfer it through flash drive. [ill teach them]. I don't wanna go to the point that this project becomes toxic. So frustrating. This too shall pass.

Does every start have to be this hard and frustrating?

Quietish team member sits quietly and creates the mother of all APIs, doesn't say much about it, doesn't document what he's done, falls out with the boss, leaves with 2 weeks to go before a beta release.

Already overworked dev/backend support team are plunged into manic bug fixing/business rule implementing/call standardising/chaos.

This is not how one devs.

Not one bit.

the previous team didnt bother to document, upgrade, improve or anything to at least ease out the support and development process.

i guess i cant blame them, the bureaucracy here is ridiculous. a simple and tiny out of the box stuff is questioned not entertained.

wtf.

If you are a graduate/junior developer be very careful about joining a small Ltd company.

You would get better support in a bigger team and have better insight of the industry in a bigger organisation.

Question for leads...
Have you found that it's possible to have a balanced leadership style instead of ruling with an iron fist?

Let me explain what I mean.

There's always going to be room for improvement, there's going to be at least the occasional issue that happens, etc.
As a lead, your job is to not have issues happen and to have the team work effectively.

Now, for me, my goal was to have a balanced style in the sense that if there's a small issue or small room for improvement, but the team is already stressed, I take the heat for it if necessary and let them relax so they're not stressed and they can focus on the bigger things.
For medium improvements, I essentially put it to the vote so the team can have their say in whether they agree with the proposal on improvement.
And so on, idea being to have a balance between "Do what I tell you" and "do whatever you want".

However, I have found that doing so does essentially nothing to improve team morale and team cohesion. Any thing that needs doing and I force them into it, any thing I don't protect them from, any thing they don't agree with will still manifest as problems in the team, a single "you have to do this" will make them complain about the leadership style being "force to implement".

Being completely hands off and essentially not a lead, just basically a support dev more or less, is not what I'm really looking for, but also isn't good for a team that does genuinely have things that need to improve (stupid errors not being caught in dev OR review, system not being fully testable because of external dependencies that are not really necessary for tests, etc).

So the only option I see there is simply ruling with an iron fist and leaning into being that hated lead that just forcea you to do things and "doesn't care about you".
I've already stepped down from this lead position because I don't want to be that guy, but if I'm looking for another position I'm curious if this is just universal or hae you guys found that it IS possible to have a "good team" where you can be adults and discuss things as a team and improve as a team?

"Hi, I was wondering if we have a way to <do a standard thing that we have support for, and has already been done in their project>"

Also, of course, let's CC every team lead and manager we can find so they all think it's something dire and we can end up in tons of meetings about it. Great.

Part of one of the workarounds for Dirty COW is to disable ptrace.

ptrace is generally needed by debuggers.

I am team lead for L2 support at a company which makes a debugger.

RedHat are now shipping this workaround.

*ducks for cover*

*last week, sprint retrospect meeting*
TL : "So next is dotenv . Hey dotenv, tell us what went well in the sprint, what went wrong and what could be improved"

le dotenv: "so all went good for me. i had just 5 tickets and i was able to complete them on time. i am grateful for team to provide support when needed in those tasks. no areas for improvement or wrong from my side"

*next sprint*
TL : "So dotenv, you have these 7 tickets with 3 being p0 priority. you also have 2 releases in addition to these tickets. also, since your senior is going to Malaysia for a nice fucking week, here is his additional 5 tickets with 3 p0 priority and 2 releases :)"

me : 🥲
----
I really need to push up my blame game :/

Code is poetry. Customer support is rap battle

You caps locking, hell knows what trying to compensate, little arrogant person who volunteers in Wordpress plugin review team, - learn some manners how to communicate with fellow human beings.

If you don't have patience for help - quit what you are doing and spend the rest of your life not dealing with people.

At least be professional enough to have email signature, and not look like some teenager wrote us back in a bus stop.

I hope your emails gave you confidence to keep such manners in real life and someone punches you in the face this Friday.

The first company I worked for had a policy to not ship any release, service pack or hot fix as long as there were still open bugs with the severity "critical" or "blocker". They wanted to ship a service pack nonetheless, but without violating the rule and thus keeping their KPI unharmed. So the support guys got in touch with developers and asked them to lower the severity of certain "critical" bugs. They said we by all means need to write into the comments that the severity of those bugs has to be reset after the service pack was shipped, so that those important bugs would not be left behind.

- Support team violates the rules set up by themselves.
- Developers had the actual work of doing so (and the blame to catch).
- The Support team's KPI just remained unharmed.

When you end up running support queries and QA as a developer because the client's on site support team blame the provider instead of their half-assed user configuration job. #IHopeYouGetFiredAssholes

My manager, while apparently trying to blast us over taking too much time to understand a product (that no one in the team knows about completely):

I don't understand why you guys don't understand the severity of it. How will you support the product if you don't even know it? There's no comments or anything also, just code! You guys should be able to grasp it!

I'm sorry, what now?

(The part about no comments is true, by the way)

Thought about startup.. Strange but literally saying no single coin had in my pocket.. Still have love for startup.. But u know what no project no idea no team.. Still struggling for startup.. Fortunately few days back got proposal of govt project.. One min game literally coin replaced his face.. But after some days grant procedure issue pending sucks.. Still have love for startup.. Suddenly got a thought can I do it after grant but I know I have devRant support.. So still continue to love for startup ;-)
Just few days are remaining and waiting for it..

A peer told me today that if I wanted to get better at my job as architect, I needed to focus on building things so they could be handed off to another team when they got too big for my team to support.

He seemed to take exception to my assertion that we DESIGN things on PURPOSE to not need to do that.

I guess I need more training.

Monday...Wasted...VDI not working and IT team still have no clue what the hell is going on..

What a sucking support system.

IT team

I really wanted my team to know how I felt about my role in support.

Every dev team has this chatterbox guy, who works as a support, does sometimes whole work in a hour, watches anime for following 7 hours and wants to fix the whole world with JQuery. Still can't imagine working and hanging out without him.

Finally dropped our old useless in-house legacy content editor (built by another team) today. Going through the database and ripping out all the shit that we had to keep for legacy support is the most liberating feeling I've had in weeks!

Why do they keep sending me support related email when I clearly advised them to contact helpdesk support team directly.