We need more JS devs for our frontend.
After half a year of PM complaining that he doesn’t find devs, he finally came back to us:
„Sorry guys, I found two devs, but they are not Java developers, they only do JavaScript“
Me:
Team:
*both speechless*
TeamLead: „... wait, you searched for Java devs half a year?“

Production is down

Me to Customer :What did you do?
Customer: Nothing
Me blurt out: The fuck you didn't!
Customer: ...
Me: ...(fuckfuckfuck)
Customer:... Well, I did run these scripts..
Me: (oh thank Christ)
Me: ok, I'll get right on it (Click)
Me to TeamLead: client called. Their prod is down!
TeamMate: did he say he didn't do anything?
Me:Yes
TeamMate: ..... Every fucking time...

And then there was this big review...

DEVs:" this bug is hazardous and needs to be fixed quickly! It could crash a productive system completely!"
CTO and DEV teamlead:" shut up! This big exists more than two years! No customer will ever klick this button!"

--exactly twelve hours later--
Customer:"so we clicked on this button and our system crashed! Can you help us quickly? We are losing money!!!"
CTO in the meeting:"who programmed this shit? Are you insane?"
Teamlead:"you are useless !!"

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Client : We need this feature

Team lead : Sure, we will deliver this to you in 3 days.

Meanwhile Teamlead forgets to work on it or assign it to anyone in the team while he was surrounded by many other tasks.

Client on 2nd day morning : What's the progress on that feature?

Teamlead to Client: It's going fine, we will deliver it to you on time.

Meanwhile, Teamlead to a junior developer in the team (on 2nd day afternoon): We have this priority feature where we need to finish it in one day and deliver it tomorrow!

Junior Dev to Teamlead : This is too much of work to complete it in 1 day, it atleast needs 3 days!

Teamlead to Junior dev : I don't care, can't talk, busy, just complete the work and deal with the client, bye.

And the Junior dev continues to struggle where he is unknown of the fact that the task actually was of 3 days but just because the Teamlead forgot to do the task and also to assign the task early, he is in trouble!

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

:Junior> man, i saw a little bug here. lemme fix it.
:Teamlead> (*hmm, nothing wrong should happen*) well, k, try not to mess everything up
:Junior> yeah, yeah, i know

*1.5h later*

:Teamlead> *opened github* ...?

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.

Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).

I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.

I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?

Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.

So I take leave for a day right.

I come back to the office and my teamlead asks me to start running tests and in the same breath he adds, "so I added SOME code so that it would cater for the annoying popup".
I said cool and made nothing of it.

A few minuts later he stands behind me asking me why its so slow and my reply was.....

"Well I wasn't in yesterday and you added code and it wasn't this slo... "

Words arnt even out of my mouth and he starts shouting at me

"DON'T SHIFT BLAME!!! Don't Shift Blame."

Well okay then sorry...... I guess.

So in my 6 ppl dev team management had to do cuts and pulled a jira report of story points sum of the past 10 months, it went like this:

1. 307
2. 307
3. 283
4. 274
5. 257
6. 220

The 6. Guy is a teamlead so he was safe. 4 and 5 guys were fired with zero notice and 1 weeks severance pay (we are contractors).

Best part is that remaining 2. And 3. devs produce very low quality code. But hey, they have enough story points. Managament didnt even bother to discuss with teamlead about who to keep. Workload is the same, we were told to "level up".

You can't make this shit up. US based startups man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am really tired of broke startups and their bullshittery.

hmm I just slip into a depressive phase because of my workplace 😐 I can't handle the pressure somehow.. I think I am a bad teamlead, I am not made for this

Joined this new team which said to have a rockstar teamlead with his right hand rockstar drummer senior dev. Turns out its just 2 socially awkward dudes who come into office once a week and all they care about is doing their own tasks and calling it a day.

The rockstar senior teamlead actually turns out to be an ex QA guy whos doing development only for the past 2 years and is unable yo explain what his code is doing and just starts rambling. I didnt expected spoon-feeding type of mentoring but man calling them and trying to get some advices makes me wanna die everytime. Fuck. My. Life.

I took matters into my own hands, Im doing pretty well actually and already am delivering, but man, if they dont give me a raise after probation ends then fuck this Im outta here. This is not what I signed up for.

These fuckers are pretentious egomaniacs who look good in their linkedin page but in reality are selfish narcissists.

Not All... But Many 😏

Like someone else already mentioned here, remember that interview goes both ways: youre there to gauge wether workplace suits you or no. Always ask to meet teamleads/project leads or potential colleagues before accepting the job and try talking with them.

I applied to 3 jobs and in all of them managers did put a brave face and told me lots of bs just to get me accept the job. Managers live in their own world, sometimes they dont even know what you will be working on.

Once I accepted a job and got stuck with a perfectionist teamlead for 8 months which could have been avoided given I had the chance to catch the bad vibes during the interview.

Another time I accepted a job and had to work with a backend guy for one year and his accent was so thick+stuttering that I had trouble in understanding anything he says. Every conversation felt like trivia contest. I wish I had knew that stuff before accepting the job

When I was in school, I could walk as long as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't walk as long as I want anymore – my legs hurt and just stops moving. The spasm won't go away easily and I have to wait for it to stop.

When I was in school, I could learn as much as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't learn as much as I want anymore – my brain just stops absorbing information. I can see letters but I can't read words.

My body slowly decay. By the age of 21, I have two abdominal surgeries, joint and bone issues, clinically diagnosed depression, the food I eat won't digest without pills and much more to handle. If the pain is what stops me now I could only imagine the next step when I don't even care about pain just like I don't care now about my unwillingness.

On the other hand the realization of my own mortality was extremely liberating. Yes, my body slowly decomposes and needs to be fixed here and there but at least I know that my personality heavily depends on some fluids inside my body. I know that I have limited amount of fucks to be given.

I slowly lose my health over time but I gain something more and I gain faster than I lose. I don't care about things like indents or JS trailing semicolons anymore – I just build and ship viable products over weekends. I almost never argue and enforce my vision inside the team I manage as a teamlead.

Yes, I'm depressed and not productive but depression would go away and my confidence is here to stay. I'm here to earn just enough money to buy a house and launch my own small projects that wouldn't require that much time to provide me with basic needs.

Everyone I see is fighting a hard battle. I'm here to end mine.

First rant from my new job.
I got a position as backend-dev in a startup and for now i'm learning angular. Yes, you read that correctly, because the frontend-team is short-staffed i decided to switch teams. We are 3 people and neither one has sufficient angular-experience (the framework was a management decision).
First of all i got confused because we use slack and trello but the frontend-lead decided to do some stuff via google-spreadsheet too. Then we didn't have any code in our repository until yesterday. I tried to check out the repository after that, did an npm-install but when running ng serve i got an error "css-file not found". It turns out you had to download some files from the official website and put them in the unversioned node_modules directory. It was the teamlead's decision to do so and me and my coworker got really annoyed when we tried to set up everything on our end. But that's not all, yesterday the other dev's merged their first versions of the project. But not via git, that is way to mainstream. The coworker had to upload his code into the cloud and the teamlead copied the files into the project folder.
Aside from that the code already isn't the best, some things should be done differently imo and we have credentials in the code (not in some separate files, but in an if-else-clause that checks node.env.production).

We'll have a discussion about this tomorrow, let's hope things can be straightened out.

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1:

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

Day 2:

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

Day 3:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

Ok so we have 2 useless remote contractors in our team who got hired as seniors but actually are juniors. They take weeks to deliver most basic things and never ask for help or offer help for others. They take days to fix most basic comments after review.

Today our teamlead in a call said that it's a cultural difference, these guys dont ask for help because they are very independent.

MOTHERFUCKER, I WOULD BET MY SALARY THAT THESE IDIOTS DONT WORK EVEN 10 HOURS A WEEK.

I was doing more than them when I was a mere junior.

Today I was told by my team leader that I hadn't given them proper access to our website and they can't edit it. The repo is hosted on github and is opensource. Also the link can be found on the site....

Finished all my tasks for senior promotion ... Teamlead was like ... What promotion? I thought you wanted to stay medior? RLLY????

While he kissed asses for his senior promotion, not even having a skillset for teamlead nor senior...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Im not involved in any projects at all anymore. My direct collegae is planned fully for the coming months. It’s clear everyone just wants to get rid of me.
If i ask the teamlead for feedback i dont get any.
If i ask the manager for feedback i get to hear he talked to the lead but he has no time to talk with me.

Giving me a compliment hurted his guts. Ive spend weeks just documenting bullshit.

All im allowed is to help out with tiny annoying tasks and i need to do them 10000% perfect. I’m a human, i’m not perfect. I accept the fact i’m not and so should they.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

I was having some trouble accelerating the delivery of a new feature and so my team leader joined me for some pair programming (awesome!). Five minutes later I was selecting some, text while explaining some problems, and he stops me.

Team leader: you know, you can select all that text by double clicking it;
Me: ok (continuing to explain)
Team leader: you have to be faster with that;
Me: That's not the point right now;

Why do people focus so much on these little things?! I really like pair programming, or just pairing to think about a problem, but this kind of things really get under my skin...

(Silver lining: Cool team leader that didn't snap after I told him to focus 😅)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's task: create a wireframe for the website.
Teamlead doesn't give a fucc about me, k I'm chilling then. I looked at their work and I saw a picture where a stickman types the domain in the browser and then the site appears (as a printscreen of the existing site I've done so far)

As a dev, how can you work with a teamlead that second, third and 4th guesses your decisions?

Simple example: fixed a bug, but temlead was shitting bricks about some error. Did a thorough research and told him that that error message was already in codebase for years and can be safely ignored because there is no workaround. Main thing is that our solution is working and I followed the latest standards. Basically I had to advocate for myself. Fine. Shit happens I get it. But it seems that this is becoming a pattern.

Then I had to do another issue: fix some bugs. While testing I was not able to reproduce any bugs. Filmed a video of app, attached all proofs to the jira issue and informed the teamlead. He couldnt believe his eyes! One month ago he saw the bug and now its gone! I had to retest 3-4 times everything and he still doesnt take my word for it.

I cant continue working like this. I have few years of experience under my belt, never had to deal with such insecure teamlead. How can I work if he second guesses everything what I do? Jesus.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

CollegueRant

Colleague from other departement told me, his teamlead tacitly removed all comments from the source. They have no official style guide about comments or discussed it on the team, teamlead just thinks the source should be readable enough, so that there are no comments needed.

That would make me think about quitting really fast.

Teamlead: Can you integrate feature X to project Y? The dev maintaining that project has lots of work and does not know how to do it, and we need to deliver it next week.
Me: Sure, I know that feature should not take long.

BIG MISTAKE!

For 2 hours now I'm trying to get that fucking project to run... errors, faulty configuration, tons of missing stuff in the project environment.
The list of errors grows with every step I get further. And I have not even started with the feature I should work on.

So good luck next week, my dear colleague, I'm not the one finishing your tasks from the past few months, I'm just fixing the stuff I actually need to finish my task.

So this month I had to do two major features which required unexpected refactors and I had to handle unexpected edge cases all over the place. Since I work in another timezone and time was of essence, I was kinda working around the clock to complete refactors as fast as possible because it was "important and critical". I have 7 other devs in my team but only half of the team are actually competent and even less are motivated to push through. Most of the team prefer to sit on low hanging fruit tasks and cant even get that fucking right.

So that resulted in me doing at least 100 hours of overtime this month. Best part all I got for pulling it off was a thank you slack message from teamlead and got assigned even more work: to lead a new initiative which seems to be even bigger clusterfuck...

So today I had a sitdown with my manager and I asked for 3 paid days off and told him that I did 50-60 hours of overtime. He okayed it as long as my teamlead was happy.

So I created a chat, adder manager and teamlead to it and explained my situation. That Im feeling burned out, I need 3 days off and combined with the weekend that should allow me to finally relax.

My fucking teamlead told me that these days are mine and he cant take them away from me. But then he started guilt tripping me that no one else will be working on the new initiative these days so we will have a very tight timeframe to deliver this (only until August).

Instead of having at least a drop of empathy that fucker tried to guilt trip me for taking days off for fucking unpaid overtime. What a motherfucker. Best part is Ive talked with manager and we actually have until end of August to deliver the new initiative, so fucker teamlead is gashlighting me with false sense of urgency.

I guess a hard lesson learnt here. Waiting for my fucking raise to be approved for the past 6 weeks (asked for a 43% bump which is on the way since I got very strong positive feedback).

So Im done. I proved myself, will get the salary of which I only dreamed about few months ago. Not putting any overtime anymore. If something is very urgent, borrow fucking decent devs from another team. Or replace half of our useless team with just one new decent dev. I bet our producticity would increase at least by 50%.

Its not my fuckint fault that 2-3 people are pulling the weight of 8 people team. Its not my responsibility to mentor retards while crunching under immense pressure just because current processes are dysfunctional. Fuck it. Hard lesson learned. If you want overtime, compensate with extra days off or pay. Putting my 7-8 hours in daily and Im not responding to your bullshit slack messages or emails after work. I dont give a fuck that you work in another timezone and my late responses might result in stuff getting done postponed by a few days or a week. Figure it out.

Question about scrum in terms of developer/QA workflow. We have a problem in our team: basically when a dev submits an MR it needs to get 2 approvals from devs and then task is marked ready for qa. Now problem here is that qa takes 2-3 weeks to get to the task and when they do usually MR has merge conflicts and since QA are quite new-ish they have to wait for dev for conflicts to be resolved, ergo rendering the MR unable to be tested until dev resolves the conflicts.

Our teamlead proposes to solve this by forcing devs to rebase everyday (even if QA will get to working on the task 3-4 weeks later). Problem with that approach is that each conflict resolve removes approvals. So I had a situation where in 3 weeks I rebased like 15 times and 5 times I had resolve coflicts and because approvals were lost I had to annoy all devs and ask for reapprovals. And this is only with 1 MR. Now imagine all devs doing rebasing daily and spamming each other for reapprovals. Its not efficient.

Anyone could advice how to solve this issue?

Dear teammates!
I'm so proud I have you. You're the incredible professionals. Your efforts and your desire keep us on the track even at the toughest moments.
It's a honor to be this team's leader.
I bagging you. Do not ever fucking think you are able to make design decisions on your own!
I'm tired to toes of that shit you submit for code review every fucking day!!!

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.

So we are 8 devs in our scrum team but 2 major refactors felll on my shoulders (initially they were supposed to be fairly simple tasks, but like that malcolm in the middle video 2 tasks became 10 tasks in the past month) and I have been working from 11 am till 4 am for the past 1 or 2 weeks. Just yesterday I worked until 7am. Slept only 4 hours... Trying to play it cool, since I asked for a raise 5 weeks ago and still waiting for answer.

I havent told anyone because partially its my own stubborness of wanting to learn things and not wanting to bother others with questions, but Im starting to loose it.

And all because my pushed initial features resulted in unexpected blockers so scrum team leaders had an all hands meeting and my newly appointed teamlead started shitting bricks.

Meanwhile all other devs pick a low hanging fruit tasks and sit around for 2-3 weeks while I have to do heavy lifting alone with some guidance from other devs.

We dont even have QA resources. We have 2 new hires who will be useful maybe after 3-4 months and we have 1 QA guy who judging by his output is working part time. Also same guy managed to take 2 weeks of vacation in the past 4 weeks.

So due to lack of QA and due to code reviews taking long time it takes over a week for code to be reviewed and tested and each time if a blocker happens I have like 2 or 3 days to rush until end of the sprint in order to fix the feature for upcoming release or I have to move tasks to another sprint and feel bad about spillover.

Imagine implementing something in 2 weeks, just to wait for another 1-2 weeks for changes to be reviewed/tested and now having to fix blockers. And then teamlead comes up to you with being surprises how come shipping of this is taking longer than 4-5 weeks? Dude, I did my fucking part in 1-2 weeks, its not my fault that other devs perform code reviews late and they dont even launch the app to test. Its not my fault that we have very limited QA resources and our only QA guy is not even testing out everything properly.

Seriously Im starting to fucking loose it. We are basically 8 devs in a team where 2 people are doing all the heavylifting.

The time when you are totally stuck but showing you teamlead that you are into it :D

Learning that not everyone gets a say in the direction of the app. Only the team lead.....