Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Not really a rant, but here goes...
I want to personally thank each and every member of devRant! Here’s why. (First, a little boring backstory): I’m visually impaired, and stuck in quarantine like the rest of us. (Not totally blind, but y’all definitely DO NOT want me out on the roads driving,) I also work a Tech Support job which largely deals with macOS. Due to this eye condition, there simply isn’t a lot of shit to do while stuck in the house other than work and learn node.js. So my pastime has largely been to sit and read Facebook while not on the clock. One day, while working from home, I was so bored and pissed off, I googled “macOS fucking sucks” for fun, and found devRant! Your stories, jokes and rants have turned my life around! I’m no longer on Facebook. (I know, I know, but what’s a half-blind guy to do except read about COVID-19 and get more pissed off at the state of the world?) and you guys have inspired me to start learning new things and delve deeper into node, which I had put down for awhile (I’m at a kindergarten level anyway, brand new). Anyway, thanks again! I’ll refrain from asking stupid questions, I promise. But I need a TechSupportRant now...

I've already read two stories of software engineers working on the field to end up becoming farmers years later. Almost as if there's a connection of disconnecting from the tech world after getting close to it.

The Return of Mr. Gitmaster:
So there is this colleague I already ranted about several times. After my previous team lead had confronted him about not doing much work, there was some irritation because he showed not up at work, but it turned out the external training he did was just a week earlier. Then he was ill a week, another week vacation so we didn't see him much. Not that his pre- or absence makes much difference to our repo: When his and my team lead looked at his commits of the past three months they found like the one copy-pasted HTML-form that wouldn't even show.
Fast forward to now, where we have a new team lead and we were going to lunch with Mr. gitmaster. So we got some more hero stories from the great work he was doing in the previous company. How he was graphically monitoring the heap fragmentation that stupid glibc was causing to their search engine, and how much better it became with tcmalloc.
I still don't understand how he bridges that cognitive dissonance from all the superior tech knowledge he displays to not actually writing any code at all. Not that I would not have experienced some states of feeling low, in paralysis unable to write a single line of code... but he seems so full of confidence, always commenting how trivial and easy all these tasks would be, as if it's all so lightyears below his abilities. Maybe he should just become a manager - but not mine.

Just startup stories:

Our backlog of tasks and bugs has officially reached 100+ tickets, all for me, the single software engineer at our "tech" company.

Huh, imagine that.

What would you think about sharing something cool (preferably tech related), or weird, or f-ed up about the country or the city you live in?

I'll go first, here in Cluj-Napoca, Romania the internet really fast and dirt cheap like 1gbps fiber for 15€/month.

2. The government paid like millions of € to add ticket vending machines for public transportation and they mostly don't work, I managed to crash one while buying a ticket. Card payment is not functional on like half of them. Also they run Windows......... What a joke...

Looking forward to hear your stories on this topic!

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Sometimes I wonder how large the gap between tech savvy n normal is.

All those stories about too much time on social media...

and also not knowing why you should get a tempered glass screen protector.... Even if you're screen is reinforced with Gorilla Glass...

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Fuck me I'm pissed. This sprint, my tech lead has been away and a senior dev has been covering for him. We plan a load of work and distribute stories and we churn threw it quite well. However, my senior dev says let's not deploy until all the works done. I was like, how is it going to be tested? He was like well it will be fine because it's all one test. Bs. We now have 2 days left, tester is getting stressed because they don't know what to test or what's been finished. Scrum master is asking why all of it should be tested at the same time and I'm here like this is fucking dumb. Also the tester decided to start testing with the most complex piece of work, rather than prioritising.

Starting to wonder if I'm just the outsider or whether no one understands that granularity is better.

A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.

I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.

Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.

What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.

I guess I should relate what work experience I have: my internship.

A little backstory I suppose. It's required at my school to do an internship to graduate except under certain circumstances. They encourage work experience a lot where I study. It was around time for me to apply for internships. However, the closest I got was a phone call with Amazon that I biffed when they started asking about stuff like sorting algorithms and other Big O notation stuff. So I was pretty desperate. I found a small company that were looking for internships and got an interview with them. The pay was dirt (I made more as a crew trainer at McDonalds) but I needed that internship and they were only 10 minutes away.

Immediate red flags when I showed up to the address. At first I thought I was wrong, But I noticed the sign of the company pointing up some stairs that were installed on the side of the house I was in front of.

Interview was a bit weird. It was with the CEO and the marketing manager. Again red flags. I show up for work a week later.

Turns out, they have no full time developers. 1st day was getting my workstation ready and 2nd day I was running Ethernet cables to the basement where the phones were connected. Spent around a week doing that.

This was supposed to be a Software Engineering internship?? Excuse me?? I came here to learn how working on Software is supposed to be like! I was also their "tech support" both for their computers and their crappy software that was built 16 years ago that people still pay for that I had NO idea how it worked because I just started and NOBODY taught me anything! To make matters worse, even if I wanted to delve into the code to see how it works it was all made in ancient Perl which didn't make things any easier.

But I needed that internship to graduate. And thus begun my 9 months with them and boy howdy I have stories to tell. Stay tuned in the future.

Sitting 3h in a bullshit claiming and blaming meeting called 'refinement' as 'the tech expert' while PO and customers fight how stories and bugs should be priorized and importantly enough they discussed why the god damn bugfix isn't alive yet that was promised to be deployed this morning.. I was up to deploy it right the time they said I really have to go to that meeting... Yeah.. Business as usual

Most of us have scary stories about professors that think that they know about what they are talking about when it comes to teaching comp sci subjects. Shit is so backwards in most parts of the world with teachers showing outdated or completely pointless tech.

A friend called me the other day asking for classic ASP help because it was being used in his web class. Another was asking me about flipping c cgi web scripting. Wtf are schools teaching? Having the drive to LEARN actuall useful topics that are relevant on the market is hard enough as it is...shouldn't schools help at least a little bit? I was lucky, we were thaught Java, Python, cpp, js, sql, html5, css3, php, ruby and we had classes for node (for those interested) and asp.net mvc. Those were RELEVANT and good classes and while some outdated tech was good the rest is just bullshit. Specially since most teachers have 0 market value as develpers...but hey!! Wtf do I know! Of course my word is shit against all them doctorate and master degrees.

Gimme a break. School can be great. But a lot of the leadership there is toxic af for our industry. And while I appreciate the effort in me being thaught modern languages (and thaught is a hard word since I already knew how to program way before going to school) i still remember a teacher taking points away from an assignment for not using switch statements in Python...despite my explaining that there was no such thing (you can go around it by using a lil technique using functions, its pretty cool..pero no mames)
Or what about the time I mentioned to a fellow student how he could use markup for having more control with his windows forms while the very same teacher contradicted me saying that shit was not possible. Or the guy at the school in which I work teaching intro to programming using fucking vba...fk man if you are going the BASIC route at least teach them b4j or something fuuuuck.

I had good teachers, but they were always cast asside by dptmnt heads as if they knew better. I just hate pendejo teachers I really do.

Chinguen a su madre, bola de babosos.

I have quite a few interesting stories from my romantic but also technical foray into dating applications.

There was a lad who was quite attractive that I encountered on Tinder. And I thought he seemed familiar. Turns out he worked at a start-up I had visited a year earlier.

Although at the time I was looking for romance, all I could think about was discussing the pros and cons of dating websites and building at least one that functioned well. To be fair, so was he, however he just wanted a Wham Bam thank you ma'am (which I didn't). Ghosted me without even a tech hangout.

It's so hard when you encounter cool tech folks you want to befriend and pick their brain but you met them on a dating site.

!dev but working via a Dev firm..
So these dudas hired me to cut and edit videos for them and get to know them (considering to work as web dev after studies, good way to start they said..) sure bit of an extra income..why not..

First clips I get, butthurt ass image quality with low ass sound that not even my grandma with here hi-tech super eardevice could hear a shit..

secondly who the fuck films a company video with a mobile phone in hands.. not even a fucking tripod... The angles are all over the shitfaced scene and your shaking like a fucking dildo vibrates.. "oh fix it with warp, it's easy".

FUUCK YOU! If I tell you these pieces of shit clips aren't even worth posting on Snapchat stories, how the fuck could you even consider using them for companies?!

Every god damn client video has shitty as dildo vibrating Slenderman light quality... Come one! And you want me to consider working for you as a front end developer (where I probably still will have to go through these pills of shit videos)?! Mate.. you better think twice about that...

Ps. Yes I have consulted them regarding these issues and no.. considering that these piles of shit still come my way they haven't taken my advices..(╯°□°）╯︵( .o.)

(Had to steam out somewhere.. ☕)

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Hey I have a career dilemma, was wondering if anyone experienced that and if anyone could give a tip on how to resolve it maybe.

TL;DR: I'm a Front End dev, who wants to become an expert in everything but obviously can't. What do I do? How do I choose what to learn?

Longer version. I started with Front End. Now i'm doing alright with Vue, React, bit of Angular, and other related to the stack tech. Then I started learning python because of a project I was doing (personal client). Didn't go far with this one. I still find it interesting esp. in the machine learning context, which I also want to do. Now I'm studying .NET, because of a project I'm currently doing at a company (full time, I'm doing ReactJS front end there tho). And I'm also studying for GCP exam, because I wanna know how to deploy solutions to the cloud. But one also needs to secure them, so I'm looking at some courses on Cybrary, in a search for appropriate courses.

I feel overwhelmed and unproductive. I feel like i need to specialize just in one field with some general knowledge about other areas. So I feel like I have to select what I do/learn carefully.

Any thoughts? How did you plan your career? What kind of goals did and do you set for yourself? Are you happy with those now once you achieve them?

I'd love to hear some stories. :)

I hate project managers trying to stay relevant to a agile development methodology. Our PM doesn't care if we are working and providing value to the customer, only about checking off his Project check boxes.

tech lead CANCELS Monday stand-up becuase they cannot attend. and I work and status and update my tasks in or virtual task board. I forget to send a message mentioning I'll be kissing Tuesday standup. Then he sends me emails like the following sent to me, my manager, and my tech lead: "please remember to notify your team if you cannot attend the standup, and to send an agile status to the team. This is something that is required and not optional. We are trying to firm up all stories and tasks and need to hear a status. We are in week 1 of iteration 4.3. Thanks."

I'm coding and delivering value to the customer. Wtf are you doing dude?

New office stories during the emotional turmoil...

Story 1: The creepy fuck

So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.

Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.

I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.

The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!

👀

Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.

Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.

Fuck this guy.

Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect

So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.

The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.

But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.

Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..

To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.

He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.

That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.

I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.

I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.

The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol

Never again he'll school anyone.

I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.

Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.

I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..

Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.

Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.

Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.

Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.

We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.

I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.

Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.

I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.

So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people.

ugh, company discussion on WhatsApp sucks. i want to take a leave from this new company i joinedbas i am bored the hell out

the company policy is that we got 16 pl 7 mandatory leaves and 8 emergency leaves. pretty good deal i guess. but as a new joiner, i am on probabtion for 6 months and I can't take either of those mandatory/paid leaves.

i was neck deep in work so could not get time to call my manager. plus had a 1 hour incredibly boring and frustrating call with another 50 yo tech lead from another team who was goin on an on like a 90 yo uncle with his wartime stories so could not think straight.

i sent my manager a "hey a***" at 7.08 pm on WhatsApp.

that's a great shoot oneself in the foot situation. i could not call because it's 7.08 pm, and don't wanna give an impression of a corporate non living dev who makes or supports making calls at odd hours. i also can't dele6 the message coz that would be more awkward

but i had went with the creepy hey text , and didn't wanna keep him waiting, so quickly add anothe message with the context : "i wanted to discuss a small leave related query, will call tomorrow"

another classic shoot oneself in the foot.

the probation guy wants to take leaves? he doesn't have any, what could he talk about it? oh right, i was gonna cheese him to give me an informal permission. but now i made it all formal.

noice :/

So i want to know how finances work for tech companies. There are a lot of big numbers that come up when we talk about a company's finances, but i don't understand why the tech people are so down in the ladder, or why those no.s are not associated with the tech teams
Like here's a statement :

"company x is valuable at $42billion , their annual turnover is $5billion. With a profit of $2billion. The ceo has a worth of $1.4billion and company's share are selling at $1500 per share. Person a,b,c of the company hold's 2,3,4% in stocks and the investor sequoia capital is thinking of providing an investment of $25million"

This is a hypothetical company, but if this company is also providing its members of tech team @$20-200k per annum (depending upon seniority), then is it relatively too less? I mean the company is playing with numbers in millions, people are being attributed with billions and yet a developer has to satisfy in those numbers.

Is it because we are being paid by the no. Of hours/time? Because i want to know what other ways are there in which those managers and ceos and investors are being paid? I have heard far too many stories about devs leaving their jobs and starting businesses, and I don't think its only because their boss was a dick

Was hella drunked yesterday. Guy at work brought me to some place called beer garden. Tf do u order in a beer garden. Whack. They drank 2 huge beers and so did i. Its like 1 or 2 liters no idea. My vision was delayed and blurry. My head hurts now too. They good ppl but i hate alcoholics and average people with no ambition other than to go out talk unimportant stories which wont buy me bread and drink alcohol. Im a fucking businessman. I want to talk about ideas and creating businesses especially tech startups or saas. Im a fucking God. I deserve to be surrounded by highly ambitious millionaires like myself who dont drink or talk shit, but talk only money talk. I can do moneytalk all night long. Any improvements on what can get me bread is ALWAYS highly more valuable topic than shittalking non bread topics. I hate this and i feel bad for these good people to watch them slave their life away not trying to be rich like me they're content with being average and it disgusts me because when ur average ur just 1 slip away from becoming poor or homeless. I'd rather steal millions and rot in jail for the rest of my life than work for matrix as a slave to eat crumbs for the rest of my life...

Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.

Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.

I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.

For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.

But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.

I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.

So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)

But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.

But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)

So just in general, what do you think?

I have a list of favorites but the first person that always usually comes to mind is John Romero.

I love listening to the talks Romero gives and even though I don’t partake in the practice of developing games I still love hearing his stories about his projects development or having to work with old/retro tech and learn something from those stories.

Trying to configure a smartphone which was already optimized for elderly users, with a more simplistic launcher, larger font size etc.

But the underlying Android 7 and its apps still keep showing up with their inconsistent UI and nagging messages and suggestions.

Is it even possible to configure any Android device to make it really simplistic and distraction free like, say, a classic NOKIA before the age of smartphones?

Culprit no. 1 Google and Android system. Suggestions about features keep recurring, even after stating that we are not interested in the feature.

Culprit no. 2 WhatsApp, unfortunately still the most popular messaging app in Germany, so this crappy bullshit software by Mark Fuckerberg's company has to be installed. Even to me as a tech savy developer, WhatsApp has a confusing user interface that tries to promote features like status (their versions of stories) without any option to hide / turn off.

How shall an 80 year old senior learn to use the app when they previously only used SMS and voice calls? I don't know.

Be me, a ret***

Already 3 months in a new position. (check my previous rant)
Storm have passed for a while but another storm is brewing.

C levels are having disagreement with each other.
Caught in the crossfire as one the of C's hire.
Have some chit chats with both side of C, each telling different stories.

C#1 told me there was a demand from C#2 to force tech guys (not defined who or how many) to resigns.

C#2 told me there is no plan to close the whole tech team. But there's a distrust brewing in the tech team especially on the C#1

Be me, C#1 hire...
Me telling them IDK what their real intentions are but there's a high probability for my reputation to be tarnished on the job Market.

I've always had good review amongst peers and confident I did and do a satisfactory job for my previous employer.

Be me:
Resorted to flexing my connection to high ranking (think of C suites) reference who I've worked and have good relations with.
Connected them to my C#2.
Dunno how the C#2 thinks of me and what my value to C#2 are.

Don't know what the future hold for me.
Tried doing one interview but topics of my reputation comes up because of me jumping to executive position without having "Manager" ever in my resume.
Got a bit too defensive on that and it might eff up my chance to have a backup ready in case I urgently need to jump ship.

Depression and impostor syndrome hits like a truck every day.