Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Roughly 180 days, 5 months and 29 days, 4,320 hours, 259,200 minutes, I devoted myself to a client project. I missed family outings with my daughter and my wife. People started asking my wife if we had broken up. My daughter became accustomed to daddy not being around and playing with her. Sometimes only sleeping 4 hours, I would figure out solutions to problems in my sleep and force myself to wake and put them into action. My relationship with my wife became very fragile and unstable. I knew I had to change but I just needed a little bit more time to complete this client project.

Finally, the project was ending there was light at the end of the tunnel. I “git add –-all && git status” everything looked good. I then “git commit -m “v1.0 release candidate && git push beanstalk master”

I deployed the app to the staging server where I performed my deployment steps. Everything was good. I signed-up as a new user, I upload a bunch different files types with different sizes, completed my profile and logged out. I emailed the client to arrange a time to speak remotely.

“Hello” says the client “How are you” I replied. “Great, lets begin” urged the client. I recited the apps url out to the client. The client creates a new account and tries to upload a file. The app spews a bunch of error messages on the screen.

The client says

“Merlin – I do not think you really applied yourself to this project. The first test we do and it fails. If you do not have the time to do my project properly please just say so now, so I can find somebody else who can”

I FREAKED THE FUCKOUT on the client!!!!!!! and nearly hung up. My wife was right next to and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I sat back and thought to myself “These fuckers don’t get it”. All that suffering for nothing!

Thanks for reading my rant….

BTW: I did finish the project, the client was amazed on how the app worked and it is has become an indispensable tool for their employees.

Just found out the backend developer I’m always complaining about. The one who:

- Can’t implement OAuth, and we have to have app users login every 24 hours because we have no way to generate new refresh tokens.

- Who used the phrase “your time zone is not my concern” to avoid building something that would let us inject test data.

- Who’s been debugging a critical bug affecting many users since December.

- Who can’t conduct API tests from external internet (you know, like the way the app will be in the wild) because it takes too much time.

- Who replies to Jira tickets only on a blue moon.

- Who has been 90% of the reason for my blood pressure situation

... is a fucking principal engineer in this company. In pecking order, his opinion should be considered more valuable than mine and everyone on my team.

I’ve just lost the will to live. How are big organizations THIS bad. Seriously, what promotion discussion did he go into

“So, you are a complete and utter bastard, nobody can stand to speak to you and you’ve yet to deliver anything of worth that actually works, over the course of several years ... ... ... interested in having your pay doubled??”

Hey, Root? How do you test your slow query ticket, again? I didn't bother reading the giant green "Testing notes:" box on the ticket. Yeah, could you explain it while I don't bother to listen and talk over you? Thanks.

And later:
Hey Root. I'm the DBA. Could you explain exactly what you're doing in this ticket, because i can't understand it. What are these new columns? Where is the new query? What are you doing? And why? Oh, the ticket? Yeah, I didn't bother to read it. There was too much text filled with things like implementation details, query optimization findings, overall benchmarking results, the purpose of the new columns, and i just couldn't care enough to read any of that. Yeah, I also don't know how to find the query it's running now. Yep, have complete access to the console and DB and query log. Still can't figure it out.

And later:

Hey Root. We pulled your urgent fix ticket from the release. You know, the one that SysOps and Data and even execs have been demanding? The one you finished three months ago? Yep, the problem is still taking down production every week or so, but we just can't verify that your fix is good enough. Even though the changes are pretty minimal, you've said it's 8x faster, and provided benchmark findings, we just ... don't know how to get the query it's running out of the code. or how check the query logs to find it. So. we just don't know if it's good enough.

Also, we goofed up when deploying and the testing database is gone, so now we can't test it since there are no records. Nevermind that you provided snippets to remedy exactly scenario in the ticket description you wrote three months ago.

And later:

Hey Root: Why did you take so long on this ticket? It has sat for so long now that someone else filed a ticket for it, with investigation findings. You know it's bringing down production, and it's kind of urgent. Maybe you should have prioritized it more, or written up better notes. You really need to communicate better. This is why we can't trust you to get things out.

*twitchy smile*

"Can you work on this ticket? It's kind of urgent."

-- "OK"

"And could you please not refactor? Just get this done."

-- "Why? What's the issue?"

"The logic is complex. We should not break it."

-- "Erm, that's what the tests are for. So yes, if the need arises, I'll refactor. The tests are my guidelines if the logic breaks or not."

There's a reason we create tests. So let's not hinder code base improvements by some random fear that stuff might break.

If breaks due to refactoring, we'll fix it by adding a valid test case during and then fixing the bug.

If my refactoring does not break the tests, I'll assume the code base is stable.

If your code is untested, then we have a complete different problem.

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Worst bad practice..

Manager: I need code today
Developer (thinking) : let me give it without unit test. Anyways tester will test it.

Manager to tester: complete testing fast.

Tester(thinking): developer must have unit tested it. Let me skip it.
Enjoy testing completed.

God help clients.. 😊

My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.

A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”

Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.

Glad to finally get that off my chest.

My first complete pipeline with Jenkins:

- push on gitlab
- build with maven
- test with junit
- deploy with Ansible
- integration test with Selenium

I love devops!

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…

TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.

Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!

Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!

Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.

Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.

Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.

Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)

Me: i have to pass this test tomorrow so I better study

Me to me: start an overambitious project that will take years to complete

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

My Interview question was simple, just :
Create an algorithm using **JAVA** accepting row input which output corresponding diagram :

1.
*
**
***
****

2.
*
**
***
****

3.
54321
4321
321
21
1

I said, well this going to be easy. Turns out they give me one sheet of FUCKING PAPER. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? THIS IS JAVA NOT A FUCKING PYTHON.

But in the end i complete the test except i don't write the :

public stupid static motherfucking main(String[] dick){}

in every single number. Got Zero in the test. Didn't get the job.

I win.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

I got through the first stage for a summer internship at Amazon. They send me a link to a technical test with a 7 day deadline to complete.

The link brings me to a 404 page. Fuck.

I contact customer support, reach out to Amazon directly, don't get any response whatsoever. The week has passed and the link is still dead and I s received no word from them.

FML. And fuck Amazon for teasing me like this and for having such shitty technical support.

Yes! you made a difference.[image]
P.S.
started working at a startup as an intern(android app developer), Most of my work is like debugging the code, new feature implementations.
And the codebase is full of this kind of shit(even worse) plus literally zero documentation(not even for API's), not even a single line of comment in complete project(40K-50K), not any unit test/ UI test.
The funniest thing is when I ask for documentation he(boss | *) said: I am documentation.

Here’s one that has been the reason that I’ve not been on devRant for a while.

School counselor decides to come to me saying “Oh hey, it’s your last semester and at this rate you’re not gonna graduate bud” Why the duck couldn’t you tell me earlier?! Fine, fuck you, just give me FOUR extra online classes. ELA, Game Dev, Web Des, and Criminology. Alright, ELA and Game finished with no issue. Then comes Web.

This class is a complete piece of dog shit wrapped in HTML5 memorization hell. I don’t give a single fuck what a scrum is, or that this bitch doesn’t know how to ask her client if she can use their logo, the dumbass. How about you teach me more about actual STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION, HUH? MAYBE SOME EDUCATION THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE MEMORIZING ALL THE FUCKING HTML TAGS EVER?!

I am literally brute forcing my way through the tests. Failed? Open the lesson, close it, test reset and unlocked. Try again until you pass. Fuck this class in its miserably over complicated yet somehow over simplified existence.

Now I’m gonna go get some goddamn sleep. I’ve been at this shit for hours.

1. Aim is to complete work as soon as possible and not worrying about good coding practices.

2. Senior Engineers take credits for everything that Junior Engineers work on. And that Junior Engineers are just shadows

3. Credits? Team lead and senior engineers take. Complains/issues/delay in product delivery? Junior Engineers are blamed

4. Testing? Test cases? What are they? Why do we need them? That's what my team lead asked.

5. Take work without even knowing what it is or what is to be done and then just keep carry forwarding it.

6. Junior engineer dares to point out any mistake, he/she is very rude and is taunted forever

And many more.....

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

We have a developer position open in our APAC office.

Before I take phone interviews, we ask candidates to complete a preliminary code test.

I’ve just been sent an email with code attached in screenshots...

nope.

Story of my life when I am really interested in a company:

Company: let's have a call to get to know each other.
Me: okay.
Company during the call: takes a technical interview

Company *a few days later*: now let's have a technical call!
Me: okay
Company during call: asks to design GOOGLE in GOOGLE DOC (??!!?!)

Company *a few days later*: now let's have a Development Test!
Me: okay
Company *sends an email* asking to complete a task which should take a week to develop in a few hours
Me: okay...

Company *a few weeks later*: Sends a generic email saying they got another person who is a better fit.
Me: ffs..

1)Get Project/idea
2)Look for the most suitable tech
3)Draw out all the functionality
4)Break into milestones
5)git init
6) git commit
7) Start
8) Test
9) Complete
10) Feel like a King

Had nothing to do today, so I thought I´ll test the migration of SVN to Git in Gitlab.

Boss sent me a mail today, that when I migrate we need to preserve the history, so I actually have to put some effort in it. *sigh*

Shout-out to the Gitlab documentation at this point.
That´s probably the best doc I´v ever read...

Well so I tried to use svn2git. And well...
Who the fuck thought that this piece of shit software is in any way usable?
Holy crap!
If it fails, it just does so without any info why. Even in verbose mode.
And the RAM usage? What the actual fuck?
This whole thing is a complete memory leak!
32Gigs of RAM full in Minutes and the whole system starts to stall!
And then when I thought it finally runs through.
Bam another git checkout error...

Googling for that error then I found something. A version of svn2git made in .Net Core.
Didn´t expect much but I tried it anyways.
And would you look at that!
It ran so smooth and didn´t need that much RAM , I had some doubt it did work correctly.
But it did!

I think I´m gonna pay a coffee or two to some guy over in China now!

Friend of mine: so I wonder how do you test your applications in the startup?

Me: testing? *grabs his coffee laughing*

Actually we have a complete build pipeline from commit/pull-request to dev and production environments. No tests. Really. We are in rapid product development / research state.

We change technologies and approaches like our underwear (and yeah, this is frequently). If we settled some day and understood the basic problems of the whole feature palette, we'll talk about tests again.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

Dumbest experience.
Talked to recruiter, they praised I know ruby, said I needed to do a code test in ruby.

I was given 1 hour to complete 5, exercises in a codefight like thing.

1 exercise had C as the only lang option.
2 more had C and Python.
The last two has ruby too, they were permutation exercises that never completed within the time restriction (that was probably on me, but they did complete on my local ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I told them about all this, I failed, no second chances, no explanation, no nothing.

When did it become a trend to give people 4 hour technical tests? As a 32 year old man who commutes to work (1.5-2hrs each way) where do they possibly think I'll ever get that amount of time to complete a "test".

What's wrong with a github link and a face to face chat? A decorated linked in with recommendations?

Why can no one have the confidence to hire a dev?

I feel like the web frontend landscape has gone to hell...

It used to be a priority to develop lean front end applications that load fast and work the same on most devices. If resources are required you try to share them. I have always liked the way this was solved using CDN.

Proper workflow: include some small libs you might need, script your interactions, test site, deliver.

And now our friends of the Javascript community have discovered the nuclear science called npm... It started off as this great benefit allowing frontenders to complete entire projects in the language they know and love but I feel like it has grown into an abomination that produces bulky applications with more boilerplate configuration than actual active code...

Surely I can't be the only one who is completely fed up with the direction this is going? Is anyone else looking for a lean way of developing javascript again using only a couple of small libs instead of those monstrous frameworks.

I have even considered to develop a library that makes it easy to develop with CDN (and dependencies) in mind but I don't even know if it will be worth it as more and more people tend to move away from it.

I'm sad

“Hey, thanks for accepting my request we have a role you might be interested in.”

Sure, happy to move forward

“Great you just need to a complete a Technical test”

How long is the recommend time?

And I quote:

“It’s entirely up to you how much time you spend on this task. I’ve seen tasks done in 45 mins with minimal effort previously. I’ve also seen others take a week on it. Totally your call”

——

...so you contact me to offer me a role and want me to invest up-to 1 week on a technical when I’ve not even visited your offices. How about no.

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

So, at the start of November last year I completed a big system for a client. It took me months to complete.

Most frustrating was the sheer amount of pressure the client applied to get it completed. Emails every day, phone calls where the client was "checking" on my progress etc etc. All the annoying stuff.

Only plus side was the fact they paid in full a few after is was completed.

I've just released the system is still on a test AWS account and I haven't heard from the client for well over a month now.

I've just logged into the system and took a look at the logs. The client logged in once the day it was completed and hasn't done anything since.

I mean what was the point of all the pressure if they were just going to let the thing gather dust?

I'm pretty annoyed to be honest as I experienced a few fairly borderline stressful months due to that project.

Ah well, the image below was me after looking at the system logs :)

So today, again, I discovered the importance of unitests.
I was solving this performance issue, in which we had a few update actions for multiple entities in mongo, but it took FOREVER to complete, even when I unified it into one bulkWrite command.
Since the unified write did improve performance slightly, and we wanted to move on, we decided to let this bug go.
So there I was committing my changes when I got a rejection from the pre-commit hook since I didn't have enough unitests coverage.
Ok, let's start writing some unitests.
Some unitests also needed to test the bulk write. So there I was comparing expected with actual result, and suddenly I got a huge facepalm.
Apparently some rogue for loop iterated all entities again for each entity that needed update. So instead of getting one update per entity, I got N identical update commands per each of the N entities 🤦‍♂️
Needless to say, fixing this fixed the performance bug entirely.
Thank you unitests and pre-commit hooks!

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.

Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...

Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!

How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.

Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.

You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

So I finally got my senior project approved by my school's assistant principal (the one who deals with every student's project) and he said that the three forms of evidence I suggested were not enough. A quick summary of my project: I'm supposed to make a game engine in Java before April of 2017. Every student needs 3 forms of evidence that they did the project so I suggested screenshots of my work, the finished source code, and pictures of me actually working on it. In addition to all of that I would have a ton of documentation and sample projects to test different features of the engine. Well, he doesn't really understand that for a high school student, that's already enough work for a couple of years and thinks I need more evidence. So what does he do?

He requires me to find at least 5 people to test the engine and complete a survey about it. This normally wouldn't be a problem, except I'm a high school student and don't know more than 2 people who are fluent enough in Java to work on a game. And, I have to finish the project before January now to give the people enough time to work with it.

Long story short, I'm not even out of high school and I'm already experiencing the struggles of dealing with non-technical people.

In my three years experience so far I can honestly say that 100% of the developers I've worked with are narrow sighted with regards to how they develop.

As in, they lack the capacity to anticipate multiple scenarios.

They code with one unique scenario in mind and their work ends up not passing tests or generates bugs in production.

Not to say I'm the best at foreseeing every possible scenario, but I at least TRY to anticipate and test my code as much as possible to identify problems and edge cases.

I usually take much more time to complete tasks than my colleagues, but my work usually passes tests and comes back bug free. Whereas my colleagues get applauded for completing tasks quickly but end up spending lots of time fixing up after themselves when tests fail or bugs appear.
Probably more time wasted than if they had done the job correctly from the start. Yet they're considered to be effecient devs because they work "fast".

Frustrating...

Bored waiting for a long running test cycle to complete, so...

Monopoly: Software Dev edition.

All properties are companies with apple and alphabet being the most expensive ones, course the online version plugs into stock tickers to accurately reflect the current share price.

All railroads are broadband providers.

You don't build houses or hotels, but patent portfolios and 'landing on another property' becomes 'infringing on a patent'.

Cards:
- Kickstarter refund, collect £200
- Hit by ransomware, pay 1bitcoin.
- You are sued in East Texas, go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect dividends.
- Get out of court free card.

Yeah, I'm that bored that I'm rewriting bloody monopoly...

I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.

I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).

Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.

Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like

>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.

For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.

Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).

Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.

The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.

It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.

I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.

I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.

Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.

About to start coding my first complete website. Oh boy. Everything I learn up until this point. Just basic HTML is all about to be put to the test. Lol. Grant it. It's not for a client. Just school assignments but man I'm nervous.😂😂🤷‍♂️

Jeff Dean Facts (Source: God)

Jeff Dean once failed a Turing test when he correctly identified the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than a second

Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler and CPU bugs
Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O(1/n) algorithm

When Jeff Dean designs software, he first codes the binary and then writes the source as documentation

Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers

Jeff Dean wrote an O(n^2) algorithm once. It was for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Jeff Dean's watch displays seconds since January 1st, 1970.

gcc -O4 sends your code to Jeff Dean for a complete rewrite

Employer: Hey, we are moving an API update live tomorrow morning that could affect our apps. Can you regression test the apps to make sure they all work?

Me: The API team is pushing code overtop of live endpoints that can break them?

Employer: Yes, we need the updates to work with a new product we are developing.

Me: And nobody thought about versioning these endpoints so we guarantee uptime on all existing services using them now?

Employer: We looked at that but it cost extra and required us to use the cloud solution so we don’t use versioning.

Me: Okkk… I also take it that the API’s don’t have integration tests written?

Employer: What are integration tests? Are unit tests the same thing?

Me: No, so when do I need to regression test all 7 production apps?

Employer: The API’s are moving to production at 4am and we need it signed off by 7am.

Me: I only have 3 hours to regression test 7 production apps at 4am? Each app, if I just skim over them, would take me 2 hours each. I will do my best but that’s a very short time to ensure complete functionality.

Employer: Don’t you have unit tests?

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

I went for an interview yesterday and everything went fine, today I was asked to complete a technical test. I have done plenty of these in the past but never have I come across something as invasive as interviewzen.

It records every key stroke and plays it back to the interviewer, I assume they are watching on the webcam and recording audio too. I find the whole concept horrendous.

I closed that shit straight away and will tell them I'm no longer interested.

Anyone used that site before?

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

Project manager : At 9:30 am these all are the tasks you have to complete today.
Me: OK ,sure.
Project manager: At 10:30 have you completed any thing.
Me:no not yet we can meet at 11:30.
Project manager: At 11:30 have you completed the tasks.
Me: no it's takes more time post lunch.
Project manager: post lunch have you completed the tasks.
Me : give me 5 mins ( integrating the code).
Project manager: 5 mins over.
Me : showing the application with out testing.
Project manager : This not working.......!
Me:(I know that )then I have to check .
Project manager : OK go and come in 10 mins
Me:(in 10 mins I have to test and fix the bugs you non technical brute) sure .

Why Gmail. Why the fuck do your search parameters, especially your date filters, not work anywhere near as expected.

You make me have to query and test, query and test, just, randomly fucking guessing because, fuck it, right?

With a good 10 second refresh time. I love twiddling my thumbs and pulling my hair out.

after:2018/11/1 should produce emails from Nov 1st onward.

Not, TODAY ONLY, if no other parameters are
specified.

If there's a from: parameter, now we want to do after Nov 1st, right?

And also, don't show me how to sort in reverse order, either. Not without a complete rewrite of my class there, which clearly I'm too lazy to do right now.

Fuck the Gmail Api, responsible for weeks of wasted dev time... or more aptly put, "fuck devs using our gmail api" says the maniacal, sociopath devils that created it

fuckers.

Migrating to another sub domain for the 4th time.
First they say 'oh this sub domain is just for demo and you can freely test your code on it .
Few days later they say the same thing to another team and then :

- 'dude ! Is the website down because of your code ?'

- 'The code is not complete yet ! I've been adding some features! '

-'Is it possible that you migrate to another demo sub domain? Content production team wants to upload more content on that sub domain '

-'Sure ! Why not :('

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

My favourite dev tool? I would't be able to do my work without any tool, which's in the list. I love IntelliJ IDEA & Webstorm, Java, JavaFX, Maven, Git & Gitlab, TeamCity, Upsource, YouTrack, Artifactory, wtf that list's kinda the complete tech stack. But I completly hate AWT & Swing (AWT fucks up on my Linux install, such a frame creates in about 10-20 seconds, if you test the app locally, you loose approximately 15 seconds per minute, and Swing uses AWT internally too), I hate Gradle (screw Google for standardizing it), and so on. Wow that's like my complete tech stack, what the fuck happend? The question was one tool, help me.

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

A dev found a bug I created where I set a SQL parameter name to @OrderID instead of the expected @Order. The standard is @OrderID, there is one stored proc where it's @Order.
Oops...I didn't catch it because the integration test didn't cover that area of the code. My mistake...I should have checked...I take complete responsibility for the screw up.

He let me know by email..
"When refactoring, from now on check the stored procedure parameters, there are a few that don't follow the standard."

I was like "from now on..."? ...wow....bold comment from someone responsible for code that doesn't check for nulls, doesn't log errors, and relies on exceptions for flow control. You wouldn't even have known about the error if I didn't modify your code to log the error (the try..except returned false)

I really wanted to reply ...

"Fixed. From now on, when you come across those easily found bugs, go head and fix it, write a test, and move on. Don't send a condescending email to me, my boss, your boss, all the DBAs, and the entire fracking order processing team. Thanks."

But..I thanked him for finding and letting me know...we're a team..blah blah blah..

Frack..people suck.

The marketing dept comes to me and ask for an important project to be done ASAP. Builds pressure on my PM to get it done fast. After I complete it, I ask them to complete UAT to make sure it is what they wanted so we can go live. They seem to not have enough time to test it. After one month the whole dept gets divested! Is this common or I am unlucky? They never used that very important app ever!!😢😠

I recently have been delegated the responsibility of managing a 4 people team by planning the sprints, scheduling tasks, and in general "take charge" (as said by the boss).

What bothers me is there is this "developer" with a heavily toxic attitude, who feels he is above all laws and knows everything just because he joined some months ago all of us.

He is basically a human linter. When he code reviews, you can get away with any major mistake if your linting and indentation (and all that shit) is according to "his standards".

A new guy recently joined the team and was given an overwhelming task by the boss just to test whether he belongs here. (Again, wrong, in my opinion). He didn't know any of the technologies he needs to work on to complete that task but he still learnt them and got a working product. Albeit not according to our God's "standards".

Cut to the chase, the asshole dev is now mocking him in PR comments and demeaning him in every discussion. As a "team lead", what should I do? If I let it go, it'll make the environment toxic and I don't want him to get away with it. If I do take any action, I don't want to be seen as as pussy who can't take such minor insults. Please advise.

PS. The asshole developer once wrote a "friend request accept" API endpoint in such a way that when any single person accepts a request, that'll cause all pending requests (from any person to any person) get accepted. Fucked up the DB queries basically. This is just to give a perspective on what I'm dealing with here.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

FUCK YOU WORDPRESS wtffff with that shit , i can't use multisite if running in 8081 port ?, fuck you! your """ cli """, your media folder with that month and year stupid subfolders, your plugins and your fucking unit test running on a complete WP instance. GO FUCK YOURSELF! stop with that shit and remake all that shit.

Scaled custom help desk software across 5 school districts. Way harder than it sounds when you realize that we needed a tunnel to get an external site working, complex routing to get the servers to communicate with one another without exposing one districts network to the others. And I also made it auto deploy on a successful CI test. The only thing that really perfectly worked on the first try was the database (CockroachDB). Everything else was a complete mess of DNS and routing rules.

Wish me luck. Looks like the feature I am developing is going to be late because QA doesn't feel like following the estimates we agreed on. We already identified that development was going to be the longest part of this whole effort and that QA was going to be relatively easy, but but no. Because this is the day we have to be "code complete", they don't want to test a relatively simple feature. In fact we had to talk them into even starting testing on it today. Even though regression day is Monday and they are basically going to be done testing their last ticket this morning. Like what the fuck were they going to do for the next 7-8 hours? They don't write any documentation. There are no reports to do. There are no meetings. Did they just want a virtual day off?

Edit: they are literally playing with people's careers here. This is not the first time I have had something delayed by QA even though they agreed that it was simple to test and it was delivered with enough time to fucking test. Then I get in trouble because of late delivery.

* Developing a new "My pages" NBV offer/order solution for customer
_Thursday
Customer: Are we ready for testing?
Me: Almost, we need to receive the SSL cert and then do a full test run to see if your sales services get the orders correctly. At this point, all orders made via this flow are tagged so they will not be sent to the Sales services. We also still need to implement the tracking to see who has been exposed to what in My Pages.
Customer: Ok, great!

_Friday
Customer: My web team needs these customers to have fake offers on them, to validate the layout and content
Me: Ok, my colleague can fix this by Tuesday - he has all the other things with higher prio from you to complete first
Customer: Ok! Good!

_Sunday
Me: Good news, got the SSL cert installed and have verified the flow from my side. Now you need to verify the full flow from your side.
Customer: Ok! Great! Will do.

_Monday
*quiet*

_Tuesday
Customer: Can you see how things are going? Any good news?
Me: ???
*looks into the system*
WTF!?!
- Have you set this into production on your side? We are not finished with the implementation on our side!
Customer: Oh, sorry - well, it looked fine when we tested with the test links you sent (3 weeks ago)
Me: But did you make a complete test run, and make sure that Sales services got the order?
Customer: Oh, no they didn't receive anything - but we thought that was just because of it being a test link
Me: Seriously - you didn't read what i wrote last Thursday?
Customer: ...
Me: Ok, so what happens if something goes wrong - who get's blamed?
Customer: ...
Me: FML!!!

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

I swear the God I'm considering getting a rabied dog just to bite your balls off in case I ever see you in the streets..

- guys X are running load tests on env A
- load tests complete
- analysis of test results is being done
- slow response times are obsered
- someone asks whether X guys took a thread dump for further analysis
- a guy from team X (Mr. Xx) replies: "Will take the Thread Dump now."
- 10 minutes later uploads the whole fucking 2GB log file to Slack
- Xx replies: "I do not see anything wrong in the dump"

A fucking retard... Shove that useless dump up your ass and THEN tell me there's nothing wrong with it! Why the FUCK do you think that's the case? Moron

There are a couple:

A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)

A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!

A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss

Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P

a friend of mine has applied at a company who have sent them this task* to complete before the job interview.
They gave about 10 days to complete this.
*I rewrote it

Personally I think this is super overblown and way too much to complete as a test before the first interview.
They expect the applicant to configure an SQL database, a backend with a custom API and a UI.
It's like a fullstack prototype software, not a task.
Im not in web development and I wouldn't feel confident learning these technologies in my free time in just a few days.

I said that this felt like some HR manager writing up the test or that they want the applicant to create a prototype for free.
Am I being too extreme here? To me it feels overkill, what do you all think? Is this common?

Oh and I should mention, this is for an internship position for a bachelors student.

(Part 1/2?)

Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.

Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.

So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.

THE INTERNSHALA ARC:

I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.

I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.

I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.

THE WHATSAPP ARC:

I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.

The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).

So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?

Him: So, which parts CAN you do?

I thought of it as an HR thing.

Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.

Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.

I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.

Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?

Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.

At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).

Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.

And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.

I hate web development
I mean why it has to be everywhere and so important.
I joined college my friend calls 4 days before my quantum physics test. Asks if I wanted to do internship. My reply sure.
( Level of knowledge at that time no idea what API is, what react is but it's just making webpages ) made a nice homepage within 4 hours of YouTube 2 tutorials and 2 developing that. Friend appreciated his manager also liked.
But failed to deliver the complete e-commerce website's frontend.

Comes next, hackathon nothing related to Android specific( I like coding for Android) need webdev in one way or other. One senior asks if want to go together sees my GitHub and rejects politely by my skills ( I would have too).
Went on with my 2 more friends with thought of making an all Android app guys team, next week team breaks. I then got offer from a friend to join with them in web development I agreed now prepare for web development.
Team was rejected internal politics of organizers ( would take no all fresher's team).

Dropped learning webd.
Now started flutter and it feels good and comfortable but stability isn't permanent.

Now seeing GSoC
Sigh...Most requirements are for web , hacktober fest also had things related to web maybe I don't recall. Still thinking about it sigh...

Got selected for college app development team. The head had to be one with excellent webd skills.

Now college provides funding for projects and ideas, prototype requires making prototype. Most easiest thing to work on
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web development.

I completed my driving test today. You're gonna want to read this whole thing about how it went.

I have attached a pic which highlights what you have to do in the car, to the pass the test.

And as if that wasn't easy enough already, my driving instructor sat beside me in the practice car where he had his own foot controls, handled it.

I swear I just sat in the driving seat with my foot doing nothing and my hands controlling the steering wheel. The test took a total of 45 seconds to complete.

I'm a little weirded out ngl.

I got my last job from stack overflow jobs. They had me implement a code test that involved a decent amount of features and took several weeks of my freetime to complete, but in the end I had a short phone interview and I had gotten the job :D

Marketing team built out some changes in the staging environment using the CMS, didn't test it, submitted a ticket for cloning with the note that they only changed the content of one page. I check and it works fine, complete the clone. Two weeks go by and I get a ticket saying one of the pages isn't working, I check and it doesn't work because it only exist in staging. Turns out they were hoping to sneak one by me and deploy something that they were trying to get printed for shipping that day in their original request. So now I have to spend the next hour running test, getting approvals, and deploying that page. I need to finish my CI/CD for this site.

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

Fuckers didn't even give my account access to the fucking soap action I was calling after 3 weeks of email chains and other back and forth.

First the credentials I was given "we're fully set up" and now this BS??

Fucking test your live and sandbox environments work BEFORE you let your clients start their integrations.

And if they have issues, try to emulate the e-2-e test and prove you can complete the transaction yourself BEFORE emailing back 🤦

Started working as a "working student" in an it company to write unit tests. (which then will be executed automatically - so automated unit tests)

Realised that I write more or less the same code just changing the names and some parameters (sometimes more if it's not an number but a bool for example but it's pretty much the same scheme)

So I bought a tool for 1$ to use "auto complete" on custom templates.(I type testgetbool and the tool replaces this to the test case only asking for the variable name.)

So now I'm writing automated automated tests 😁😅

(which is btw pretty boring but cost & time effective)

Me when I complete the actual coding implementation and have to write Unit Test cases:
" AND NOW MY WATCH ENDS HEREEE! "

Last week: Build out a landing page and contact form in Pardot. Deliver to client after a quick QA pass through.
Friday: Get nasty message from client via basecamp about how the entire page looks like complete crap. We're also very unprofessional and can't deliver a simple request, while we charge a premium for our services.

So I, wondering what I managed to screw up so horribly, hop on to the test page I sent them. Except, its different and looks like crap.

They edited the page after it was sent to them and are pissed it doesn't match the comps they sent over. So I edit it back - except for the form. The one they added selects and textarea boxes to. Fields they didn't include in their comp and there was no mention of them wanting to use.

Today: Phone call with client. Every single complain they have about the page template they delivered all goes back to one of 3 things.
1. Their designer doesn't know how to use their global styles in his designs. So when things match their global styles (as they specifically asked for) they don't understand why they don't match the comp in a side by side view.

2. They change their mind on a design after the page was built. They won't admit this is the case and want to blame someone else for it not looking the way they want it. You know, "Spirit and Style of their current site"

3. They're idiots.

So now, I put aside a much more fun React project for an Amazon owned grocery chain and work on this nonsense.

Email: "Thanks for applying to this position, after you complete this technical test, please let us know via email."

Me: Dude! I didn't even apply for that position, stop spamming 😒

I hate it when my bosses approve of a design and then after some time ask me to make some annoying changes. I love programming, but I don't like being bothered by boring tasks.. and the worst part is that my bosses expect me to take care of building the backend, front-end, complete the design of the screens available, make up designs for the screens that are not, test the Web app, solve the bugs created the people who also worked on the project, solve the bugs created by me, and if something is not clear, to ask the client directly, like dude.. I'm just an intern here... and the most annoying of all this is when they take a screenshot of something they don't like and simply write: "change this".... CHANGE IT TO WHAT? if I knew what you would like I would have already done it!!!

It is 4:08 am here, I am supposed to complete my first task as an intern by tomorrow night(technically tonight) and here I am on devRant.

Plot twist: I already did the job. It was writing test cases ffs. 😕

/rambling

Arghhh!

Okay, so have just been having a play with Mailgun's webhook functionality (a client finally has a decent use for these).

I setup a test endpoint that sends a mail via Mailgun and then handles the POST data too. It emails myself the raw POST request response from Mailgun when I open the email. Mailgun fire an event their end when they detect the message has been opened.

All is good apart from Mailgun are posting multiple requests for each event, which is annoying.

After an hour messing around and getting annoyed I have a complete face palm moment.

In my test script Mailgun is called is send my notification email! So I'm creating multiple events for the same test message.

i.e. send original message, receive post back from Mailgun to my endpoint, my script then emails me the result using Mailgun. The latter itself generates its own events again.

Sooooo stupid of me to not notice something so obvious :(

Me:
- 4+ years of experience
- Great Portfolio
- Great Github profile
- Worked at some succesful startups.

Interviewer:
- Uhmm sorry we can't hire you for this frontend job because you couldn't complete this whiteboard bubble sort test in c++.

Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?

To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.

Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!

Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.

To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.

Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.

Client deescalation needed and intervention by company leader...

Client refuses to test - too much work they say.
Client wants a lot of changes - but cannot define what.
But most frustrating... Even as we tried to with all patience that was left to find out what they were doing aka how they work, what work flows, documents and so on were involved, they basically started a team discussion and seemed to work all differently...

And the project should be a complete sale and warehouse solution, suited and written for their needs.

Really? How can a company like this work?

It's not the first time I've dealt with hard projects or 'weird' customers, but really the first time I have no fucking clue what I should do.

Can someone please summon Ctulhu?

So, I recently applied for a graduate position at a company. They will wanted me to complete an online test for them and successful completed it.

I then had the option of choosing a time and date for a phone interview, so I did so.

The day of the phone interview came and went, and no one called. I emailed asking what happened? But the only reply I had back was the same template email I had before. It seems like they're asking me to book another time again, however, there aren't any free slots for now 2 weeks.

I am now quite annoyed with how the process has gone, and now unsure if I should even bother with them. Will they just forget to call again?

Ticket: here's something wrong with the export of transactions, please check.

Very useful description, let me just go over this logic I've written months ago.

Yeah, I went extra sure that everything's right, besides the ones for created during the initial testing that we left. Took me a hell a long time to prove because there's such a vague description but ok.

Of course I have the time to make an eyecandy of an excel spreadsheet for you.

Only for you I'll also go and fix these entries manually. If you want me to do it so badly, I'll gladly do it.

Oh what, you're upset that I wasted 5h for this complete bullshit? Well fucking go and learn the database structure yourself then or get sued idk

Hope it was worth that 1€ difference the customer paid himself.

Not to mention that I also had to do an emergency setup to work from home because those people who are responsible for giving me an appointment for a covid test sure like to wait days after my sick leave is over. ffs, I just had a cold...

Also fuck all this bullshit mac software required to work in this network, half of this shit flat out requires you to use the same software and ofc it's all closed source to the point where I'd be glad to have an electron app for everything.

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

How do you do your CI/CD pipeline? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just wondering how the tests and deployment usually runs. Is it on a per team basis? Is it the whole release getting deployed to Test many times per day? What happens if too many automated tests fail or there is not enough coverage, does it abort the deployment? If so, how can every team get delayed by every issue - is that actually a good policy?

My pipeline is very slow and requires a team of 12 people working in shifts to complete it. I’m not an expert but I know it does a lot of steps and never completes without manual intervention. I would like to help but I’m not sure how bad it is.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I love it when someone wants you to troubleshoot an issue but will not give you a test user account to test with. So you have to sit with a user or talk with them over the phone while you troubleshoot. I'm literally elbows deep in the code and database, but you won't give me an account for security reasons. Ok, that makes complete sense.

You know, I don't mind getting dragged if I deserve it. But it would be nice to have ALL the information I need to make an estimate BEFORE you hang me out to dry.

First I was told that work on this issue could be kicked down the road since we were getting big contracts. The next day the issue was in the sprint.
I tell you I won't be able to get it done with the business critical stuff you said absolutely had to be done that sprint (turns out we had 3 months of leeway even before COVID). You say alright cool. We push it to next sprint. The next day you say we have been pushing that issue too much and we absolutely have to get it done this sprint. At least have it so QA can look at it by Tuesday.
I give a preliminary look to QA cuz I found a bug, but they can test other shit about this fucking issue, but then get shut down fucking again because it isn't code complete.
STOP. MOVING. FUCKING. GOAL POSTS. AND. GASLIGHTING. ME.

And as a bonus, I disagree with the necessity of this work in general. I think it's fucking stupid, unnecessary, and zero value added. It's a management jerkoff issue that is going to piss off all of our users.

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

Hello wonderful Salesforce peeps. I need to take the Salesforce platform app builder credential

What is the best site to use as a study guide/ exam prep?

Cause honestly I've been using Trailhead and I feel it's just a big advert for Salesforce and it's so condensed it feels like a beginner course and I'm scared the test questions will be more profound than what is displayed in there.

I am a complete noob in Salesforce but I do have CRM experience, DB experience, Security experience, and programming experience.

Help a Newb

One time I got a Skype interview and the interviewer asked me to complete all the coding questions (rewrite in actual code) and email the answers to them within 10mins.

But when I open the question sheet, I found that all questions contain pseudo answer, so I ended up rewriting them on specific coding language, which was easy.

After I finished all the questions and sent the answer back to the interviewer and she told me this test wasn't testing my skill level on that specific coding language but honesty.

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

Developers don’t have access to the test database so I had to put in a request for a dba to add two columns and it took over two hours for them to complete it.

Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy.

Why is it that most people that reply to feedback/support forms of just about any web site in general are complete dimwits? If they are people, that is. In that case, congratulations! You've just passed the inverted Turing test!

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

Material-ui looks and complete and so but their documentation is a nightmare .

They seperated component example and the code of those example.You gotta go to one page to see a silder example and test it and then you have to click on a link at the bottom of the page to go to the code where they mixed multiple variation of this compoment into the same spaghetti code.

Just spend two fucking days debugging a few methods in our program. I used unit tests to call those methods (don't want to navigate through the complete program workflow)...
Yeah, guess what: the test cleanup includes a fucking rollback transaction function. So NONE NADA ZERO FUCKING CHANGES WILL BE PERSISTED. Fuck me

New ERP project has been going for 1.5 years. Project team comes to me asking to create an import process from old ERP to new ERP in 4 months, oh we need data loaded into Test today so we can complete end-to-end user testing. Project team doesn't have any requirements documented or know what data is needed in new ERP. I have never used/seen either ERP system. Project team keeps changing what is required in the new ERP weekly, and they don't understand why all the imports into new ERP are bad.

so i had this day at college we were supposed have a viva ( oral test ) ..the teacher asked me to print hello world..in java but no where can i use a static method including 'main'..well i made a static block instead and added System.exit in it.. and i had to write the complete syntax of main else it wont run..but my teacher snapped back at me saying it could be done.. with a non static main

..nodded an okay..didnt want a fight..came home..figured out the thing she said is now obsolete.. fuckin hell..update yourself at least..

help with the ui for my app?

it pretty much just gives you a word a day. they frontend is functionally complete, but it looks pretty ugly. any ui ideas? (the backend isn't complete so only test data is being returned by the server)

it's android only right now, because i cannot afford to compile it on ios

i'll put the download link in the comments

Saw this test on upwork.

Can you complete this in 60 mins using react? with the bonus points?

So I went to a service center to repair my cracked mobile screen. I thought that the process would be completed in a few hours so I didn't took any backup.

Guy: You need to hand over your device for 2 days.
Me: Okay, no problem just fix it. (At this point i was desperate because a bunch of shops already told me that the complete model needs to be replaced)
Guy: You also need to remove any screen lock from it.
Me: But why?
Guy: We need to test once we fix the display. The repair util can be accessed by an inbuilt app.
Me: *Internally screams, my pr0n collection, my browsing history...*
Me: Just give me a minute. *Uninstalls a bunch of apps*.
Me: Handing the device to him. *crying internally and thinking if anything was left*.
Me: While returning, Fucking fuck now how am i gonna suppose to book myself a cab.. *facepalm myself with a fist*

When PO lashes you to complete the project so they can begin testing as soon as possible, and you don't hear a word on the progress or get a single bug report because noone has the time to test it...

Angular test for a company: they are asking me to implement a filter on a table using rxjs. Me, no real rxjs experience, set up complete new page, new table with angular material and a working filter. Lol, ductape solution successful!

Fuck testcomplete, fuck having to spend 40 minutes mapping out every element just to still hang 5 minutes every time you try to check the existence of one, fuck having a software who's sole purpose is to automate testing and save time take hours upon hours to do what a person can do in seconds, and fuck me for having to use this piece of shit to test every single change made to our site.

How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).

The situation is as follows:

1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.

What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.

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TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
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What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!

Let me share my sprint with you.

So, we lost a developer this at the start of the sprint because the organisation we work for is total cancer.

Project manager frequently says to us that it's better to under commit than over commit.

Come sprint planning, we commit to exactly what we know we can achieve.

Of course, the PM whinges and says we need to put more in the sprint. So, we say sure, but we can't guarantee we will deliver everything on time.

Fast forward 2 weeks, we complete 90% of what we committed to.

PM is whinging at stand ups, asking us why some user stories are still in 'ready for test'.

We try to explain to the PM that 2 weeks ago we made ourselves very clear that this point 2 weeks later would most likely happen.

PM stops whining.

Tester starts whinging about only having a couple of days to test. Blames developers for not adhering to acceptance criteria.

>User stories aren't actually user stories, they're user essays.

How do you deal with this?

how do I test long scenarios? I have an app with 10 screens to complete. I have a dropdown on the first screen which creates a table row element on the last screen. should I do selenium or unit test or both? selenium will have to click through the whole app and call every API just for 1 assertion. unit test will only check the dropdown has the right options which are subject to change and not really worth testing. I run into this problem every time I want to write a test. i always miss something in my manual testing and introduce defects. what should I do?