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29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.
For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.
I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.
I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.
Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.30 -
So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
I hold two degrees in computer science/engineering and to this day, whenever I have to help my dad with any computer related stuff, he *always* says:
"Good thing we let you study this stuff!"
Yeah, right dad. Fixing your windows problems is exactly what I learned in university 😒4 -
Some time ago I learned that my brother was taking a MATLAB class at University. I thought to myself "hey, why not try teaching him another language, like C#".
He learnt that shit faster than anyone I've ever tutored! Even the 3rd years at University had more problems than he did.
So fucking proud.4 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.4 -
It's march, I'm in my final year of university. The physics/robotics simulator I need for my major project keeps running into problems on my laptop running Ubuntu, and my supervisor suggests installing Mint as it works fine on that.
I backup what's important across a 4GB and a 16GB memory stick. All I have to do now is boot from the mint installation disk and install from there. But no, I felt dangerous. I was about to kill anything I had, so why not `sudo rm -rf /*` ? After a couple seconds it was done. I turned it off, then back on. I wanted to move my backups to windows which I was dual booting alongside Ubuntu.
No OS found. WHAT. Called my dad, asked if what I thought happened was true, and learnt that the root directory contains ALL files and folders, even those on other partitions. Gone was the past 2 1/2 years of uni work and notes not on the uni computers and the 100GB+ other stuff on there.
At least my current stuff was backed up.
TL;DR : sudo rm -rf /* because I'm installing another Linux distro. Destroys windows too and 2 1/2 years of uni work.
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I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.
I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.
The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.
After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.
Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."
First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.10 -
When I started university, I was getting out of some really awful situations-- emotionally abusive parents, a boyfriend who was blackmailing me, a truly bizarre rape, etc. My life had been a little rough, and I was dealing with some PTSD.
My first computer science course was great. The professor was clear, patient, everything a sensitive student needed. I was able to concentrate on the curriculum without any problems.
The second 'intermediate' course, though? Not so much. The professor shouted his lectures during the entire class period in a relatively small classroom. Occasionally, he would clasp his hands and move around pretty unpredictably (like jumping out at the class), which spooked me a few times. He also always seemed like he was just hovering on the edge of madness, like he was just barely keeping it together, but he never broke.
I sat in the front row and was absolutely terrified during his lectures because it seemed like he was mad at me. I was half expecting him to start attacking me at any moment. Because, you know, PTSD.
I was also only getting a comp sci minor, so the other students looked at me like I wasn't supposed to be there, which also made me feel pretty uncomfortable, but such is life.
After most classes with him, I would need to take about an hour or two afterwards to calm down, stop shaking, and recompose myself. I looked forward to test days because he wouldn't yell. It was rough.
Later on, I learned that he used to be a gym teacher, which explains the jumping and yelling. Also, his wife, daughter, and dog all died within six months of each other the year prior, which might explain why he always seemed so on edge.3 -
See, the problem with University students beginning programming is that they think that they're the hottest shit just because they know how to open cmd.exe. Since I'm a mentor, I have to give them pro tips while helping them through problems. I can't count the amount of times I've repeated "solve the problem on a notebook, write down how you should approach it before you begin typing your code, otherwise you'll end up spending more time debugging." They don't like to listen, cuz they're the next Zuckerberg. The following day I get a bunch of emails asking why their code doesn't work.2
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Why the fuck are the setup instructions for the repo for Mac only?!! Oh, because everybody on the previous team used a Mac?!
Have you dick heads ever considered the possibility of new developers for the university module website not having a Mac??
And fuck your documentation too, half the fixes for setup problems mentioned inside the page doesn’t work. CS freshmen can write better documentation than you guys.
PS: that website and db is still not set up and setups should never take more than a day2 -
So I recently had a university project which focuses video game audio. We had to work in groups of 3 students and the task was to create a video game which uses audio as a gameplay mechanic.
Our idea was to create a game where you collect different audio samples which get looped as background music, and you have to select the correct ones to have a nice tune. To make it a bit more challenging we had enemies, guns and grenades plus doors which only open if the correct music is playing.
The guns fire on-beat, and the grenades always explode on the first beat of the next bar.
It was quite challenging to get things synced since even small offsets are noticable.
I wrote some nice code and theoretically it should have worked but for some reason the gun shots and the grenades didn't quite hit the beat of the music.
I tweaked stuff, created workarounds, optimized lot's of code to get execution times down but it still only worked sometimes.
I tweaked more and more only to realize that the timing drifted over time.
At that time I worked 20-30 hours on tweaking and trying to get it perfectly timed.
After recalculating some numbers I realized that all the audio samples are recorded at 135 bpm, but the guys who did the recordings said it was 130bpm.
I asked them if it could be the case that the samples are 135bpm and they said:
"yes, they are at 135 bpm as we told you"
I scrolled back in the telegram conversation only to see that they said 130.
Changing the number to 135 resolved all the problems and all of my workarounds and tweaks weren't needed.
So I worked for nearly 30 hours just because they didn't notice their fault and even when they realized that the timing is off sometimes (which took forever because they never played the game), they didn't even consider that they might have given me the wrong numbers.
This all wouldn't be that bad if both of my teammates had worked for more than 15 hours but they didn't. I did all the hard work and the only single thing they did fucked up my workflow. It fucked up the system I created and it fucked up the gameplay as things got unpredictable. Because of their fucking fault I worked as much as both of them combined IN ADDITION to all the other work I did (built 3 maps, coded everything, created animations, ...)
I love working in teams, but only if the whole team is motivated. Those two fuckers were the exact opposite.
Luckily i found the error so I could fix it, but guess with whom I'll never ever work together again?10 -
Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...
I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...
And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????
This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?
Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <3
6 -
A T.A. in my university.
He's kind of a java expert and the class was about advanced oop principles.
But the way he coded live in class and spoke clearly how he approaches the problems was the best thing that I got from the class.
Needless to say, nearly everyone that enrolls in that class, starts to love java afterwards xD1 -
!dev
In the name of my partner: GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FILTHY MUSHROOM ADDICT SLAVER! DAMN SUN OF A BITCH!
My partner does her obligatory internship for university. Guess what, the place where she is working offers no payment, 40h a week and even work unrealted to her studies!
She went there with pure enthusiasm and power and this whole non-sense facility of fucktards broke her. She lost her bliss and is really depressed now - mainly because of this fucktard, cock-sucking boss that has no fucking fire anymore and is abusing everyone there mantaly. If not for me she'd get not a songle positive feedback from this whole piece of junk which really, REALLY PISSES ME OF. FUUUCK. How can someone be such a joy sucking prick?
And the university?! They just don't give a fuck because they don't have enough employees to tackle all problems while at the same time their whole organization is the biggest pile if stinky, sleazy shit you have ever seen!! Omg.
Just had to get that out. Fuck.1 -
I wish my classmates didn’t know that I’m good at programming.
Recently, more and more often I am being reached out to by my classmates (and especially by one individual) about the problems they’re having issues with. For example yesterday, a guy fucked up his Git commit and made a bunch of merge conflicts, so I helped him fix this, which then lead to WinForms having multiple declarations of same objects.
And I really don’t wanna be rude, and I always try to help, for the love of god - stop bothering me every 5 minutes while I code, or at 10 PM while I wanna chill out.
Most of the things they have problems with can be solved by 2 minute Googling and I strongly believe that at the university level, you should be able to find solutions for your problems yourself - especially when you’re a programmer.18 -
I've got a teacher (math) in the university that let us use our phones as a calculator in the exam but without sim card and of course no wifi. I've spent a few hours programming a very ugly CLI app which let me calc and show me the steps of every type of exercise.
Another probe that programming can save your ass.
The exam wasn't difficult but basically they tell you to solve a few problems applying different methods, that hasn't advantage from others.8 -
Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.
Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.
I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.
A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.
I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.
On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg
The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.
I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.
But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?16 -
Back when I lived in my university dorm I shared my room with internet admin. Usually I helped people with internet problems when he wasn't there and I've placed FAQ on the door how to fix common stuff with a little note, that I can help only with internet problems and only with those that aren't listed. It worked for most people, but one guy knocked and messaged me around 5 times a day to fix his system. So I've decided to finally do what he wants.
He: come on, I heard from XYZ that you are an admin in job and you fixed her computer.
Me: but I work only with servers
He: what's the difference? Just copy my photos to my external drive and install new system on my laptop, just like you do it in job.
Me: so this is that simple job?
He: yup, but I need a laptop tomorrow, because I have something to do at the evening.
Me: okay
I've used find to copy all the photos from his HDD and installed minimal Debian without xorg on the laptop. He hasn't come back after picking up his computer. And that's the way to get rid of leechers that whine for fixing everything because you are IT guy :D1 -
It is the time for the proper long personal rant.
Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me
if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?
As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.
The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.
If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.
I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.
I might add something later, that is all for now. -
Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.
But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.
Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.
Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.
Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests. -
1 - I love coding because since when I was a kid I really loved to solve problems and create things
2 - I always tried to understand how computers worked, and how could yo make a program because when I was a kid I was almost always on the computer and my dream was to create a virus 😂
3 - I was studying my baccalaureate and I hadn't decided what to study in the university. I was only playing videogames and installing software to make jokes. So, my computing teacher taught me to code in VB.net and how to manage a local network so I decided to study and IT degree before going to the university, and when I was studying that I falled in love with programming so I'm currently in the university studying software development engineer -
It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.
I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.
At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story... -
How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?
A little background:
I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.
I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.
There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.
I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.
Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.
I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.
Thanks a bunch!10 -
Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)
Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of
I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.6 -
Beginner coder. We all have our own relative difficulties (lol my problems sound like simple addition compared to y’all); these are the thoughts from a cs student @ university5
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The time at university I was kind of burned out all the time.
I was far away from being a hard-working student, I needed more than double time to finish, but I constantly had a feeling of being stressed.
My free time never felt like free time because I thought I should learn/do something for the university.
Now at work, I can spend my free time without feeling guilty. Sure, I also have to think about problems at work sometime and I still should learn something to get better, but now I can focus on stuff I'm really interested in.2 -
I reported to our team leader (who is not a developer) that me and my colleague has been having problems with our senior developer whose codes are unmaintainable and messy. I told the team lead that I am losing my trust towards my senior developer and that his codes are messy and not following the coding standards. I was nervous at first because this certain team leader is tight with the senior dev. But still, I expected the team lead to be objective.
I was surprised because the team lead asked me if 'I was perfect' and then the team lead continued to shift the conversation towards me. Team lead then started to compare me with the senior dev which is unfair because I've only been working for 2 years whereas the senior developer has been doing this for 6+ years. Team lead said that I was arrogant. Team lead sent our convo to the other teammates and friends. Team lead told me that I am such a baby.
Fast forward, the senior dev talked to me. Told me that he was busy so he didn't get to improve his codes. Which I dont buy because I often see his discord status as playing during work hours. Told me that it wasnt him. Which I dont know if i should believe since he always lies. Told me that his knowledge is outdated. Told me that maybe because I came from a good university and he did not. He apologized and told me he will improve. Sounds good right?
It's a lie. Because then my friend gave me a recording of his voice ranting about me after our talk. In that recording, he said that I have nothing to prove so I dont get a say. He said that he doesnt care about me. He said that I am cocky. Which I dont understand. I only commented abt his work, why is he attacking me personally? Plus, if someone new like me already already noticed the flaws in his work, what does that say about his skill?
My teammates then asked me to just take the fall lol take note that these teammates were also complaining about this senior dev. they asked me to just give them what they wanted to hear. That I am the one who's wrong and the bosses are right. I said I wanted to defend myself but they hated me for that. They told me to think about what would happen to them. They told me I am selfish. Is it selfish for wanting to defend myself?
I defended myself. I told the senior dev that my intentions are for the right reason. He told me he understands. Later that day, a friend told me he talked behind my back again.
Senior dev told me that the team leader cried because of the words I said. Which i found confusing because it was my own feeling, my own opinion that i am losing trust with this certain senior dev so why would the team lead be so affected by that? Also, i showed our convo to the most objective people i know and they said that i didnt say anything that is offensive nor arrogant I have no control as to how people would react to the words I say. It's beyond me.
I feel so helpless. I told those things to the team lead because I think a team should be open to each other but I was blown out of proportion instead. My friend told me that the team lead and the senior dev are still talking behind my back.
If they do this every time someone tries to speak up, will they ever grow?24 -
I'm having some problems with an assignment for university, the special forces are trying to help me
3 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
I'm studying games development at university and as a course it may not be the best but I enjoy it. With the department courses like Computer Sciences etc run alongside and we're given the choice to swap if we want. At the end of first year a few left the class and a few came in.
Forward to now where we're actually making games. I'm in a team of 4 working on a minecraft clone using Direct X 12 (50% of the module). Immediately one asked "who actually wants to make games?" to which they all said "no... This course is pointless, I don't want to make games" . So now I'm stuck on a team with a group of people who think its all stupid and want to do bare minimum work and want to solve no problems or do anything interesting with the project...4 -
Have to apply as a software dev again. Going to study now and the amount of jobs that are available is too damn low.
Anyway i hate this formal stuff. Why would I need to tell you why your company is so cool. Your IT probably sucks and you know that.3 -
A really sad story of my cousin's carrier,
My cousin was a smarter guy in math during school grades but there comes his devil aunt and uncle during his high grades forcing him and his family members to go for biology in high school. They just want to use my cousin for their benefit, as they own many medical stores in the town they can use my cousin in future in their field. The uncle reached the school's principal and confirmed his admission in biology giving bribe.
Here where my cousin's carrier starts to demolish, as he was interested in math but he was forcefully admitted in biology class.
It was all ok till high school but further the uncle fought with family members misguiding them and took cousin's admission in pharmacy discipline in a university offering bribe. Here the min problems starts, As he is not interested in pharmacy he is failing in the exams and now he is under a great depression.
PS : The uncle ruined whole carrier of my cousin just for his future monetary benefits.12 -
!rant
TL;DR: Can anyone recommend or point at any resources which deal with best practices and software design for non-beginners?
I started out as a self-taught programmer 7 years ago when I was 15, now I'm computer science student at a university.
I'd consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to designing software as I already made lots of projects, from small things which can be done in a week, to a project which i worked on for more than a year. I don't have any problems with coming up with concepts for complex things. To give you an example I recently wrote a cache system for an android app I'm working on in my free time which can cache everything from REST responses to images on persistent storage combined with a memcache for even faster access to often accessed stuff all in a heavily multithreaded environment. I'd consider the system as solid. It uses a request pattern where everthing which needs to be done is represented by a CacheTask object which can be commited and all responses are packed into CacheResponse objects.
Now that you know what i mean by "non-beginner" lets get on to the problem:
In the last weeks I developed the feeling that I need to learn more. I need to learn more about designing and creating solid systems. The design phase is the most important part during development and I want to get it right for a lot bigger systems.
I already read a lot how other big systems are designed (android activity system and other things with the same scope) but I feel like I need to read something which deals with these things in a more general way.
Do you guys have any recommended readings on software design and best practices?3 -
I have struggled with leet code two years ago when I started university and was learning programming.
Now I am finally set to have a leet code interview at a large company, followed by a take home problem and a system design problem.
I started looking into leet code again today and I feel like I could had done so much more back then if I just had some help.
Back then I made the mistake of doing leet code problems in Java since that's all I knew and it used to make many simple problems last for hours.
I want to try it out using Python this time around since I don't have to focus on every little detail when I solve the problem. The company focuses on Python, Go and JS but I don't know Go and JS well enough.
What do you think? Is it a good idea or not? Should I just try JavaScript?
Also do you have any advice for this kinds of interviews?
i think the leet code one will be the toughest.
Some suggest I should read Cracking the coding interview, but I don't see the point of doing that
Good thing is all interviews are through Zoom since it's coronavirus season.2 -
Ngl I probably never would've learned any programming properly without it. I'm too disorganized and get distracted easily so I probably wouldn't have learned any language if it took me more than 30 minutes to get up and running. Plus I made great friends that I wouldn't trade for the world and learned a lot about myself and how I think and work with problems. I really doubt I would've become a hobby programmer so yeah. Unpopular opinion but I'm having a good time at uni. It also seems like my university does a lot more to prepare us for development in the real world than many other universities do so that might have something to do with it.1
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In the year 2015 I graduated from a reputated university. Though I had a couple of offers from my campus Placements, I did not willing accepted those offer and tried updating my CV in job portals.
On the day June 25th 2015, I still remember I recieved a invitation to attend the interview with one of the reputated company and I was like very much excited to attend this interview.
Interview process,
1) I had coding round which lasted for an hour and half and the best part is I scored max marks 😉
2) next round was problem solving or algorithm round it was quite difficult, but somehow I managed to clear that too.
3) final round was managerial round which was very much tougher than these two, My manager was real technical guy who knew most difficult industrial problems. In fact I should thanks him because he thought me how to organise code while development and also he thought me corporate ethics as I was a fresher when I joined there.
4) so I cleared all the rounds and joined the company around 10 days after 25th.
5) my journey in this organisation was very good. I had learnt the tech stack and there I started working as a microservices developer.
Thanks to my previous organisation. -
That moment your professor tasks you with writing a genetic algorithm and are forced to use MatLab (which I don't use).
"The University offers MatLab through ssh, so no problems, right?" Only basic package installed...
As cherry on the pie I found out that it's nowhere close to intuitive for me.
Got the feeling I could've done it way faster in the programs I'm used to, but finally got it working! -
So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.
My story is;
The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.
Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.
Thank you for reading.2 -
!rant
Currently I am studying "applied computer science" in Berlin and most of my modules are easy as fuck for me. Most of the time I don't even have to study for the exams. My programming professor even told me that I am the best student in terms of clean/readable code and he was amazed when I handed in on of my homeworks where I used MVC. Today I failed my math exam for the second time. It's the only module that I suck at, mainly because I don't give a fuck about it. I can easily grasp the concept of anything that I am interested in, but if I am forced to learn something my brain just shuts down. I truly fear that I will drop out of university because of math. I am still at my first of three math modules and I don't know how to handle this problem properly, having in mind that I still need to participate in two more modules. The saddest part is that I am not the only one with those problems and fears. I will link a news article of the German newspaper "Tagesspiegel" in the comments.
I know this is neither a rant or a question, but I just wanted to tell you guys about my problems and maybe start a conversation about the importance of math in our modern times and why school's aren't able to teach basic math in a way that young people are excited for it or at least are able to grasp the basic concepts.3 -
It annoys me immensely when I struggle with myself, criticizing my own lack of knowledge in certain areas and my colleagues say: "You'll learn by doing". No, I won't, that's a foolish dogma.
I won't and I have never learned by 'doing'. The best results I've obtained have been through understanding every last bit of what's under the hood of a particular functionality. I'm not going to understand the white box by constantly probing the black box, it's just unsatisfactory and insufficient information. It's even dangerous to base yourself on the black box results because you often might get false positives.
I got through university by massive multilateral sensory focus: kinesthetic (writing things down), auditory (listening to the professor), visual (observing graphs and models of the material taught), conscious (mentalizing it all and interlinking information so that later it's accessible from long-term memory). I can confirm this is necessary for the brain because a Neurologist once told me just that.
At least for me, I had the most horrible grades (D's and F's) in freshman year with the 'learn by doing' method and the best grades (A, A+) with the multi-sensory method in later years as I matured my studying methods. In fact, with that method I've continuously outsmarted other people who had 10 years more experience than me ('experts', 'consultants',..) but they preferred to stay in the ignorant 'bro zone' rather than learning things properly. Even worse, the day they arrived on the scene, they completely broke the production environment and messed it up for the whole team. I felt like banging my head on my desk. It just makes me disappointed in the system.
If you follow popular method, you'll soon find yourself in the same problems that arise from doing what everyone else does. What happens at that point? That's right, they have to call in someone who actually bothered learning things.10 -
Feel like shit, can't focus on work, exam coming up in about 2 weeks...
These stupid numerical algorithms are easy, and yet I manage to get stuck on every shitty little detail, I panic, and I completely lose focus.
This shit has been destroying my academic career... Can't focus properly anymore, cannot study even the simplest things - things that I used to do off the top of my head just a year ago.
My sleep schedule is FUBAR, it's a miracle if I manage to stick to the same timezone for three nights in a row.
Yet I'm still learning new things, trying out stuff and solving problems. Just not the ones that I need to pass my exams.
And before anyone says that university is useless and whatnot: I'm studying aerospace engineering.
I love it, I'm having great fun, learning amazing things, and I've met a lot of amazing people thanks to it. It's one of the few choices in life that I am certain of, and would gladly repeat over and over again.
I've burned myself out from stress, far harder and longer than I've ever done before, and I cannot figure out a way to recover from it.
I've been doing better in the last month or so, but I still cannot get any proper work done, and this is gonna bite me in the ass really hard, once again.
Funny story: I had 3 days of break between the end of the previous semester and the beginning of this one. 3 days of pure freedom.
In those 3 days, I spontaneously reverted to a normal sleep schedule (didn't even need an alarm clock) and felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders.
A year ago I had no idea what truly panicking in the middle of an exam felt like.
My mind had never gone completely blank.
I had no idea what impaired cognitive ability felt like.
This shit is scary.
Why do our minds have to make things so complicated? -
!rant
Hey there everyone :)
I am struggling with my next career steps and hope you can help me with your opinions. So I finished my IT School (HTL for German fellows) this summer, I am 20 and don't know if I should start working or studying at a university. Most of my friends start at a university because they say you will have problems in your future career without a bachelor title. Maybe you could give me some advise so I can make the right decision :)10 -
Since I lack proficiency in Object Oriented Analysis and Design and Datastructures and Algorithms and this has caused me many problems at work, I must review these.
You'd think you don't need to know the 'dry theoretical matter' as they say, oh but you do.. I found out first hand at one of my tougher programming jobs where you have to create everything manually.
And now, looking at my entire first and second year of university courses regarding this matter.. the amount I have to study is enormous. Datastructures and algorithms alone: 1000+ page book + 500+ slides.. and that's only fresh man year! Yep.
I could say there's a way around it but.. I don't really think there is. If I keep just knowing the basic programming concepts, I won't get far. I need to dive deeper.
Until I master this material, it will keep haunting me in programming jobs.
The frustrations of a developer..7 -
First Android app in University. Actually it was a calendar application that was really shitty in the end because I wasnt confident with different layouts which led to big problems and performance issues later on. But its sth I can talk about in interviews until today if the interviewer asks me, which situation was really important to me as a programmer.
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