Boss: "I looked at a testing suite. It is $2,500 a license and I'm buying 60 licenses. You should probably get familiar with it."
LeadDev: "Um, we already use NUnit, and it's free."
Boss: "Hmm...I'd better add Pluralsight training in the budget so you can learn about the new program."
LeadDev: "Oh, no...we need new laptops more than we need software."
Boss:"New laptops? Not my budget. When we buy this new software, everyone is going to use it"
LeadDev: "Everyone? How will you monitor it's usage?"
Boss: "I'll have networking send me captures of all the running tasks on the dev machines. The test suite better be running. Writing good tests will be our #1 priority."
LeadDev: "Um, we already write tests using NUnit."
Boss: "I don't understand what you are saying. I need something I can visualize. This UI testing suite is exactly what I need."
LeadDev: "Maybe the testing suite would be better suited for you and QA?"
<click..click>
Boss: "Submitted the budget. There will be a test server available for you to configure. This whole project costs over $100,000, so don't screw it up. Any questions?"
LeadDev: "Oh...well...what server ..."
Boss: "Dang...sorry, I'm taking off the rest of the afternoon. We'll talk about this more on Monday. Get started on those Pluralsight videos. I'll expect a full training and deployments by next week. Have a great weekend!"

Boss: Hey we got a new outsourcing project coming up, you know anything about python, sql server and php?

Me: Never worked with sql server nor python but i can learn

Boss: Good, next week you go to the client's place and you start

Me: aight

(week later me at the client)

Client: Ok, your job here will be to fill excel spreadsheets with those fancy functions

Me: :) wut :)

Client: Also our printer died yesterday, can ya fix it?

I think i need a new job..

Boss: We are using Angular 1 in our project, right?
Me: AngularJS, yeah, we are using it.
Boss: I heard they have AngularJS 4 now and it's faster and better.
Me: Angular, yeah that's much better.
Boss: So shouldn't we upgrade it? Can you do it this week?
Me: Erm... It's gonna take more than a week.
Boss: How much time do you need?
Me: 6 months, at least.
Boss: What if I put one more guy with you on this? How much time will it take then?
Me: Let me rephrase. It's gonna take 6 months for the entire team to upgrade all the modules in our product to Angular 4. Not including the time to train everyone on Angular and TypeScript.
Boss: Oh, Angular 1 is suddenly seemed to me a better option now.
Me: Smart move 😉

We need to debug a HUGE legacy code project so...

One of my worst meetings, as the sheer rage was unbelievable.

Backstory:
Architect: "Stop duplicating code", "stop copy pasting code", "We need to reuse code more", "We need to look at a new pattern for unit tests" etc.

Meeting:
Architect: What did you want to talk about?

Me: I built a really simple lightweight library to solve a lot of our problems. Its built to make unit testing our code much easier, devs only need to change a small bit of how they work.

Architect: I like the pattern a lot, looks great ... but why a library? can we not just copy the code from project to project?

... do you have a twin or something?

Boss: we have a project, we will need an application on Mac with objective-c.

Me: But I am a Java developer, I never touched a Mac or objective-c !

Boss: it's ok, use Google, you will find some useful stuff there..

Me: But..

Boss: we have a week for a demo

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Me (5 days ago): A major, life-threatening hurricane is coming. I need to prepare. I know you have a need to launch so I will do my best to finish your project.

Client: Ok, stay safe.

Client (today): I know you're not done. You're late actually. To provoke you into further action, we went ahead and announced the launch and people will begin using the website now.

Me (at the store buying food for the next two week): What in the actual ... Here is your code. Finish it yourself. May God have mercy on your cold, dark soul.

Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.

Me: Desirability is not do-ability.

Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？

Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.

I just got dropped from a project for taking 2 days leave. The client was like 'the rest of the team worked fine without him for 2 days, we don't need him!' :(

First day at new web dev job:
Me: what IDE do you guys use?
Coworker: Notepad/notepad++
M: Okay... Any version control?
C: Oh we don't need it. We just update the server pages.
*Boss walks in*
Boss: Heres the project for you to do just need you to rebrand this web app we made for client A for client B just need to change some scripts. Should only take afew hours.

I take a look. No comments. Not formatted. Missing braces and brackets. Semicolons at odd places and missing at others. 7802 lines of code...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I worked support after the launch.

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

Back to support.

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

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

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

Dev: Hey our current server is starting to chug a bit. Can I get approved for $1200 additional spend to double the speed?

Manager: *Sharp inhale*. We need this project to cost as little as possible, we really can’t justify spending any additional money for any reason right now.

*2 days later*

Manager: YOU ARE APPROVED FOR $100,000 TO IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT SOMETHING RELATED TO NFTs IN ANY OF OUR APPS. THE BUSINESS NEEDS TO EXPAND INTO THE METAVERSE ASAP IMMEDIATELY. I NEED AN ETA BY EOD AS TO WHEN THIS CAN BE ROLLED OUT.

Dev: …

BOSS: i will need your resume for this new project, can you make it?
ME: sure, but don't you have one?
BOSS: yes, but i would need it changed for a new details
ME: ok...

after work...

BOSS: we have a problem, remember that resume? we need it on english, and need it right now, can you translate it at home?
ME: ok, but give me a few minutes...

sends translated resume...
BOSS: ummm, it's not translated well, you didn't translate your education...
ME: the name of the school? you can't translate that...
BOSS: this lady asked for it, so do it...
ME: ok...

sends again...
BOSS: not quite there yet, you have Ć in your last name, translate that...
ME: translate my last name?
BOSS: yeah, this lady has a spell check and saw that incorrect...
ME: .....

im going to celebrate when i leave this itterate shithole

Me: So i've cloned the iOS project, i've run carthage, but it won't build.. Have I done something wrong?

Devs: Oh read this doc on github, we do loads of custom stuff. The depenedncy manager can't do it all by itself. You need to run `./scripts/boostrap.sh`

Me (another day): I've switched branches and i'm getting all these errors. Any ideas?

Devs: Ah this happens when someone modifies xyz. Read this pinned slack message. Run `./scripts/bootstrap.sh` again.

Me (another day): I've switched branches again, getting different errors, re-running boostrap didn't fix it.

Devs: Ah yeah, this happens when someone modifies abc. You need to run `./scripts/nuke.sh` and then boostrap when this happens.

Me (another day): Guys When I try to run the prod app its not building any ideas?

Devs: Ah yes have a look at this confluence link. You need to run `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`, then nuke, then boostrap and you'll be good.

Me: .... ok

Devs: Oh btw very important! do not commit any changes from `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`. It will break everything!

Me: ... no i'm sorry we have a much bigger problem than that. We need to talk ... like right now

Lead engineer: "Well, uh... I haven't really prepared a test for you but the HR insists that I should test you before wrapping up this interview.. so uh.... what do you suggest we should do now?"

Me: "Um... how about we walk through my latest project code and you can ask me to optimize it?"

Lead engineer: "Sounds cool, allright let's do that. How much time do you need?"

Welp. Did I just pick my own interview question?

Boss: "I know we just finished the first part of Client A's project but they also want this extra work done that wasn't in the contract."
Me: "Can't do it without pushing back Client B's work"
Boss: "Well we don't want that. We need to hit that deadline."
Me: "Cool"
Boss: "But Client A was really hoping this new feature which wasn't in the scope would be in."
Me: "Then we're pushing back Client B's work"
<<loop continues >>

Management: This project isn’t moving along fast enough, you know what we need?

Dev: An additional dev?

Management: No! An additional manager! We’ll have a meeting about it later today.

Dev: …

Every goddamn time.

Boss: Hey, how is the project going?
Me: promising. We have some basic functions working, but at this point it is more like a proof of concept.
Boss: Ah ok, I see.

Couple of days later...

Boss: I talked to a client who was very interested in the stuff you are just building. Made a really good deal! We need to be live by the end of the week.
Me: What?
Boss: What?

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Me: Boss, your new project is ready, we've tested the technical aspect but we're waiting on your approval before deploying, will you test it?
Boss: yeah sure, I'll test it in 5

*2 weeks later*

Boss: why isn't that project deployed yet?
Me: you haven't tested it, and we haven't gotten approval
Boss: oh right, I'll go test it right now!

*2 weeks later*

Boss: I NEED that project to go live RIGHT THIS MOMENT!!!
Me: sure, have you tested it yet?
Boss: nope, but I need it
Me: well, I'll put it live, but me and my colleagues are shifting responsibility to you, since you haven't tested it. Are you sure?
Boss: yeah, yeah whatever...

*put product online*

*2 days later*

Angry call from boss, bugs have been found, tell him that he approved the state of the product and that the bugs will go on the to-do list...

Boss is extremely pissed, but recognized his mistake...

Now, the boss actually tests everything thoroughly at the moment we tell him to! No more bugs, complaints, and I got a raise!

!rant

A: "Hi, I'm A, I'm the CEO of X, we had this project I'd like you to do for me"
Me: "Hi, can I have more details about the project?"
A: "Ah yes, this is some kind of e-commerce for our start-up, we need you to do a web app, iOS, and Android app in 1 month"
Me: "OK we can do it in 2 month."
A: "OK we'll let you know our decision tomorrow"

(next month)
A: "Sorry we have to postpone this project"

(next 5 month)
A: "Hi! now I'm building this Y start-up and we need you to help us migrate our android app to web"
Me: (Looks feasible than his last project) "OK, I can do it"
A: "Can we meet tomorrow?"
Me: "OK"
(tomorrow)
Me: "Hello? where will we meet?"
Me: "?"

(next month)
A: "Hi! Sorry for not replying, can we meet this week for the Y project?"
Me: (...)

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

Heard a fun quote from a project manager today:

"Naaah we don't need tests, that project is so small it wouldn't be worth it"

Seconds later: "Why does this keep breaking all the time and we only notice it once deployed?"

friend: so how are we gonna do this project together? download, edit then upload to google drive again. thats the fastest way.

me: how about git?

friend: what?

me: ill just create a repository and create branches before we merge it with master. no need to go through that process of downloading and uploading multiple times

friend: not sure... what... that.. is.....

me: oh we have a looooong way to go, ill guess ill have to teach u git right from the beginning

# Day 0:

Me: "Hey boss, I want to let you know that I need this kind of information from the customer for these features, otherwise I cannot finish the project's milestone in two weeks."

Boss: "OK, just continue as far as you can get. We have to get this finished."

Me: "Well, I cannot go any further for these tickets. I need that input. Shall we leave them in todo?"

Boss: "OK."

# Day 7:

Boss: "Whe didn't you start on these tickets in todo?

Me: "As I have told you, I need some information."

Boss: "We gotta get this out of the door!"

Me: "Yes, if we want to meet the deadline, we should. Yet I cannot guess the feature. Also, let me create a column: `to clarify` and move that ticket there. As I have said: I need that information. You have to contact the customer about it and get their feedback.

Boss: "OK."

# Day 13:

Boss: "Why isn't this project finished? There are still tickets open."

Me: "You never provided the information I asked you about."

Boss: "I want an explanation not an excuses."

Me o_O: "This is the explanation. I was asking you on multiple occasions about the required feedback. You never provided it. See the columns name? It's called `to clarify`. We created it last time together. That clarification never happened even though I told you that I need it. I cannot do magic. I can only implement features, and while I can sometimes make intelligent guesses to their use cases, I rather implement their actual ones than my fictional ones.

Boss: "You should have told me."

Me: ಠ_ಠ

(tl:dr at the bottom)
context:
my partner programming skills are pretty basic and he does not work in software development. instead he is in the largest (and only) electricity company here.
history:
one day his boss ask him "hey, do you know how to use google maps?"
Partner: "yeah, what do u need?"
His boss: "great! please make 10,000 routes with these coordinates, i need them for tomorrow"
Partner: "WTF!" ,grab his phone and call me, "(explains me te situation) dude, can you make like a script or something?"
Me: "Sure, but we'll need a loooot of coffee"
We spent 18 hours developing a routes generator with java-fx, mysql and JS.
Next day we went to deliver those routes and to "show" the system. They told us that after searching for 6-7 months, they wasnt able to find such a solution as ours.
Next day, I took a plane to this company HQ (My partner was food-sick, so i had to be there by my own), had a meeting with the TOP Bosses (on of them arrived in a Helicopter, lots of body-guards) and after a 3-4 hours, just like that, we had our first Big Contract with a huge ass company.

tl;dr:
we ended making an 8 months national project with the biggest and only electricity company with an 18hrs-developed system.

Me, a 19 year old student at a meeting with a "potential new project" today:

Her: So, we would like a website where people could rent a conference room, and pay for it on the website. After they have paid, we want automated emails to go out to us and the person that rents the room. We basically want an automated rental system.
Me: Sounds fair, what kind of budget do you have in mind?
Her: Well because you are a student and you still live at home, we have a budget of about €200 (~$220). We thought it'd be fair because you don't really need an income yet.

At that point I slowly tried to fade away from the meeting... Please help me 😭

At work:

"I do not get your concerns over ssl, it works fine when we use ie"

"What do you mean by xss? A regular use would not even try ans attempt something like that"

"We need to keep the txt file with the passwords there, its an internal project, the public would not even attempt to reach our site, just put them back"

Ah the many stories that I have from this place. It is an otherwise good place to work at tho, but oh well...

Me on a daily basis tho

Professor in college: We have our fest coming up. We need some volunteers for technical team to build website and android app.

*She says that and looks towards guys. Some guys raise hands saying they were interested.*

She didn't look towards girls even though some girls were raising their hands too.

Then she looked at girls finally....and she said "Oh you girls are interested too? We have cultural and decoration team. You can join that. "

I was triggered to next level.

I stood up and asked "Can't girls be part of technical team?"

She said "oh...yeah sure...." With not much hope that I would get into technical team.

But I ended up passing the screening round and got into technical team. She realised at that time that I knew my shit.....

There was even a time when I was in HODs office and she pointed at me and went "She is my student." trying to take credit for me being so Awesome ;)

LOL!

She was my guide for final year project too. We ended up writing a research paper and won best project award as well.

This was a year back. I have graduated and now I am working....
Just remembered....

(The PM is pretty technical)
One day:
Me: Could you create this subdomain?
PM: Sure, just a sec.
Me: Ohh and could you add a letsencrypt cert? (one click thingy)
PM: Why would you need that on this kinda site...
Me: Well in general for security...
PM: Nahh.
*walks away*

Next day:
(referring to my internship manager/guider as Bob)
Bob: Hey... we have a new subdomain!
Me: Yup!
Bob: Wait why is there no letsencrypt certificate installed...?!?
Me: Well, the PM didn't find that neccesary...
Bob: (Oo) of course it is... are we going for security by default or what?
Me: Yup agreed.
Bob: *creates cert and sets everything up in under a minute*

It wasn't a high profile site (tiny side project) but why not add SSL when you can for free?

Hey guys, dfox here. Due to many requests, we have decided that now you need only 100++s to get a stressball! Also, we've decided to make the collaboration free for everyone! That's right, any project you have in your mind, post a collab now to get help from other developers.

Update on my student job :

Today they put me on a new project.
Basically, I have to update a database of buildings owned or rented by the company. They provided me a lot of data including the address of each building but I need the GPS coordinates.
They wanted me to do it manually, copy pasting from Google maps (info: there's 75 buildings).
So I wrote a small script using an API to automate that, took me 20 minutes.

My colleagues were like "how the fuck is that possible ? We always do it manually, always takes ages !"

Last night I dreamt that I had done a large project for a customer.
Upon delivery the customer said:
"Now we just need you to deploy it, and then we're gonna sue Facebook."
"Nooo!", I thought to myself. "I used react for the project!"
It was a true licensing nightmare.

Manager Logic: The project is behind, we have brought on additional managers to satisfy the client. 😲 The fuck is a manager going to do? "Meetings! We need more meetings to ensure the deadline is met."

tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining

So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))

This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"

Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.

Then shit starts to happen

I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)

So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.

Release day!

I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"

That is not true, not at all, in any way.

See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.

So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.

So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.

I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.

Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.

And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.

And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.

Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!

So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!

A new urgent request today…

“ITS URGENT WE NEED THIS CODE IN IMMEDIATELY I DONT CARE IF ITS FRIDAY WE NEED IT THERE BY ONE HOUR”

“What is happening?”

“ADD THIS CODE TO OUR CODE”

(A snippet to track marketing conversions from fb)

“Uhhh it’s Friday and our product won’t release to the public for 2 months anyway?”

“YOU DONT GET HOW URGENT IT IS, MUST BE THERE IN AN HOUR OR WE’LL LOSE DATA”

“O….k”

Spoiler: data said that today we had no customers on an unreleased project. Go figure!

Please, do not "learn to code".
The industry is already filled with too many shitheads who think they're the next bill gates.
Most people have no business coding anything.
You might hear big tech screeching about "tech shortages" and that "we need more coders" but in reality, they're trying to flood the developer market with shit-tier coders so they can pay less wages, because they're too greedy to pay their workers a decent salary.

We don't need more coders.

You're not special.

Your bootcamp project looks like dogshit and 10,000 other people wrote the same thing only better.

Project Manager: Hey Gid, we need to start migrating project-A to the new Server.

Me: Okay, I will inform Dev-Q.

Project Manager: Please do and treat as top priority!

Me: Hey Dev-Q, we need to migrate project-A to the new Server and we need to get it done asap.

Dev-Q: But I'm currently working on some critical bug XYZ which PM wants fixed before COB.

Me: I dunno maybe you want to speak with him.

Dev-Q: I was told to...

Project Manager: Yes! we need that done right away.

Dev-Q: What about the critical...

Project Manager: No! treat this as top priority the client just called.

Dev-Q: Okay.

Me: Any update yet?

Dev-Q: Yep but it seems like the database is quite large and the migration may take a while.

Me: Okay take your time.

Dev-Q: {hours later} Pheww done! All files and database migrated successfully.

Project Manager: Good good. So the critical bug XYZ was also completed and migrated to the new server right?

Dev-Q:

I'm working on a project with a teacher to overview the project at my school to be responsible for the confidential student data...

Teacher: How are we going to authenticate the kiosk machines so people don't need a login?

Me: Well we can use a unique URL for the app and that will put an authorized cookie on the machine as well as local IP whitelisting.

Teacher: ok but can't we just put a secret key in a text file on the C drive and access it with JavaScript?

Me: well JavaScript can't access your drive it's a part of the security protocol built into chrome...

Teacher: well that seems silly! There must be a way.

Me: Nope definately not. Let's just make a fancy shortcut?

Teacher: Alright you do that for now until I find a way to access that file.

I want to quit this project so bad

Once, I overheard a conversation between my former PM and a client during a phone call.

Client: I will send the final draft of the project by Thursday.

PM: That's great to hear!

Client: When can I expect the updates to review the changes after the draft is sent? I need to present it at a meeting this weekend.

PM: It should be ready by Friday without fail!

Client: Excellent! Thank you. I will be expecting it.

PM: Sure, goodbye.

(After the call, PM joined the team.)

PM: So, team, the client for Project-A will be sending us a new draft for review and updates. They are putting a lot of pressure on us and need it to be ready by Friday at the latest. We need to treat this with a sense of urgency.

(After hearing this, we felt compelled to respond.)

Me: There's no way they would expect us to deliver an unseen draft within a day. Both the backend and Figma team members were forced to work last weekend, on Saturday, because you mentioned that Project B was behind schedule and the client needed an update by Monday. We simply can't continue working like this.

Backend guy 2: I also worked last Sunday on Project B.

Me: We overheard you telling the client that they should expect an update by Friday. It seems like you're the one directly putting the team under pressure, even though we still have three ongoing projects with tight deadlines.

(The office fell into an uncomfortable silence.)
(PM left the office without saying a word.)

Later on, I heard that he contacted the client to reschedule the expected time of arrival (ETA) after receiving the draft.

In a mobile project far far away...

Dev: Now we need a ui expert to beautify the app.
Boss: we dont need him its beautiful as it is.

5 mins later....

Boss: here Is a ton of ui changes dear dev. I trust that you have creative insight to make changes that I like :)

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"

Thanks God I'm a freelancer

A woman can make 4 babies with 4 different fathers in 9 months, right?

Someone decided we need a "rubber band programmer" who bounces around from project to project as needed, and that gets to be me.

So I work on 4 projects, with 3 programming languages, 4 frameworks, and with users in 4 complicated industries, none of which I have experience with.

And my boss wonders why I'm not as productive as everyone who has worked on 1 project for 5 years.

*the Company closes a project and splits us in different teams*

Me: *tells the manager for half a year about feeling extremely bad in the new team which is mobbing me, caling the previous project "shit" (it was not, it simply didn't need to be alive anymore cause we found out cheap alternatives) and not letting me do anything*

Company(half a year later): *sends me into a new project* we don't get why you are underperforming lately.

Me: *full burnout after half a year of being treated as living shit* yeah. Wonder why.

When your out of ideas

Boss: don't worry about the architecture, it's an one-off project, just make it work...

2 months later...

Boss: hey, remember that one-off project? we need to add in a few more features... Also can we reuse that code for this new one-off project we have to do for this new client?

CEO - So... We'll have a new side project, it's a small thing, I spoke with a guy, he needs just a small thing...
Me - Ok....... So, what do you need me for?
CEO - Not much, this guy started a project but wants your help on a small part, and you already did something similar for us, so it should be fast, just copy and paste and change a little bit. You probably know better than me.
Me - *Sigh* ... So `friend`, what do you need from me?
Friend - So, I made a crawler that is storing some information on a local file, I just need to add multiprocessing and multithreading, a producer-consumer system with a queue so I can automatically add new links every now and then, a failback system, so when a process doesn't finish, it should be re-queued and crawled later, store all the information on a database cluster (that is not set up), [......]
Me - And when is this supposed to be up and running?
Friend - Your CEO told me you could do this by the weekend. Can we finish this by Friday?
Me - *facepalm* FML

Some back info that you need to know for this rant:
1) I am a Canadain, so I spell 'color' like: colour.
2) Americans spell 'colour' like color.

Today I was debugging a Python file that I and my team of Americans and Canadians were working on. I ran the code and got an error that one of our variables was named incorrectly. I searched the code up and down for 3+ hours looking for the issue. After taking my lunch break I came back and read the file again. Then I realized it: I had started working on one part spelling color like colour, and then an American finished the project, spelling colour like color, so there were two different variables. This really pissed me off because we could have fixed it by deciding on a language before we started the project. I fixed it quickly and now we have a new rule at the office: always use American English when naming variables.

Moral of the story: decide which language to use for variables when working on a multi-national team.

Have you ever felt that you're being overrated by your employer ?

For our front end projects we use Cloud9 IDE

Now the business have around 100k+ files.

So Cloud9 is becoming slower and slower with every new project created.

So I was tasked to build a code editor where a new instance of that code editor will be created per project ( so, the new editor doesn't need to handle a huge file tree), so I "git clone" ACE editor and add to it GoldenLayout.js , FancyTree.js and some other plugins.

Now they think I'm a genius, and I'm like ... Eh? Should I tell them.. ? Will it backfire later ?

I kinda like the feeling.

What's the best thing to do in this case?

Client A: "I understand that we need to extend the due date for the project, but why we need pay extra for that?"

Me: "Because my people and I need money to survive as well...."

Day 1 at internship:

Manager: Can you get this RFID tracking system working? We have the full source we just need it installed.
Me: Sure thing, shouldn't take too long if it's a working system.
Me: (opens VS project)

Code is a sprawling abyss devoid of any intelligible structure, commented with broken one-liners which serve only to annotate method names.

In Mandarin.

For the record the system was broken, took me several weeks to track down all the issues.

Me: Hey Guys we've been working on this application(project 1) for 4 months and i think we're almost done.

Owner of Company(Not My Boss): CooCook4Choo we moving you to project 2, forget about the previous one.

2 months go by, project is completed.

Boss: I've got another project for you
Me: Awesome!

1 month later...

PM: We're moving you back to project 1
Me: Why?
PM: Our senior dev resigned, we only have junior Devs and we need a lot of help before deployment next month.
Me: Why am i moving back to a project i was taken off of
PM: Where an agile company and you will be moved off many projects
Me: **Fuuuuuuuuuuck!!!* Ok i'll need documentation of everything that happened in the past three months, the current issue, what the current sprint revolves around and A demo of what has been added.
PM: Relax, I've got a lot of work myself, you will get them soon.

2 days later, still don't have what i need, PM is on vacation.

Me: Guess i don't have any work to do.

Appretnly for 5 devs + 1QA we need now :

A project manager
A scrum master
A VP of engeneering
Another person I don't remember title.

yep 2023 will be "productive"

Product owner:

Okay we have users and groups. Users have roles, roles have permissions, but groups can also have roles or permissions. Clients have users and these client-users can have special kinds of permissions. Now we need to add projects which have pages and special project users who manage the projects, but only the client-users can set rights for which project owners can manage pages. Pages are coupled to roles, and assigned to workflows, unless the client-user already had the permission to... wait where are you going?"

Me: "Fetching a new SSD. I ran out of hard disk space trying to model the database design. Could you please start from the top when I get back?"

Hey guys and ladys. I've got another little rant about my teacher.
As some of you may know, i finished my final exams last week, so basically every relevant grade is done. Every teacher except of my special snowflake programming teacher spends the lessons casually talking with us (some even say we dont need to show up anymore).
Little backstory: Grades need to be done on 18th, June and i get my certificate on 22nd.

Back to my rant. Special Snowflake is different. He wants ANOTHER project. This is totally his idea and is nowhere mentioned in our curriculum. It has to be done until next friday, it has to be C# and we need a detailed documentation. This wouldn't be a problem normally - if I wouldn't be moving at the moment. Special Snowflake knows this but doesn't care.
Except from the criteria above he wants it to be:
- fancy
- loved by everyone. Literally we need to make something EVERYBODY wants in their daily life
- good looking
- everyone should want to pay money for this

How am I supposed to come up with an idea and program the shit out of it in less than 2 weeks, which i need to paint my new office and pack some more stuff.

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

- Project for a 40+b$ company.
- No business analysis.
- Only some 64 pages tech paper dividing the project in 4 iterations (pretty well written).
- « Please estimate the first iteration ».
- Can we do it in 2 weeks? Only items in first iteration, I think we can but we need a BA before we accept the project.
- Confirmed by senior dev front. 10 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- Confirmed by senior dev back. 12 days, says we need a BA before we accept.
- UX/UI senior designer says he can't estimate such a technical, says we defo need a BA before any estimations.

PM, who is actually the department manager, says OK we can do it. No BA and estimations are halved, UI/UX 2 days.

He fucking signs the contract.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER, WE NEED STUFF FROM FUTURE ITERATIONS IF WE DON'T WANT TO THROW AWAY ALL THE FIRST ITER WORK.

PROJECT BECOME A CLUSTERFUCK.
NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ANYTHING. THE CLIENT HAS NO CLUE EITHER.

The fucking dep. mgr assigns another PM and says he don't have time anymore.

NOBODY HAS A CLUE WHAT THE PROJECT IS AT THIS POINT.

We have 3 days left.

Whole team came to a conclusion: the only sane thing to do is to give our grouped resignation letters.

Thanks. It was fun while it lasted. Your dep. can go to hell.

Boss: I need you guys to give me an estimate on how long this project will take.

Team: We've put a lot of thought into this, and we think we can get it done in 2 months.

Boss: I need it next week.

FUCK THE RECRUITERS WHO ASK US TO MAKE AN ENTIRE PROJECT AS A CODE TEST.

Oh you need to scrape this website and then store the data in some DB. Apply sentimental analysis on the data set. On the UI, the user should be able to search the fields that were scraped from the website. Upon clicking it should consume a REST API which you have to create as well. Oh and also deploy it somewhere... Oh I almost forgot, make the UI look good. If you could submit it in one week, we will move towards further rounds if we find you fit enough.

YOU KNOW WHAT, FUCK YOU!

I can apply to 10 others companies in one week and get hired in half the effort than making this whole project for you which you are going to use it on your website YOU SADIST MOTHERFUCK

I CURSE YOUR COMPANY WITH THE ETERNITY OF JS CALLBACK HELL 😡😤😣

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

It is always very nice when you and a colleague are given a project that is nowhere close to being finished, a week to finish it on, and great motivation from the boss.

Being called into a meeting with the boss and he tells you:
"Ok, you know %s ?", project.name

"Yeah?"

"I need you and %s to finish it within a week", colleague.name

"A week?! We'll do our best but we need more than tha--"

"ARE YOU SERIOUS?! IT IS AN EASY TASK THAT YOU CAN FINISH IN A DAY!! I COULD DO IT EVEN BETTER MYSELF!!"

"We'll try"

Casual workday be like:

Project manager: It is important we deliver these features.

Me & Coworker: Sounds reasonable, here is how long we need, roughly.

Mgr: Well, the deadline is already set and the contract is signed and written.

M&C: Ummm...

Mgr: Also, while we are hosting the application, we are not paid for operational cost, so make sure to optimise the crap out of it immediatly. Preferably while developing the features.

(A wild architect appears): Also everything has to be built on cans and kubernuts, with rectangular ui and bootstyling and with these internally developed backend frameworks NOBODY tests. Coroporate policy you know.

(A wilder division CEO appears on meeting): Also we are rolling out code KPI's across the organisation. Everyone is expected to Focus on documentation, test coverage and there is now mandatory SonarQube scanning of repos. ZERO DEFECTS PEOPLE

M&C: ...

(Wildest Salesteam appears): By the way we sold the application to these other customers, they love feature XYZ and must have it.

M&C: It does not have feature XYZ

Mgr: It will have feature XYZ

M&C: Allright so with all the extra funding from the sales, we need to hire atleast one Machine learning guy, an extra frontend specialist a developer and maybe funnel some of the funding into slacking the operational budget in the start.

Animated Suit *Railing a line of coke from his gold plated ihpone 15*: What funding? Get to work. Also your havent been super sharp with your time registration.

This big multi-million consulting company hired me as freelance. They did it in a hurry, because "the project already started, it is a very important client (a bank) and we need your expertise by YESTERDAY".

In the first THREE WEEKS I had meetings with their own project managers, their client's project managers, techies, sales people. No one was able to tell me what do I have to do, but:

1 - they asked me for very detailed estimates plus a release plan
2 - f**k your estimates, we need this BY JANUARY 16th

New spin on the Manager / Dev format!

Recuiter: WE NEED AN ABSOLUTE NODE EXPERT, NODE NODE NODE, WE LOVE NODE! WHAT IS YOUR NODE EXPERIENCE?!?!

Dev: Well I've had exposure to it since it was nearly new, all the way back in 2012, and since my professional career started about 7 years ago I've used it fairly often on a per-project basis.

Recruiter: WELL HAVE YOU BEEN USING IT DAILY FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS!?!

Dev: Well no, as I said I've used it for specific projects... anyway, there are these things called weekends...

Recruiter: WELL WE ONLY WANT NODE ZOMBIES SO SORRY.

Dev: Thanks for reaching out and wasting my time.

Recruiter: ...

Dev: ...

God recruiters are like robots, don't they understand senior-level engineers are language agnostic?

Context:
PM is not an IT professional but somehow leads IT operations ... (yes... I know)
---

PM: "Hey xxzero0, do you remember about the XYZ project?"

xxzero0: "Yes, tell me"

PM: "I told the big boss we can use it to make starships and explore the universe, I also said we can cut the developing time because we are already at 70% with it".

xxzero0: "....... Do you understand we planned to use this project to deploy a small ship in the sea?"

PM: "Yes, but you clearly inexperienced developer, don't know it needs only some refactoring to explore the universe"

xxzero0: "It is more complicated. There is no logic at all. It is just displaying data without doing anything and..."

*Get interrupted*

PM: "Yes, we need some refactoring, I'm such a genius."

We have a huge codebase, built during the last 10 years, with a lot of problems caused by legacy dependencies. We are trying to modernize this gradually but it is very challenging because we have a lot of features to maintain and test coverage is low.

Today, a guy hired three days ago just proposed to rebuilt everything from scratch stating that he did the same thing in his personal project, so it wouldn't take too much to develop what we need.

Manager gently invited him having a quick call. I would pay to listen that conversation.

I need some advice: How could you stop laughing at a meeting? Help!

Yesterday, in a meeting with the development team, my boss accidentally wrote "Puto System" on the board (of course, I cannot post the real name of the project). For those who don't speak spanish, "Puto" means "asshole".

Oh, I laughed so fucking hard XD Well, we continued with the meeting, but I couldn't stop laughing, and then, I was going to ask a question about one of my tasks, and accidentally said "hard" instead of "boubt" (in spanish "dura" instead of "duda") and all of us laughed again.

At the time I'm writing this post I can't remember that without laughing, help! I need to get serious :'v

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

*during project development, we use a library as core of tye app*

Manager: We need to add feature X.
Me: The library developer announced that this feature is not supported.
Manager: why is that?
Me: *giving some tech explanation*
Manager: ok, but still we need it urgently, we told the client we already have it.

Just a simple day on my work

Friday 4:59pm
PM: hey, we need to add this new feature to the project.
Me: no problem, I'll take a look on Monday.

Monday 8:01am
PM: how's that new task coming along?
Me: 😩

Backstory: Offering manager brings a project through a few months of requirements gathering / feasibility study etc. Project spends 8 months with a R&D team to flesh out. Our team gets 6 months to turn it into a ship able product. 4 months in, offering manager calls a meeting.

OM: ok so you are all working on project X, well I need your input on something

Team: Ok, go ahead

OM: what do you think the app needs to do?

Team: ... I'm sorry?

OM: well we've been looking at it, and we don't think it does very much compared to existing apps. We need a killer feature but we don't know what. Any ideas?

Team: well we were looking at project Y originally, which was a lot more advanced. But you pulled the plug in favour of this.

OM: yeah, believe me customers will want project X a lot more. It just needs to do something interesting ... you know what I mean?

Team: not really, if it doesn't have anything, why did we go for it?

OM: ok I don't think I'm being clear. Point is, if anyone has any ideas let me know, we need to ship it in 2 months and it needs to be killer

I handed in my notice that week and was asked why ... let's just say I told them.

Managers when a developer misses something on a project: “we need to go red fucking alert and schedule several meetings on why this developer inadequacy can never happen again and make sure to record this and make sure the stupid ass devs read all the requirements and use this mistake to offload more of our work onto the dev team”

Managers when they or any other team member misses something on a project: “oh we just made a slight woopsie, just a tiny little miss on our part, a lil fucky wucky, no need to worry”

Me: I need more programmers for the project.
Boss: You have 4 people, that's enough.
Me: I have 3 juniors taking 50% of time of a senior (me) contributing less than a medior and rest of my time goes to managing project. I know that in 6 months time invested in them will start paying off, but right now I need more people. Also I don't have me, by that logic, cleaning lady comes to the office every day and we couldn't work witout her, so there's 5 people, at least.
Boss: You'll manage.
Inner me: I would if I was working 8 hours as programmer without tutoring and managing.
Me: Sigh.

Send help..

The project we're currently working on:

- an angular codebase that's broken beyond recognition - nothing's working as it should

- user stories are estimated in hours, but estimations are treated as hard facts. Since the app is so broken, everything takes longer than usual and it's almost impossible to consider every potential hardship during refinements, therefore, we constantly need more time than we have estimated

- retrospectives (intentional plural here, since one time isn't enough) are used to discuss why we cannot manage to finish tickets within the estimations

- the design was made beforehand and is extremely inconsistent and inaccessible

- if you open a new ticket, you need to add a reason for why this ticket is needed - in addition to the ticket description..

- The moment you move a ticket to QA, the "Scrum Master" breathes down your neck, shoving new tickets in your face. Despite having to finish up the other two you're still working on

- multiple teams are working on the application, but - of course - communication is overrated.

I could go on, but I'm too tired..
We were supposed to help the client for a couple of months - we're close to a year now and still nowhere near done.

I manage a team of engineers.

Toxic Culture Post #2:

Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.

Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.

Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?

Me: No

Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.

Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.

Management: foobar resigned. We need to have a dev who can work the android app project.

Me: You have to find a dev who can work with that stack.

Management: You!

Me: Me?

Management: Yes, You.

Me: Me? Why me? I'm a web dev.

Management: Starting tomorrow you will work for 2 projects.

Me: but..

Management: accept it or..

Me: Okay. -_-

Management:

Me:

Project Owner: We don't need Git, it's a waste of time to set it up!

Yeah, whatever you say old man...

| Me and my team presenting an half-assed AI project to our lecturer.
Note that the algorithm doesn't work and we have a placeholder |
Lecturer after looking only at the UI: The project looks very good, I believe we are done here.
Team member: Don't you want to check the code?
Me: *trying to choke him without anyone noticing*
Lecturer: No need.
Lives were saved that day.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Manager: Hey software engineer, how's the project going?

Software Engineer: Good, just debugging my code.

Manager: Debugging? What kind of bug are you trying to fix?

Software Engineer: The ones that make my computer turn into a lava lamp.

Manager: Ha ha, very funny. But seriously, how can I help?

Software Engineer: Well, I need a bigger monitor. My current one doesn't have enough real estate to display all the errors.

Manager: How about a second monitor?

Software Engineer: No, I need a bigger universe.

Manager: I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, keep coding. We have a deadline to meet.

Software Engineer: No problem, I have all the time in the world. I just need to find a way to slow down time.

Manager: I wish I had your optimism. Just let me know if you need anything else.

Software Engineer: How about a unicorn? I heard they're good at coding.

Manager: I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, stick to using a keyboard.

Client project manager calls me up one day

PM: hey can you make some precise estimates on some items for a project you’re not working on? It should be easy. It’s very similar to the project you ARE working on and it’s only a handful of user stories, mostly front end stuff. We´ll need this to be done by tomorrow night.

Me: um, I guess if it’s just a few simple items. ok

PM: great! I’ll let you know when you get access to the backlog.

Me: sounds good

Link to project is sent to me. Backlog contains over 20 user stories, most of which are backend related. And it doesn’t have much to do with my current project.

I contact PM: this isn’t exactly what you announced when I had you on the phone. If you want precise estimates with a minimum of design, this could take up to a week. I could however proceed to some ballpark estimates (poker planning) for starters if you need this quickly for your roadmap.

PM: no I need PRECISE estimates down to the hour for each item.

Me: ok then, it’ll take up to a week.

PM: 🤬🤬🤬. You told me it could be done in a day. I’m coming to realize your word can’t really be trusted.

Me: 🤦🏻‍♂️

One of the guys in my uni group project accused me of bullying, shutting him out of the group, ignoring him and taking over his work. He complained to head of year, I had to have a "discussion" with head of year, welfare tutor and my personal tutor.

For supporting evidence, I brought the message he'd posted in our team Facebook group where he told me to do the thing I was doing. The discussion didn't last long, but it seemed he was unhappy with me asking questions, mean things like "I need a draft api to do my work, why don't we sit down and design it instead of the UI you're working on?"

Conclusion? He "worked on a separate project". Got to the end of the year, the whole class went for pub drinks, someone else came up to me, had been through the exact same thing, exact same person, different group project.

Group projects teach you to hate people.

DO NOT be afraid to argue with people. It doesnt matter who they are. Senior engineers, tech leads, delivery managers, if you know something is wrong make it heard. I made a point of telling my Project Manager that the current project is the worst ive ever seen. The technology is awful and we all hate the development. They need to know this stuff. And if they come to you with a deadline that you dont think you can make, say it then and there. Then they cant come back and say why isnt this done. Basically dont just do as youre told. If we needed that we would get robots to do our job. We need people who think and have opinions and make those opinions heard at the appropriate level.

> be me
> work on a nice project with friends: A, B and C
> joined in a bit later, but before any real progress was made + we scrap the existing code, because it was Python2 or something
> decide on a framework
> A wants to create one himself, instead of using an existing one
> we fight for a little, but let A do his thing
> 2 months later
> been waiting the whole time
> +1000 lines on github, but still not finished
> "Wouldn't it be better if we would use the normal framework?"
> "No, mine is hand-crafted for that task"
> "But it is full of bugs"
> "If you find one major bug, we'll ditch my framework"
> finds major bug
> "That's fixed, just give me a min-"
> finds another bug
> "Thats just because you don't know how to use the framework"

- Documentation inside ONE gigantic README
- Library is missing the core features we needed/those which are implemented don't work
- Both B and C were on my side from the beginning (in that we should use "Already Existing Fully Documented Popular And tested Framework Which Does Everything We Need")
> "But i dont understand this framework so explain it to me"
> send him a few code examples + a tutorial??? (dont remember if i actually sent im the tutorial before i left)
> "explain it to me, i can't understand it"
> I CANT UNDERSTAND YOUR FUCKING FRAMEWORK DUMBASS
> ragequitted the server+project

To this day i still don't know, which framework they are using..
Also that Python 2 code in the beginning was because A didnt know the difference and copied (yes by hand) the code from atom to github without testing anything.

Tuesday.
Director: we need to add our partner's project to our ci pipeline
CTO: we need to add ci to this repo, it should work via this tool (not the one we use now)
PM: we need to use this new tool, figure it out until Friday
TL: we need to move all our projects to this new ci tool, don't ask, the task is given by CTO
Me: okay

Friday.
Me: everything is ready except for this one old project
TL: we couldn't use it for one of our projects
PM: we had difficulties with the new tool
CTO: we couldn't add our partner's project to the pipeline
Director: *gives me a warning for being incompetent*

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

PM: stressed out and during the briefing, keep reminding us how urgent is this project:

"This project need to go live this Friday"
"We only have 5 days to complete this."
"Client need this campaign to go live as soon as possible"
"We need to have a quick catch up every morning to ensure we are on track"

I have been working in digital agency for 7 years. When you heard something like this, there's a high chance that the deadline is a FAKE deadline. Very likely it will be delayed for another few days.

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

Today after working 7 days on a project. My coworker comes up to me and says he pushed everything on the server and that he cleared git to make everything cleaner. When he did I that he forgot to change some vital things. Now we have a black website running and no backup code. I was so passed at him. Luckily a stressbal works really well. I threw it at is head and felt immediately better. Sad part need to do it all over again.

So glad monday is my last day at my job.

Got a message from mgmt through teams chat today, to paraphrase: we are making our awful time entry system even worse. We are switching to microsoft projects next week for all project. So you'll need to enter in your company wide time sheet with 40 hrs every week, separated by project, then go to a seperate url for each project you work on and enter in the hours you worked on for each individual task given to you by the project manager. There will be no way of easily seeing that the hours in microsoft projects add up to equal the hours entered into the company wide time sheet.

I presented a graduation relevant project this week.
We re maked our school website. Our teachers liked it, the most students liked it too.
But at the beginning I made wrong decisions.

The guy who should design it made nothing and at the presentation, he told that you need a pencil and eraser to design a website.
A "friend" of mine should do the HTML/CSS part but instead of finish it, he made a not working search bar in JS and was like "I made this, it doesn't work and we don't need it but give me attention"

I hate working in a group.

Sorry for spelling mistakes, English is not my native language.

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

5 of us working for a larger team were tasked with doing some R&D, we blew everyone away and were given funding to start a new team and hire people to make the project come to life.

One of the high level sales / product managers we were reporting to, secretly had another team work on a similar idea because he needed it quicker (i.e. no time for research, just build it).

After forming new team, we were asked to work on his project instead because it was further along. 4 months later, big knob comes to a meeting and basically says "You know what, this doesn't look like we have enough features, we need more, but I don't know what".

Project blew up 2 months later, head of the unit kicked up a shit storm saying how badly everything was planned and canned everything. Now one of our clients is building nearly the same thing we were originally working on, the team no longer exists and i'm back on the R&D team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the R&D team, actually didn't want to leave in the first place but was told I had to. But the sheer anger and frustration to see that walking cluster fuck strutting around like his shit doesn't stink, derailing entire teams, meanwhile we can't hire new staff due to lack of funding.

Heres an idea, fire the fucktards bleeding us dry ... then we'll have lots of funding.

I believe this was the last attempt I had at doing a project for this customer before I just stopped replying to emails. I cannot emphasise enough how brutal it was communicating with this person. This was years ago. I'll keep it simple:

Customer: "Yeah so we need this page to look *exactly* like this. I've attached a picture, and I'll need this done soon because we're running a newsletter campaign soon."

Me: "Alright, I'll have it done by the end of the week." (I paid a student to do it, their work was impressive, it looked *EXACTLY* like the picture, but was now a functional web page)

*end of week*

Customer: "This is too exact!! I was hoping you guys would have some creativity, and have it do this and that!"

Me: "You said exact, we made it exact. I can do additional work to it."

Customer: "Well, we're not paying for additional work!!"

I left it at that.

[...] great! Nice to hear from you that you've got experience using C#! Our shipping company will also need a mobile interface for our IBM AS400 relic older-than-the-pyramids server, can you do that?

Me (a little displeased about the idea of working on a pre-existing legacy server): yes sure, I'm working on a Android project right now, so I'm learning a lot about it lately, I think it's totally feasible

Them: oh, but we are using a windows mobile device

Me (wondering why they are still using Windows phone): I can look it up and let you know btw

> Windows Mobile /= Windows Phone
> Deprecated since 2010

I'm fucked.

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

I think my project manager thinks I'm terminally ill or something. I tell him I have weekly appointments at the hospital. It's just therapy. I just told him I have a doctor's appointment I cannot miss so we need to move our meetings. I'm just catching a flight lol. He's very concerned about my health.

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

I'm currently working in a web application project with multiple environments for testing, and we need to give support to all browsers.
So when a 'defect' is iddentifyed by someone, we make sure we know all the previous constraints to solve it quicker.

One of these days, this "tester" comes to us:

Tester: There is a deffect in this X screen.
IT: Ok. Can you tell me what browser you were using in the test?

Tester: The same as you. "H T T P : / / localhost:8080"

:D

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

!rant

I need to pick a CSS framework for a[n eventually very large] React/React-native project at work. Any suggestions?

While I'm very good with CSS, nobody else is,
and eventually everyone is going to be touching the project, so it needs to be pretty easy to use.

I'm thinking of picking Bulma, or one of the newer, lighter frameworks, but I just don't know. (I'm also getting a lot of pressure to pick Bootstrap3 so we can... copy tables from unrelated sites? I guess? idgi)

Anyway, I have until Wednesday to completely convert over (it'll take me a day), and I still don't know what to pick yet.

Suggestions/advice welcome!

Sat down with the Project Management team today to discuss a signage installation. This is how the conversation went...

Me: Right, so we need to get the hardware on-site asap so we can get this configured before it goes over to the production guys to have the facisa installed.
Them: That's fine we have plenty of time. Stop rushing things.
Me: Okay, so do we have the story board in place ready for development?
Them: Nope. Hasn't been done by the designer yet because he is in a bad mood.
Me: Okay so when does the client want this?
Them: 3 Weeks' time
Me: But it is atleast a week of dev time?
Them: Sure. But you can work late if needed...right?

This is a typical conversation between them and me. I'm the sole developer here. So done with today.

!rant

My colleague saw this code of mine and said it is annoying conditions are not on the same line, since it is a shared project I can't go "that's my style!"

What do you think should I convince him why we need to follow this approach (at least it can be easily read rather than reading a screen wide line)

Boss"So, we need to get some data about the users using the APIs from this list of sites."
Me"Alright, sounds feasible enough"

Navigating to first site.

M"Hold on, where's the API?"
B"What do you mean? You're looking at it."
M"This is a website with a search bar, not an API"
B"Same thing. Get to scrapping that data."
M"I-It's written in a JS framework to be reactive in a half-assed way."
B"We need that data"
M"The data is not even consistent!"
B"That's why we need to join it with all these different sources."

The API was a lie. None of the sites had anything remotely similar to an API.

Having to use bloody selenium with chrome driver to scrap all the information because of course, it has to be done programatically every week from now on.

I just hope no captcha of any kind is installed before I finish this project.

So our last project was a hybrid application in Cordova
During client meeting:

Client (digital mobile lead) : So we have to integrate Nodejs in our App

Me: huh :|||

BD guy: yes SIR, yes SIR

Me: we cant integrate like that, both are different things and have different applications :|

Client: I am told that Nodejs is FAST and its Javascript

BD guy: yes SIR, yes SIR

Me: but (just started to explain the difference)

Client: we need to increase the 'bandwidth', we want another senior resource for this project

BD guy: yes SIR, yes....

Me: what the FUCK :|

New client: we have all the source files for our website just need it to be responsive. We paid a lot for it back then, should be easy to for you to work on.

*Sure we'll take on the project
**Gets Flattened PSD file, HTML CSS JS Minified :/

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

There was a project discussed and the agreed deadline was 4 months. And the next morning we got an email that we need to deliver that in a week with absolutely no change in requirements.

My current situation:

Manager: How is Project A coming? Project A is top priority. I would like to see a PR today with fixes to the current tickets.

Me: Project A is priority! Sure!

*after 2hours*

Manager: How is project B coming along? I did not see any PR’s coming in?

Me: I am working on project A as it is priority.

*after 1 hour*

Manager: How is project C coming? There is one ticket pending. We need a fix for it today asap!

Me: Starts project C as project A would take more time. Starts Work on project C.

*after 1 hour*

Boss: How is project A coming? Where is the PR?

Me: As you said you need a fix for project C today, i started working on project C as it has only 1 ticket to be fixed.

Boss: I told you project A is priority, why are you working on project C?

Me: *doesn’t reply*

*after 1 hour*

Boss: There is a ticket pending in project D. Did you make a fix for it?

*This is my usual day at work.

*I am the only developer in my current company. It’s not a software development company.

*Note: I do complete all the work and create PR’s for all “pending” work at the end of the day for all projects and leave for home at around 10pm :)

What do you think? Lol

Imagine developing a frontend for 2 months.

And then one day, PM says, that we have a critical library that we need to integrate with. There is no other alternative (apparently).

And then you check the library, and see, that it's written in a completely different language, that we can't really integrate with.

Project restarts and you get blamed, for not mentioning this earlier.

Yay!

If you comment your code like this, I'd like you to rethink your life choices.

This is a project we need to work on in university. The code was given to us.

Potential client: "We need this project done, but don't have much of a budget. But, if it's successful, could result in a lot more work."

If you want me to invest in your company, offer stock.

FFS.

I've been been in consulting doing systems implementations for about a decade. I just started a new e-commerce project with perhaps the most agreeable client I've ever encountered - in fact they're extremely eager to make my job easier. Just today one of the stakeholders, completely seriously, uttered the phrase "maybe we don't need to care about IE".

After ten years living thru every client cliche imaginable over and over again I now find I don't know how to trust. Their acceptance of best practices and my recommendations is almost unnerving...

Messenging with a friend about me working with VBA on a side project.

Me: VBA brings back bad behaviour
Him: Like?
Me: I_AM_KONSTANT and this is a _globalVariable.
Him: Hahaha^^
[...]
Me: Mister O. ...
Him: Mister M. ?
Me: Should i use goto?
Him: I think we need to break off contact.
Him: If you had said you killed someone. Ok.
Him: But GOTO?
[...]
Me: I did it. And then a cold shiver ran down my back.
Him: You deserve that!
____________________
( translate from German )

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

New project arrises says teacher, my mate and I go to the meeting and it seems alright, guy says he'll pay us $1000 each.
A couple weeks later, "Sorry boys cant get that much money need to pay you $500 each".

Now we have basically finished the whole thing he sends an email and it says, "We got a great fund of $333 for both of you."

Lesson learnt never work in a community project if your looking for money.

Not only are you not your job, your job is not worth taking home with you; unless it's actually your company, leave it in the office. You can love your job and still have days when you hate it, or days when you'd rather be doing anything else; that doesn't mean you don't still like what you do.

As a profession we can all be obsessive and not take the time out that we need, so make special effort to do so, even if that just means you're working on a personal project instead. Your brain, and partner, will be glad that you did. Whether you like to admit it or not, everyone needs downtime.

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

I haven't written a single line of code in three weeks and it's starting to hurt. I need a summer project of some kind but my brain isn't doing any idea-generating moves. Woe is me, this semester hasn't even ended yet and I already wish the next one would start right now 😂😭

Never thought I'd reach a point where I'd miss code (not my passion, simply a means to an end) but here we are.

So... About a month ago 2 interns started a project from scratch at my company. My boss gave them a project to follow as an example (more for the api and database side).

Wednesday they ended the internship and I've began to help fix the rest of the kinks that were left to be fixed. Friday we were finishing up the app and api to send to the client for tests. The database was created with 4 tables that were equal in structure... Imagine that you need a table for orders and they have status like pending, cancelled, finished and accepted. What they've done was they created 4 tables, one for each status....

Why the hell would you do this???

Fuck product managers.

Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.

I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.

So, I got a new job opportunity at another company, one thing we agreed is that I would need one month to give the notice, and leave the project I was working on with the company I currently work on. Today, after 25 days, they said "the project is not available anymore, we can't hire you", I already give the current company the notice. Making all the wishes possible to keep the current project I work on.

This is life telling me, don't change from what you know to the unknown, even with good positive reviews

TLDR: Ask irritating questions, you could end up saving the company money and time...

I’m working on a project where we are integrating 2 legacy web applications with each other.

Business Analyst/Project manager (BA) : Save all the contact details of the selected firm in application A into the database of application B, then expose that data later so that we can output it into the document when the user generates them.
Me: Seems a bit excessive, there’s even a fax number, nobody uses that anymore, are you sure we need all that?
BA: The old document has all that information.
Me: Please just check with client that witch fields are still needed in the document.
BA: Ok, fine, but it’s probably a waste of time…
BA: * Talks with client on phone for 10 minz *
BA: Ok client stays we only need the Lodgement Number on the document.
Me: We already store that and populate it in the document.
BA: I had budgeted 2 days labour for all that, you just saved us a lot of money!

All sysadmins, PLEASE! For the love of God just block port 21 in any direction from anywhere, going anywhere.. FTP needs to die.. The f**king protocol predates tcp/ip for God's sake! We need to stop project managers using it, it's a nightmare!!

!rant

My project is finally officially launched, it is a though and hard move since it's not yet finished.
Now for the next step, i need to find investors to fund our project. We got our publicity from news media, i hope i can get investors attention.

Nonetheless i'm proud from what i've created. I hope this company last

This is one of the picture from local news post about our launching.

Saucenao back then was in our scope, we wanted to use it for something cool, sadly, the Node.js library for it was really really fucking shit. Being the honorary idiot not realizing there's too many JS libs, I started a initiative to create a new saucenao library which is more modern, and more cleaner to work on.

My friend apprently jumped the train and started to implement more stuff until we reached the point where it's state became desirable. The library itself wasn't a seperate library and was a part of a larger project. But then, I realized a lot of people would find use for it so I released it seperate of that project. I ran out or proper nouns to give the library so I went with the meme character of 2017, which is Sagiri of Eromanga-sensei. Unfortunately, the name was taken and had to publish under my username scope. Then my friend contacted NPM so we can steal it (because apparently it wasn't even used). And fast forward to today, Sagiri became the most downloaded saucenao library that is published on NPM, with over 197 downloads per month.

I can't say I'm either proud or disappointed, but I think I fullfilled a need.

My project just went from "we can use one of those arduino boards, they are cheap and easy to use" to "we need a mass storage solution for that, maybe we can buy a shipping container and put it down on a nearby field as an on site storage". I love the things I would do if I had the resources for this kind of project!

I’ve been tasked with finding an experienced Project Manager for ‘a sensible cost’ - no specific budget amount shared.
That sounds like “we want the best, but want to pay very little” right?
It’s a massive project, they said “you developed this, did all the documentation and research, you can PM it right?”
“Can’t we just start making progress and adapt as we go?” They asked.
Sure I said (thinking Agile), but they said I just need to get on with it and let them know when finished! So no stakeholder interaction... this is not going to end well...

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

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

My mouth: Yea, sure. When works for you

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

My project manager just asked me if we need to do a release in order for the changes we have done to be seen in prod.

Yes… what do you think a release means?

So, rant!

So, global-huge-paradigm-shift project moving forward. Lots and lots of architects of multiple sites world-wide, stakeholders and business peeps and sub-corp manager and head-of-fucking-everything-of-multi-billion-dollar-CEO involved with different amounts of energy and passion.

Huge amount of money involved. Not only for the multi-year project endeavour but also in licensing costs for the years and years to come.

It's a big deal for the corporation.

And it's clowns everywhere. Leadership, project leads, technical project leads, architects. Am I one of them? I don't think so because everyone is mad at me. Since I cause trouble. Since I tend to say that I don't give a FUCK about the product being a Gartner Visionary player if you can't test the fucker properly...

Last week I attended a workshop in USA (I live in Europe) regarding this change which left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I am so far away from my comfort zone.

To these people (me?) get payed for this work? Is this really relevant? Why the FUCK did I need to go to a different continent? "The "Core team" need to be on site". Yeah, right. Fuck you Mr Project Leader, I can tell you are far, far away of being on-top of this thing...

Pointless.

It's pointless.

But I guess this is why you get payed.

Work.

Tomorrow is Tuesday and I think I will raise my hand yet again and explain to all I meet that I see HUGE risks with this project as it goes along right now. We kind of make things and that has to, you know, work. NOT making things for 1 hour is... well, that is really, really bad.

I give this project ten percent chance of succeeding above the set thresholds for all different areas/functionality. (I am sure the fuckers will alter the thresholds to show off a "successful project". Fuckers.

First month of project we suggest that we test that Entity Framework has made reasonable DB queries because the system will need to handle a lot of records. “Not a priority in this sprint because we need features.” Devs try to get it into every sprint. The last week of the project they want us to dump in a ton of records so they can test it. The N+1 SELECT query issue is on main queries. It is so bad and slow with more records that a simple query causes the container management to auto scale the application on a single query. They can have max 8 users in the system at a time and it will take 10 seconds to do a simple page refresh.

They get on our case and we dredge up all of the correspondence where they completely ignored our advice. Fix it now! We need another sprint. Fix it free! No.

Client : you are hired as a developer.

Me : we need more developers as there's more work and less time.

Client : Ok, here's another dev

(Meanwhile me doing my work...)

ON THE DAY OF DEMO :

Me : Here's the demo.

Client: it's incomplete, where's more work?

Me: that's the part of 2nd dev you hired before

Client : I don't care, I fucking need a work!

Me inside: (Why the fuck would the first dev becomes a task/team manager just because is the first one to join the project! Arrrgh!!! Hire a fucking scrum master to manage your fucking tasks/team, am just a fucking dev! )

In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.

My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.

I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.

>"We need this project finished for tomorrow"
<"But we don't even know what the client wants for parts X, Y and Z"
I'm currently in a sinking ship of a company that has no proper project management or documentation. Requirements mutate with the lead manager's biorhythms and all projects are delayed because he's incapable of scouting or retaining talent.
Unless I've misread their financial situation, I don't think they'll stay in business throughout the year without some major restructuring.

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

What is it with devs who try to bloody "cost optimise" everything to within an inch of its life when there's no reason to do so?! This ain't your personal pocket money project here. This is a real commercial app with real consequences.

Seriously, saving £100 a month might seem like a lot to you, but this is a multi million pound project we're talking about. That's bloody nothing, and no-one will care. If a Fargate spot instance restarts at the wrong time and causes downtime though, or if we need logs going back a week, and don't have them because the log retention period is a few days, then everyone will be royally pissed. All because you thought "it should be ok", or it "seemed like the right thing to do". Sod off.

Few weeks ago: Please write the system design docs for feature X of the new project Y. We need it in two weeks.
Few days later: Stop working on the docs, the customer hasn't yet bought that feature.
Few days later: We found that we included that feature in the main contract already. We need the docs in two days.
Today (docs delivered a month ago): There was a misinterpretation of the requirements and the contract, the customer hasn't bought the feature with the main contract, it has to be sold additionally. You didn't do anything 'til now, did you?

It would be really nice, if sales could finally decide what the customer bought and then tell me about the requirements that are already covered in the docs anyway. But I fear it could end in asking the customer 🤪🔫

Client: I want a fixed timescale and cost on this project.

Me: OK, what do you need?

Client: We need to integrate our website with our CRM system, which we're in the middle of rebuilding and don't know what data will be available from it. We also want sophisticated Google maps integration, online sale, digital agreement signing and a customer login section that works as a social network for our clients. And we want it in six months time. And an app. And we want you to pitch for free with some initial design concepts. And we want details of you project management strategy.

Me: Ok... Do you know what you want your app to do?

Client: Yes, it's an app! So how much will this cost me?

Me: D':

Project Manager logic (the best kind).

PM: Here are a list of the tickets we need to address next.

Architect: Hang on, didn't X raise a number of critical bugs yesterday? They were serious, we need to fix the critical bugs first.

PM: ... but he marked them all as critical

(so that means they aren't an issue? cool, i've been doing this wrong all my life)

I'm the lead dev on this team. The project is split into multiple separate modules to comply with separation of concerns, and so new devs don't need the whole fucking codebase (risking them running away with everything) to contribute to the project as a whole.

So we don't need a fucking config file to enable and disable features.

So we don't need to upload a 500mb monolith every time we want to test a change.

So we can test old fucking versions of modules without merging it back into the entire codebase.

What did this fucking dev do? He was having one small issue with Maven. One. It wasn't updating his local snapshots to the correct Artifactory version.

He decided, instead of trying to fucking fix it: HEY, LETS IGNORE THE LEAD DEV'S DEMAND TO KEEP THEM SEPARATE. IM GOING TO MERGE THEM INTO ONE MODULE FOR SOME FUCKING REASON.

I refuse to continue working with this dev if he's going to sidestep my demands and undermine my authority. He wants to go it alone? Be my fucking guest. I'm not touching his shitty single-codebase monolithic monstrosity.

If this is going to be a regular fucking occurrence, he can eat a dick and choke on it.

We are switching to an infinite scroll mode for our app. I told the backend dev in my project (we're just 2 people) I need an API to get more than one post at once.
He told me to use a loop to call the old URL 15 times.
...Not sure if stupid or just too lazy

[Working on some really "urgent" report for an about to publish project]
dev: client, can you explain what this value is? we can't figure it out and we though tha...
client: im gonna stop you right there, DO NOT Analyse! we dont have time for silly questions, if the design says there's a 10, just put that freaking 10 in that place...
dev: but sr, we need to...
Client: what did i say? just stop saying things and build it!

What a great day already

* Start learning grahpql
* yay it seems easy
* not 2 minutes later get message from professor to write an apology letter for that seminar that I did not attended (inner ultimate rage), and if I don't submit it I won't be allowed for the final semester of my last step of education

* wow claps for your education system and asshole "professors"

* fuck all friends who want to write their apology letter with "excuse".

* AT LEAST GIVE A FUCKING EXCUSE TO WRITE, YOU MORONS

* what graphql? oh yes couldn't continue

* checks messages on WhatsApp *

* Hey could you write me an email regarding a refund I need.

* ¯\_ツ_/¯ ⤜(ʘ_ʘ)⤏

All of this fucking shit storm and still I haven't been able to land upon a topic for the project

Oh wait, but you have to do your project in an industry, and IT HAS TO BE A PROJECT

Ah we don't care if industry allows a fresh intern to do a live project or gives intern resource and company space and invest time and effort in him/her. no we don't.

*WE WANT INDUSTRY PROJECT FROM YOU*

What can I do when my boss tells me to guide the “Senior Software Engineer” while I am just a “Software Engineer”?

Also, the SSE just asked me to help him/her with his/her project coz he/she forgot the skill that he/she was hired for.

I opened this up to my boss, he just told me to guide and not spoonfeed her.

So, questions:
I really find it unfair that we have different job titles, how can I tell my boss that the SSE doesn’t really have the skills to proceed with the project?

Second, do I also need to define and establish the criteria for Lead, SSE and SE within the company? (My boss scheduled a meeting for this exclusively)

I work with a few 'idea' and marketing guys. The quicker we can turn out a project, the quicker we can make money. Some days, I can get 3 quick, easy projects out. But sometimes, these guys get 'ideas' that are out of the norm so they can take a few days to get going.

One of the guys had an idea I knew was going to take longer than a day, especially with the rest of my daily tasks. This guy loves reading 'how to run a business' books and tries to say we need it today, 'nothing is impossible' (because it was in his book).

I explain reality to him and he gets all pissy. The following day he tried again, with something that would take less time. 'so, which one do you want? Yeah, I can do that one quicker, but the first one will take longer then.'

This guy don't get it. I will burn everyone of his fucking books.

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

I work on a team project for a test and maintenance course in University. We agreed as a team to adopt a git infrastructure that would prioritize the stability of the master branch at all cost by only updating commits up to the next stable point and tagging every single release. We have a long polling development branch to prepare our releases and we create feature branches for the tickets we need to resolve. I even wrote documentation to make sure that we don't forget and protected the master branch on gitlab from direct modifications.

Can someone fucking tell me how one of my teammates managed to fuck over all of this and work on an unfinished feature straight on master?

N.b. I know that he probably edited straight from gitlab's online text editor because they have a big where they don't restrict modifications on protected branches.

Project: Angular 11

Package doc 2.1: For Angular 13+
Package release 2.1: For Angular 12+

Me: Well, this package solve our problem but it need Angular 12 or 13 to run, so do we go for 13 ?

Team: yep,the update is on schedule so take it and update it later.

Me: We can also go to 14 directly.
Team: No, we prefer LTS version

...some weeks later...

Team: Update to 13 complete !

Me: Yes ! Let's go !

...Install package 2.1...

... Compilation...

🚫 Angular 14 is required for version 2.1

Me: are you fu***** kidding?

Final word: please, keep a good documentation on version requirements 😁

(The package has currently a 3.x in beta to solve the 2.1 angular 14 problem because why not 🤷)

I'm working on a project that is being shipped to production this friday, so we're killing all bugs and finishing all remaining features.
Sadly, one of the main devs just took his vacation last friday for THREE WEEKS, and being the small team we are, it feels like we'll need to work non-stop extra hours every day to meet the deadline.

The problem is, I can't sleep right now and it's 2:30 am, so fuck me.

somewhere in this world this happened..

Company lands huge enterprise project
manager: we have a year to get this done.
poor devs : excited and thinks about so much learning with this project it would be.
manager: Lets get work started with (spits planless jargons)...meanwhile another team is working on SRS.
poor devs: So we are doing R&D right..(excited)
manager: No we have a demo scheduled after 15days.
poor devs: What??
manager: Get on it..we need something to show on demo.
poor devs: no words spoken

...after one year of unplanned demos...
manager: we have to stablize project..UAT is nearing.
one of brave poor devs: No no..lets focus on demo...why do you need a stable product.
manager: instant rage

Manager said we need to use Queue. Several meetings after then I looked at prototype by 6 senior devs:

A QueueListener connects to RabbitMQ check for payload then *disconnects*;

A TaskProvider in ASP.Net.MVC.Core(whatever it is) listening http and dependency inject that QueuePoller;

A Visual Cron timer calls that http url every 5 minutes.

Wait for it: a set of database tables to store messages for another MessageProcessor.

It’s a XML to CSV file conversion project consists of 43 unique projects under a solution. I did it within 500 lines of Node with ElasticSearch and told we don’t use fancy new stuffs here.

At my internship we as interns had to work on a CRM system. We used the google api since the company is using google accounts already. Before the project is done my internship is over but I could start my traineeship 4 weeks later.

Together with another old intern/now trainee I spent 4 hours on debugging the login system the first day we came back. Turns out somebody thought we didnt need the application keys anymore and thus deleted the application from the google developer console....

Project requirements include a database. I don't have permissions to create a new database on the server, so I go to the person that spins up new servers and deals with group policy. They rustle some papers around, looking aggravated, throws up hands and says, "I guess I'm the DBA now..." Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do shithead? Ask the web team to do it? We don't have a DBA. My boss has been gone all week and, really, this isn't a hard task. You check a fucking box.

Whatever, I'll remember this when they need a favor from me.