Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.

Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.

Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.

Manager: No you have enough on your plate

3 hours later

Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long

Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.

I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.

I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)

After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.

Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.

So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.

But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant

Just an idea.

If I remember correctly, Symbian OS was a free, open-source OS, right?

How about people start working with it again? It could make a great Android alternative if enough were willing to work with it.

My experience with Adobe...
(I recently moved to Canada)

Me: I want to give you money. (Tries to pay with Canadian card)

Adobe: Sorry, you have a US account, you must use a US card.

Me: Okay, what are my options to pay with my Canadian card?

Adobe: We have to delete your US account and create a Canadian one.

Me: Okay... Why can't you just switch the country from US to Canada on my account?

Adobe: *bullcrap response*

Me: Okay, delete it and transfer everything.

*Kicks me out of the chat.
*I log back in. Try to reconnect to customer service chat.

Adobe: AdobeID unable to participate in chat.

*I'm 30 minutes into this ordeal

Me: (to myself) I could literally torrent this program in 5 minutes 🤔

Lesson: if a company wants people to not torrent their software make it easier for a willing fucking customer to buy your software!

Since the chat doesn't work anymore, I called customer service and am still on hold.... 😤😤😤

Why does the internet have borders?

"But I don't know where to start..."

"... just start typing, be willing to mess up, and if you get lost just start over with better understanding from messing up. Eventually it'll work."

*Interview*

Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?

Me: What is that I'll be doing?

I: What technologies and languages do you know?

Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?

I: Any experience working on frontend?

Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?

I: Can you work with databases?

Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?

I: Can you do big data processing?

Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?

I: Any experience in cloud development?

Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?

I: Do you know CI CD?

Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.

I: Yes. Go ahead.

Me: What will be my position?

I: A full stack developer.

Me: What technologies do you use in your project?

I: We use all the latest tech.

Me: Like?

I: All latest tech.

Me: You mentioned big data processing?

I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.

Me: what do you use for that?

I: Java.

Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?

I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.

Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?

I: Just to know if you're familiar.

Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?

I: Flash

Me: 🙄

I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.

I: Are you willing to join?

Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.

So, our clients missed their internal deadline this weekend so we as vendor were also forced to work for the weekend and implement new features in a very short period. I implemented new features and my project manager stayed to support the testing and sent me home as I already had tickets bought for the movie.

As someone who hasn't done any developing in a long long time he even tried to implement some changes and complex JavaScript dom manipulation that they asked during testing so that I could be with my gf.

Few hours later he called me and with a sad voice said he is simply too slow and needs my help after all . I came and we stayed until 00h and solved everything. He paid for the movie and taxi.
The thing that impressed me was that he was willing to took over my job so that I wouldn't break my deal.

Best project manager ever!

P.S. Yes my gf went alone at the movie and yes we are still together xD

Dev: So how do you want this feature fixed?

Manager: It should work how it worked before.

Dev: I'm new to this feature, I don't know how it worked before or what is broken about it.

Manager: Well just make it work like it worked before.

Dev: I DONT KNOW HOW IT WORKED BEFORE THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU. PLEASE TELL ME SO I CAN DO MY JOB.

Manager: Just how it worked before!

Dev: ...

Manager: ...

Dev: fuck you

So today I got removed from my freelance project because the client found out I listen to slipknot! What the actual FUCK? How the FUCK does it matter what I listen to?

And that cunt eater isn't willing to pay for the work I've already completed since "Slipknot is anti-Christian".

Burn in hell you piece of shit.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

Manager: "If needed, are you willing to work overtime this month?"

Developer: "Yes. [ ... pause ... ] would you give me some over my salary for sometime?"

Manager: Yes, increment happens every 6 months.

Developer: "I am thinking beyond it".

Manager: "No, it is not possible"

Developer: "Okay"

** alarm clock vibrates **

Developer: "It is 5:00 PM now. I need to leave. See you on coming Monday at 9:00 AM sharp"

[Developer left]

Manager: "Byeeeee ... "

Client: "I need you to implement a feature which does x"
Me: "We can it do like this, I can do it in Y hours."
Client: "Perfect do it"

Me: "Here you go have a look and if you give your ok I'll implement it on production."
Client:"That is not what I need. I need Z"
Me: "Well then you should have said Z and not x. But I can do Z if you want me to."
Client:"Do it it is urgent!!!!111"

Me: "All done here you go."
Client: "That works like what I said what I need, but I meant more like xZ."
Me: "Ok, you know I have to charge you for all this, do you?"
Client: "What why? It isn't the feature I wanted!!11 Do it right and I'll pay you for the right one!"

Me: "It might not be what you wanted but it is exactly what you specified to me. I'll send you the bill and will not continue working for you. Good luck finding someone who is willing to do unpaid work for you."

I am so done with that kind of client.

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

I think the coolest project I did was a few years ago, it was actually a Minecraft plugin.

I decided to learn Java for Minecraft, and a few months after I started learning Java, I was approached by someone who'd like to work with me to create this full-blown Gun Game style gamemode for Minecraft. I made it clear I didn't have the most knowledge, but I was willing to learn.

We began working on the project, the projects main class was bigger than any project I had worked on. Within a few months, it became one of the more popular plugins out there, even though we were still in an alpha mode. Had nearly 1,000 servers running the plugin, over 10k+ players total testing out the plugin.

Cause of this project, I learnt how to properly organize my code, how to make it efficient, learnt how to network, learned how to properly secure and verify anything being sent by the client, working with dependencies, adding features that can support a bunch of other plugins that other developers had, and a bunch more.

Sadly we couldn't finish the plugin anymore, so we gave someone else the source code who has kept it updated to this day. (I know I didn't provide much insight into what I'm saying and just gave a general overview, got a killer headache.)

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

FUCK YOU! YOU PIECE OF SHIT CLIENT!
I work my ass off for a month and deliver you the best possible design for your problem and a great booking system and you open up a dispute on the order stating the work I received was poor?

GO FUCK YOURSELF :@ :@ :@
Everything is working beautifully, I uploaded it on a test website to even demonstrate it. The only problem is he is getting the error of mysqli class not found on his fucking potato server, that is not my fault! Even then, I am willing to install the php mysqli extension on his dick server so the fucking "script" works.

Some people just need a fucking reason to get away with good work done without having to pay...I will leave freelancing if the dispute ends up in his favour.

Fuck this shit. At least I get confirmed payment for what I work for 8 hours a day if I do a fucking job.

Some companies be like-

.. In job posting - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

..in Introduction - We are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. in Interviews - We are the next big thing. We are already changing the industry. Think of us like Google / Facebook etc...

.. during Interviews - Our interview process is rigorous because we are the next big thing. We are going to change the industry. We are like Google / Facebook etc...

.. questions in interviews - Since we are Google / Facebook, please answer questions on Java, C/C++, JS, react, angular, data structure, html, css, C#, algorithms, rdbms, nosql, python, golang, pascal, shell, perl...
.. english, french, japanese, arabic, farsi, Sinhalese..
.. analytics, BigData, Hadoop, Spark,
.. HTTP(s), tcp, smpp, networking,.

..

..

..

.. starwars, dark-knight, scarface, someShitMovie..

You must be willing to work anytime. You must have 'no-excuses' attitude

.........................................

Now in Salary - Oh... well... yeah... see.... that actually depends on your previous package. Stocks will be given after 24 re-births. Joining bonus will be given once you lease your kidneys.

But hey, look... We got free food.

Well, SHOVE THAT FOOD UPTO YOUR ASS.

FUCK YOU...
FUCK YOUR 'COOL aka STUPID PIZZA BEER - CULTURE'.
FUCK YOUR 'FLAT- HIERARCHY'.
FUCK YOUR REVOLUTIONARY-PRODUCT.

FUCK YOU!

I see people complaining about their CS professors quite frequently. Meanwhile, my CS professor stays late and is always willing to help us out with our work. I've been to his office twice this week to get help with assignments, and each time he's glad to help.

Oh and he offers us a soda as we get ready to leave. He has a filing cabinet full of can sodas. 100% my favorite professor I've ever had.

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

So today I basically "lost" the chance to enter this remarkable security StartUp. The dream made true... a couple of Python nice scripts, the logic test that wasn't that big, everything was going well.

I met the CEO, damn! He seems to be a great dude. But suddenly, a wild co-founder appeared.

The dude started to talk about money and how he didn't perceive me as a Senior developer (not even if my results were telling him the oppositive); he ended up with: you seemed to be Mid-advance.
I was like: Ok, I understand. Wasn't that big because I knew that I could have demonstrated my skills.

Then he asked about my salary expectations, I answered to him my realistic expectations, that to be honest, it wasn't a lot of damn money! Because, I really was expecting a chance to learn more, have bigger challenges, bring value, etc.

He said: Okay let me check this with my partner. But, that was a week ago.
Anyway, today I received an email from the CEO, with the typical apologize telling me that the vacancy will be paused by the moment.

Oh, I didn't mention that one friend of mine is working there and he told me a couple of hours ago that they have hired a Junior developer because he was willing to accept what they wanted to pay him. Puff it broke my heart, but I wish him luck because even though I was dying to be on that security StartUp, I’m not at the point to accept a misery of money to work harder, I just felt frustrated with that stingy guy.

There are 3 types of questions.

Type 1 is a question that can easily be answered and mostly appears as the first result in Google.

Type 2 is a question that can be answered by stitching together various type 1 answers.

Type 3 is a question that has not been answered. It may be a bug you’ll have to find out about by reading an email chain 12 years ago or maybe a reason why epoll() doesn’t work on Linux VMs. There is no solid yes or no. You’ve most likely encountered this when reaching page 3 of your Google results and every link is purple (visited).

This is where depression and isolation hits. This is where you realize that if you can’t help yourself, no one else can (or has the experience and time to do so). This is where you must rely on your knowledge and infer an answer to your question pushing your concepts and theories to the extreme. If you solve this question, you’re solving it for someone else who may trek the same path later in the future. You’re solving it for the world!

If you’re willing to solve, attempting to solve, or even giving a reasonable inference about a type 3, you have a true engineering mindset.

I'm fairly certain that someone who is willing to type:

$command -h
$command --help
or
man $command

...would be more valuable than a lot of the people I work with who ask me for help.

Everyone has those ideas they thought of and were like, 'that would be rad!' but couldn't execute because of an array of reasons.

Well, two weeks ago I got approached by some people who had *thatmyidea* and were willing to pay me and any devs of my choice, to build it.

We've finished getting requirements and now I'm getting paid to work with devs I love, on a project I love!

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

Startup.

Our intern is a weird bird. He is an immigrant (like me) and should be working his ass of to become an FT, and then tie the H1B. I never had an opportunity like this.

Instead the dude sat on his hands for four/five months since hired. He was managed remotely and fairly low touch. He was doing some light support work initially, though I had not heard anything from him.

I take him on now as his ass is about to get dropped. Manage him much more directly (small tasks several checking per day, you get the picture). We need to deliver something relatively simple in three weeks.

On Thursday I find out that the dude has no idea of what Spring is (we are a Java shop). Dude, you have had access to our fucking code base for five months, didn't it cross your mind to poke in? Maybe do a little research and see what this thing is that we are using ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE? I sit two desks from you, why the fuck didn't you ask me a question? This ain't fucking socialism where we have a five year plan.

I swear, two things I dislike: incompetence and laziness. And incompetence can generally be cured with some lecturing if the other party is willing to listen.

Teaching new recruit some SQL (even though hes supposed to fucking know SQL and have multiple years experience but I was a contractor and idgaf, not messing up my money. Just fucking annoying to have an idiot around you all the time).

Me: Okay, so sys tables, so this one is for jobs yeah?

Him: Yeah

Me: Okay, so in this table, its obviously not one row per job per step cos you have multiple rows for the same job and step. Also, there is a datetime field, so what is it showing?

Him: Hmmmmm..... (after some time, back and forth we get to the answer).... history table

Me: Cooooooool, okay, so, lets say, I have a job with 5 steps. If i run it once, how many rows will be in this table?

Him: 5 rows.

Me: Correct, so if I were to have run this same job, 10 times, how many rows get inserted into the table?

Him: (Now...you have to understand, how long this thought process was, im trying to fill the gap with words but really, he was like, having a flashback or something...I kept quiet but silently wanting him to say anything....then he looks me dead in the eyes).... 10!

Me: Motherfucker what!?!? 10 What? If 1 time == 5, what does 10 times ==?

Him: Hmmmmmmmmm.... (yes...we are doing this whole flashback montage all over again)....... Ohhhhh, 1!

Me: .....Stop, think, its a history table. It holds history, for when every step is run for a job, why would it be only one row?

Him: OMG, I know what a history table is!!!!

Me: (Pissed off cos I don't take disrespect calmly). Fine, genius, answer, go!

Him: (LONGER WAIT THAN LAST TIME!!!!)....is it not 10?

Me: I swear, I'm gonna kill you one of these days.

Him: *chuckle*

Me: No...seriously....

TOOK 20-30 MINUTES FOR HIM TO SAY 50!!!!!!

And even then, I swear he didn't understand why. Serious, he was a special breed, had a manager that was a super tard and when I worked here, the spirit of that manager possessed this idiot, the CIO and his little right hand bitch zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

If there was ever a time I was willing to catch a case at work, it was there.

Bonus: Serious, it got to the point I had to come in and tell this idiot that he can only ask me questions today if he calls me by my name...and my name has changed today...and no, you can't ask me for it cos you need my name to ask me questions.....FUCK OFF kkthxbai.

I'm not sure why so many people are against certain languages..

This industry changes overnight so I'm kinda willing to learn anything I need to make my f**king program work...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.

Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.

However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.

The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.

I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.

Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.

What a fucking asshole.

So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

Job ad: Must have large amount of experience working in a completely unstructured environment, be hyper innovative and be willing to work HARD and have a PRODUCT MINDSET!

Translation: Management doesn’t know what they want and even if they did they are completely incompetent at communicating what that is. You will be accountable for reading their minds and coming up with something that makes them look good. This task is impossible so you are expected to sacrifice every spare second of your life in vain pretending it is possible. If you do somehow achieve it you will not be given any credit due to your “product mindset”.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

Job title: "Junior Application Developer"

Rest of job description: "4 years experience...Career level: Experienced hire/Professional"

Meaning: "Looking for a senior level programmer willing to work for a junior salary."

I hate job hunting.

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

Ha ha ha ha. Fucking morons!

You brag about being a highly skilled company.

You tell me I don’t have enough experience despite three years of uninterrupted activity where I currently work

You’re willing to give me a chance (I just don’t know how to express my gratitude)

BUT among your super talented team members you can’t find anybody capable of conducting a technical interview?? And you’ve been looking for over a month for someone who could do it?

Thanks for wasting my time with three useless HR interviews you worthless DIPSHITS!

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Fucking idiot lead dev who’s 10 years younger then me doesnt know fucking respect. Dumbass comes with every new framework there is:
- ow we should try abc.js
One week later
- now we should totally get in def.js. It’s soooo much better then abc.js!

Screwing up projects, asking for an extra pair of eyes and then asking wtf is this code.

Im out of here if we’re hiring toddlers for lead developers because they are willing to work 50 hours a week. I better get that raise soon.

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

All my life I have been living with my family. I'll soon be leaving my home and going to another city for work. I'll most probably be living alone and I'm quite apprehensive. Anyone willing to share their experiences of relocating to another city by yourself?

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

I got the task to set up an NAS, because "server has too high maintenance costs".
I built two databases for this company and the big boss loved my work. (spoiler:not because my work was outstanding but because I, as a student, am cheap and willing to learn).
And now? Reality hit me for good. I looked for a enterprise worthy NAS solution, sent them the details, they bought it and now it's 00:00 in Germany and I'm sitting in the empty hall, trying to configure the storage to work like they want it. On a friday. Alone. As the only member of the IT-team. With way to much responsibility.

So... Yea, fuck you for good. I hope your backup gets an disk error at the same moment i quit. (but first gimme mah monney)

Today I finished my robotics project. I had in my team a total idiot (the one who used the hidden divs, some might remember from another rant). I wanted to share with you the beginning of a ranting adventure.

Me: "you can begin with a simple task. I will send you the obstacle avoidance sensors values from Arduino, and you will send the data for the Arduino motors to dodge the obstacle".

The sensors give 1 if clear, 0 if obstacle is detected.

Below is his code (which I brutally rewrote in front of him).

Now, in the final version of the robot we have something like 9 sensors of the same time to work with.
Imagine what would have happened if we kept him coding. (Guess it: 2^9 statements! :D)

I was not that evil, I tried to give him some chances to prove himself willing to improve. None of them were used rightfully.

I'm so fucking glad we finished. I'm not gonna see him anymore, even if I'd like to be a technical interviewer for hiring just to demolish him.

I'm not always that evil, I promise (?)

Ps. He didn't even have any idea on what JSON is, even if we had already seen it during FIVE YEARS of computer engineering. (And should've known anyway if he had a bit of curiosity for the stuff he "studies")

I have absolutely nothing wrong with the desire to make money. In fact, I'm willing to bet it's inspired some revolutionary technology to be made.

But for fuck sake YouTube, im not some 20ish year old Instagram personality with 15k followers that posts pictures in front of expensive cars at the car dealership or at some hotel you're just touring with the word "entrepreneur" in my bio.

I don't give a flying fuck about trying to make "easy" money. Stop showing ads of those cancerous "I'mma show you how to make easy money. I just need 2 hours of your time and you can make easy money without investing a dime" bullshit ads. It's a fucking scam and everyone knows this shit doesn't work.

My friend tried this shit and surprise surprise: it didn't fucking work.

First rant!

The first time I got in touch with programming was when I was about 14 years old. I started a private server for a game called Maplestory (yeah you know it, I know you do) and had one of the most popular servers.
Topping all the rankings of best servers, getting lots and lots of traffic...
Anyway, I started modding the game and implement new features and quests. Right until my father saw our bandwidth. Because the server was running on my computer in my own bedroom 24/7 and blowing nice hot air in my room.
Our bandwidth limit was reached in just a couple days in to the next billing cycle and had to shut everything down from that point. And this happened a few times.
I was devastated shutting it down but learned so much from it. And it introduced me to programming.

Up till now, I'm almost graduating in computer science, already have 2 companies that are willing to hire me, and probably even going to work with my dad on a huge app soon

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

My SO got a promotion, and with it he's going to be out of town about every other week.

I told him I'm excited for him, that even though I'll miss him it's a sacrifice I'm happy and willing to make because it's so good for his career, and our future. I don't want him to distracted during his work trips about worries about my unhappiness.

But I miss him and this is so hard actually 😔

1 year and a half ago, I quit the job where I spent almost 6 years; My first job after that was as a freelancer for certain company here in colombia, but after sometime I learned that freelancing for local companies is not well payed at all, so I decided to try to work with toptal(a pre-vetted freelancer platform)

So the process included a first interview with a HR person, it was a british lady that mopped the floor with me(she wasn't rude at all but I felt horrible) 'cuz I couldn't speak english good enough, and then I was rejected... Some time down the line I created a rant for anyone that were willing to speak sometime to practice english conversations. @jesustricks and @orhun answered and in fact I got to speak with them.

@amyshackles spoke with me too, I reached her out over linkedin 😊

Just wanted to say thank you, finally I got a job offer with a nearshore company, you helped me a lot there, speaking with you people gave confidence and more knowledge. Again thank you, love you guys.

PS: you don't have to love me back

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

Hi all, first rant.

I work on an app on the Shopify platform, which requires me to look at the front end of people’s Shopify stores about half the day.

Can we PLEASE get the Shopify devs together and convince them to put a hard limit on the number of pop ups and slide ins and modal apps a single store can have running??? When a user (or app developer) can’t click on a product to buy it (or test installation) because ‘spin the wheel’ and ‘join the mailing list’ and ‘Karen in Ohio just bought a toaster’ won’t stop popping into the view, your UX is shit.

I realize people could still actually go in and build these things into their store code - but I’m willing to bet VERY few would.

Thanks - rant over.

I finally got a job at a tech company (although it's not a tech job) with a very good work/life balance.

Therefore, I plan on getting more serious about properly learning how to program in my spare time, also because, being a tech company, programmers are all over the place and are generally willing to talk about code.

I must say that while job hunting, devRant has been very useful to me since it allowed me to understand what kind of environment I'd like to work in. So far, the first few weeks of work have been great.

Ah, and the view from the office is unbeatable.

Applied to a company as an electronics technician for work starting in the summer of 2019. This application was back in October 2018. Got a quick reply that they already have a candidate and are willing to look into mine if he isnt the right guy. Two months later I hear back from them. They will look into my application now and I will receive their feedback after the christmas break. K. Finally a response. Ended up taking them a month longer with following reply. It appears we have forgotten about you we will have some more info by next week. This was on a monday. Thursday I receive a call. Errr. I accidentally sent you the wrong message. It should have been an interview invitation. Are you able to come by tomorrow morning?
Meanwhile I was in military service during this time till april 2019. This was written in the application with a statement, that anytime I have to ask for a day off, I need to apply for it atleast three weeks in advance. Ended up saying I have no more interest in their offer as I had signed my current work contract the week before they called me.
BTW: During the call some girls were constantly giggling childishly in the background. Which gives them even less credibility for being a serious company!

I'm the kind of dev who is willing to overtime because I enjoy coding. But my previous boss (owner) abused this opportunity and thinks he can call me whenever he wants. After my shift, he would be surprise if I go home immediately and ask If I will be working at home. He even called me while I'm in vacation (he wants me to work on a new feature). I already filed my leave 3mos before that. He is very manipulative to the other devs and doesn't even trust his managers.

I’ve been interviewing with a startup for a Frontend Engineer role. In the interview they said they didn’t have a designer, that their founder and other devs do the design work. I thought “ok so they are still putting something together and don’t care much if the UI is crappy”, and still proceeded with it. I do the take-home test, it took a lot more than the 1-2 hours they said it should take (these estimates never seem realistic), I thought I did a pretty good job and send it back to them. I then got an email back from one of the founders, they really liked the code and my approach, but the UX was not good enough. He asked if I would be willing to iterate on it if given some direction? The direction: design your own version of our product. I refused. I thought this was a developer position, not a designer position.

I just told my director that the solution for a particular problem that we have involves Machine Learning. For which I had already applied a VERY small app to make sense of an old database to make a NEW one since the old one broke every notion of how a db is supposed to be set (meaning that I recreated the project from scratch)

And on the same message I told him that I was not willing to do it using M.L since I was not paid enough to bring this level of heat to the institution.

Normalize telling mfkers that your skills are worth more.

I am paid well, but not enough to out of the blue tell mfkers that my ml based algo can save them./

Fuck em, fuck em hard, fuck em good, fuck em without even using spit.

I don't do this shit because I am paSSiOnate, since there lies the trap: "I mean, I love it so I guess I can do it, I do this on my free time either way" <---- no bitch, shit is expensive on the real world, don't do that wtf is the matter with you? *slaps* companies don't see it as a: "oh shit, employee X can do this! value!" they see it as "greaaaaat, I can save money on this", so fuck em.

Normalize it, y'all are wizards, advisors of kings, no company today survives without I.T. About motherfucking time y'all bitches take this shit by the horns and do with it what you want.

People form third world countries that need work: shit don't apply to you, currently, but we will make it apply to you on the rising, my kings, stay strong.

!rant per se

It’s funny, until junior year of uni I was a strong advocate of Java and was willing to argue the case for it. One thing that I definitely was taught in uni that a language is just a tool (for the most part). It’s the theory that matters, and that can be applied pretty well to most languages. Have come to the point that I actually get frustrated when people get into arguments of language X being shit or inferior to language Y.
Like many people perceive college as a place to just learn programming and stuff like discrete structures and theory as being time wasting, but i have come to realise that it’s quite the opposite, if you know the concept of something, applying it to a language is easier than learning how to do something in a certain language and then bitch and moan that “it can’t be done” in another language you are forced to work with.

Knowing the way you should be treated a super power. I am seeing a lot difference in my previous and the current manager. Ex-manager thought that we are robots and we work strictly 8 hours, if some problem came during the project execution, he asked questions which felt like I am answerable to unknowns and felt like that I am being blamed.
My new manager, whenever any problem comes, she takes it as a challange, she tries to solve it. There are quirks too but I feel a lot freedom now.
My anxiety is gone. I am only stressed sometimes which is a big upgrade for me.
I know better now that how I want to be treated, I am a person. Have feelings and yes I'm not perfect so lack basic things but I'm willing to improve.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

This was a comment I made on another ranter's post.

* Tailor your resume (and cover letter if needed) according to the job. No generic resume.
* Research about the company and make sure you have the same interests as the company. Clearly let them know why they should hire you. One question you can expect is: Why should we hire you?
* Show them that you're passionate about the job.
* Be curious. Ask questions. That's how they'll know you're interested.
* Be open to opportunities. Let's say you're applying for Full Stack developer role. Be open to take up Front End or Back End developer role. You don't have to accept everything but at least roles tangent to your job (provided they match your interest).
* Be flexible but focused.
* You don't have to know every listed requirement but make sure to know the majority.
* Don't lie. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work with dev roles.
* Be confident in telling them "you don't know" if you don't know. Also make sure to tell you're willing to learn that.

I remind myself that nobody knows everything, and even the most knowledgeable people have their gaps in knowledge.
For whatever I'm not doing well right now, I'll keep an open mind, and be willing to accept advice and work on it.
In the end, just because I'm not doing something right once, doesn't extrapolate to the rest of my life. I still try to be the best version of myself.

Geez, I'll be getting out of this quarantine as a stoic mindful person

Yes this is a rant about parents and work but I don't care!

So looks like my parents are going to kick me out because I don't have a full time job and according to them, I'm not looking...

I currently work in retail and have for the past 5 years and started working day 1 that I could have, been applying for IT positions when I'm one of the highest qualified on my area but get turned down so they can pay a teenager half the amount, apply for big retail chains that are "always hiring" like Coles, woolies and Kmart, get turned fucking down.

Don't qualify for government assistance as I'm just out of the earnings bracket, can't afford my own places, don't have my licence yet so I'm fucked...

But hey, atleast my parents will be rid of me and just dis-own me like my middle brother until I have a kid or they need tech support.

Why is getting work so fucking hard when you're qualified, I'm willing to even be a call centre guy but as soon as job possibilities come up I get fucked over time and time again -,-

So I had a meeting with a client, some time ago, asking for my expertise on rebuilding their websites frontend and backend within a month. I offered a very low price (as I am a student), which included 40 hours of work for 30$ an hour (normal price is ~120$). And done within 2 months. He turned it down by saying, that the price was 4 times too high... Clients are so demanding, but not willing to pay for their needs. He haven't found another yet. This was 2 months ago.

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Can any dev's recommend a good windows emulation program that supports x64 applications?

Really want to be able to run Gamemaker studio 2 on Linux but would rather not install a fully fledged VM.

I'm willing to work with a VM but just rather not have a 12GB installation for a 256MB program...

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

"Can I have an app? It's a million dollar idea: you take a picture of yourself and it tells you if you're pregnant or just fat. I don't have any money at the moment but I'm willing to give you 5%, maybe less if my friend wants to join. plus, no ads, and make it a free app so it will be liked alot."

Can you shut the fuck up? do you have any idea what the fuck you're talking about? that's the most fucking ridiculous idea I've ever heard. how the hell would it even work?

Most obnoxious company process: The newly introduced promotion process at my ex-employer.

Originally they had a run-of-the-mill process. You and your boss reviewed your performance independently, then spent an hour to compare results. If you agreed to have proven yourself, your boss did some remaining paperwork (iow he did his job) and done.

Under the guise of transparency, fairness and autonomy of employees this was changed to:
You had to find three coworkers willing to review you (favorably). You collected their feedback, processed that (strengths, "opportunities for improvement", etc) and presented it to your boss for review. These were the first two steps of four in total, of which I've forgotten the other details tbh. It became pretty ridiculous with you defining "progress indicators", your boss's boss involved in another review round and what not.

The true purpose was clear: Delaying promotions as long as possible, making the employees do all the work, and being able to just say "no" at any point. I don't know how intellectually superior managers and HR viewed themselves, because literally none of my coworkers bought this as an improvement.

But, yeah, that became the new process at a company too big to fail.

"Yes, the work could have finished way earlier. But it's easy, and I would have probably been bored of it and left earlier"

Finally got the reason why our fucking CTO couldn't create a fucking stable Backend for almost a year while the frontend team got all the slack because certain things are still not functioning well and while the marketing team every fucking time got their face red while showing the demo because the fucking api is not stable. Seriously, we wasted a whole year just because you could write something more interesting and enjoyable. Fuck you. Never been this willing to murder someone.

Context: A simple booking platform. No need for creating a complex distributed system while our userbase may not even be in million even on a peak season.

And he laughily commented maintaining it would be a headache.

I could seriously kill someone right now.

Submitted a ticket to the 3rd party IT provider today. Just like they always do they close the ticket instantly saying they did the work when they didn’t do anything.

Except this time they went one step further. They documented that they had a conversation with me and that they convinced me that I didn’t need the work done.

No such conversation occurred. I have not changed my mind nor have been given any reason to. They just want their ticket times to appear as fast as possible and are willing to lie through their teeth to achieve that.

Prepare for a shit storm motherfuckers.

Call me when covid-19 gets this bad:
From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus. Yet almost no media coverage. The "woke" people were in charge then.

Until then media outlets, STFU...
When all is said and done the media will be guilty of wielding weapons of misdirection. The disgustingness of people willing to use this outbreak as a way for political gain is abominable.

At my work?:
People have not been able to travel so that has been annoying.

Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier

Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.

I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.

My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.

I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.

What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.

Recently I receive a ton of mails from cool/hip/rockstar startups. They all run like this:

"We are a innovative Startup based on a [insert some random stuff or buzzword] blockchain! If you're a student with skills and experience in blockchain, machine learning and AI willing to change the world with our sick technology and make it a better place..."

The best thing about this: since they are a innovative Startup they expect you to work for free.

But who am I to judge something so brand-new and innovative. I contacted them to find out what these dank innovations are about.

They can't even explain what a blockchain is or the basics of ML and AI, they basically just want someone do it for free...

It's still ok since no one is gonna fall for this bait... this morning a friend of mine told me he got a new job... and he even can work from home...

I'm not even mad, I just feel sadness and sorrow specially for him, because he is a good dev and accepts big times underpay and now free work, because he thinks a day off in his CV will lead him to be unemployed 😭

Fucking hate it how people successfuly manipulate kids and youth to them to work 24/7 for minimum wage or even for free and some other douchebags trying to take advantage of this 😡

The other day I went back to my college representing the company that I work for interviews of Freshers. Since I was taking interviews of my immediate juniors, I knew that every candidate’s major is Computers Applications, and we had sent out a JD ‘specifically’ mentioning that we need Devs, so tech people only.
We interviewed 40 people for first round in total out of which 12 were shortlisted for second round (we made them write some code).
Out of 12, 8 straight up refused to write the code saying they weren’t interested in coding at all (even professionally). Made me boil up so much, someone else, much more deserving and willing could have been in their place and may even have the job. But us humans are always cunts.

So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.

I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.

I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.

They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.

Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.

Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.

Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.

This people, is why I don't freelance.

I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.

They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.

Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.

The company I work for used to be hosted on 3dcart. One day the site went down and their support couldn't tell us why. After over 24 hours of downtime they restored service but left 5 days of all records and customizations across the entire store, from the DB to the damn templates. Their support apologized for the outage blaming the disaster on a combination of hard disk failure and a bad update to their backup script. They were not willing to assist us in any way. We were forced to manually enter 5 days of orders (which gave them new order numbers and caused more problems), products and template changes, with order data coming from an internal email which was luckily CC'd on the order confirmation email. Thank God for whoever setup that CC, it saved our asses. In the end it cost our company thousands of dollars and 3dcart never composited us in any way.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.

I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...

My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...

It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.

I feel like a joke.

Me: Oh, man, there are hooks for react-redux now? I don’t have to wrap components in a higher order component to get information from the redux store and dispatch actions? Could this solve the problem I’m having with data fetching and consistency in the app I’m working on?!

Spends entire Saturday writing a basic server, connecting to an mLab instance, filling said instance with dummy data, starting a create-react-app, writing a reducer, action creators, components, etc. just to test how useSelector(), useEffect(), and useDispatch() would work in an application that isn’t just a simple counter (why is it that like every example is always the counter example?!). Bonus, react-router now ALSO has hooks, so got to play with useHistory() and useParams()

Conclusion: Maybe. It does appeal to me to not have the cascade of virtual DOM that you always get nesting HOCs, but I’m also wary of appearing too willing to jump on it just because it’s the new thing.

Has anybody else played around with react-redux hooks? Your thoughts?

Also, yes, I know, not every app needs redux. It had it when I was brought on and I don’t really have the ability to change that implementation detail now.

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

FUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!

I need to get off this frustration out of my system.

I have a autistic retarded sister who has less than a half brain cell.

Evolution from fish to humans was faster than completion of a task assigned to this faggot.

I fucking hate her. Why was I born in this family. Fucking why!!!!!

Autistic narcissistic cunt. Horrible human.

Doesn't have any friends, no family member cares for her, entitled bitch, earns less than $75 a year.

Whenever we meet, she makes sure to belittle me in front of our parents and gives advices and gyaan on how superior she is and how much waste of oxygen I am.

Constantly mentions that my career choices are stupid, whereas she is doing great (in reality she isn't even able to score a simple degree and no one is willing to hire her).

Acording to her, I have zero financial literacy and she is a genius (in reality I am managing the entire family finances and providing for everyone).

Even when I ask her about something, she says that I am asking stupid questions where as in reality she is an anti vaxxer. God damn fuck!! She was stopping my parents to get vaccinated. Fucking bitch.

There's a simple 20 minute task regarding some tax work and she took more than 2 weeks to even comprehend my request and now screams at me for raising the request on the last day. Bitch WTF! I told you well in advance and now you fuck me up entirely.

My parents are so fucking biased and will blindly side her because she is a girl and using this argument they have destroyed me emotionally over years.

Yes, I no longer care for any of these maniacs and want to leave this place asap.

For now, for the life of me, I am ready to pay more than $3500 extra in taxes than deal with this woman child.

I have a big problem guys. I am so stressed out that i have been crying for the past few hours. I joined this company as a fresher 2 years back by signing a bond that i'll have to pay them if I leave the company. The bond is going to be over on 25th Nov,2023. They extended the bond by 3 months. I was a desperate kid back then who had pressure from family. Now the situation is that i have performed well throughout my working period. They are heavily underpaying me. Now i have 2.5 years of experience but freshers are earning more than me now. They had been giving me work every now and then. Now they have made me the lead of a new team where i have to build the world's most useless framework that does not even make any sense. The most suitable developer who was also my senior refused to join the team because he knew how useless the work is and is going to take the troll on him. Now I have to do it.
My manager said that you are going to do this and the deadline is 3 months. Which is not even feasible. This is utterly stupid. It's a waste of time. I am so fucking stressed out because of this and how much freshers(interns whom i trained) are earning more than me.
I have a notice period of 3 months. No companies are willing to hire because of this notice period.
If I resign now, i have to pay them 75k rupees and plus I have to eventually work for 3 months. I can't do this. What to do in this situation.
I am trapped.

I'm a fullstack engineer, this period there is literally nothing to do, we are a 1000+ employees company.
I got so bored I toke over the database of our production server two times in a week, exploiting dumb vulnerabilities I discovered out of boredom, of course I reported everything.

The funny thing is that they just don't care, no one took action or is willing to fix it and they actually insulted me because I set a query in sleep for 8 minutes exploiting one of the vulnerabilities.

I work for a great company that hosts (in this very server) most italian citizens informations C: free to take for everyone c:

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

I get a mail 2 months into this fiasco telling me to register on their website and take up another test. I was already over with my emergency and was working my full-time default. (Fortunately I found another internship during this time which was one of the best initiatives I've worked with).

It asks me to register as a new user, take up the test and "share" my results. Not pushing it on insta/fb but legitimately share my test results link to my friends manually like a referral code. The more shares the more marks I'll get in the test. Why the test you ask. Of course to sign you up for the same Whatsapp trickery bullshit.

Luckily these nutcases didn't know they could be bypassed. I simply opened the link in incognito and logged in with my own account and that counted as a point. So I automated that shit.

Surprise surprise. The same fucking "Hello everyone" message into my mail. To my surprise I was relatively lucky to get ghosted after my attempt. This story is quite depressing in general cases. You're supposed to do this assignment shit for 2 months and then they ask for 2000 INR for a training period, past which you are paid between 1000/- and 7000/-. Though I didn't get the chance but I'm willing to bet you get 1000/- per month in a 2-MONTH INTERNSHIP. WTF.

You also have the other option of ranking first in their 3 consecutive competition that they hold. The theme is again to create chunks of their actual outsourced work.

WHY NOW:

The reason why this rant sparked is because I recently received an email with my results of the aptitude exam that I first took before the Whatsapp fiasco. I imagine they just pushed out a new update to their test thingy and forgot to set it's limit.

THE CORRECTION ARC:

I pushed this message to Internshala. They were kind enough to remove them from their website. I also shot down their Angel and Indeed listings. I sent a strongly worded email counting their con-artist operations and how I've alerted authorities (obviously a bluff but I was enjoying it). They most probably are not affected by this though. They might still be continuing their operations on their website.

I'm sharing the story here with the moral of:

Don't do jackshit if they're not compensating you for it

Always check for reviews before you start working at a place.

Be cautious of bulk messages (and the infamous HEY GUYS!! opening)

Don't do anything outside your work specification at least while doing an assignment.

You're free to question and inquire respectfully about the proceedings.

If you're good at your job you'll get good working place. No need to crush yourself with an oppressive job due to external restrictions.

And if you manage a company, please don't take advantage of helplessness.

There's no good ending to this tale as I have not received a follow-up. Though I want to see scumbags of their calibre shot down without remorse.

Good bye and thank you for listening.

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

Hey, I need ideas. Keywords: DIY, IT cabinet, cooling. I hope I'll catch your eye :)

So I'm doing my apartment renovation. Complete renovation, 100% everything is remade. Soviets did a lot wrongs but one thing they did I like - storage compartments below ceiling (like double ceiling.. does it have a name in English? I often see them in garages). So I tore down the old compartment and created a bigger new one. I've moved some of my IT devices up there: router, switch, raspberry, etc. Now... it's okay while it's autumn-winter, it's bearable up there. I'm worried temperatures might get very high during summer.

Compartment is not that big, smth 1m x 2 m x 0.5 m.

Any ideas for cooling? I could set up a vent fan to circulate air but it's hardly a cooling. Also not very effective. A/C is not an option as the compartment is too far away from outter walls. Also A/C might be somewhat overkill :) 5 minutes ago I've remembered I had an in-car portable fridge-like thing that could keep drinks decently cooled during summer. I'm wondering whether it would work? Any ideas where could I get this cooling mechanism (what to even google for? :) )?

Is there anything better in the market? DIY? I'm not willing to spend a fortune for this idea (one more reason A/C is an overkill)

So my first dev job has ended up as fucking dat entry after one of the contractors got bored and left.

I’m an SQL Developer (at least that is my job title) and all I do is fuck around with exchange rates in spreadsheets.

The only “proper” development work they gave me hasn’t even been applied to the test server yet (should have been done over a month ago)

And the project they gave me to look into migrating from sourcesafe to GitLab has ground to a halt.

I’ve been here 4 months and I want to quit already, that must be a record (for me at least)

I was keen an full of energy, willing to do some work from home etc. But a little piece of me dies every time i open Excel

We need to separate concerns. Too many CS courses skip over theory and teach outdated tools and technologies, often those of a sponsor who is failing in the market.

Computer Science is supposed to be about the science and formalisms of computation. The job of programming is Software Engineering. A few colleges have SE degrees, but too few.

No one understands anymore the likes of Knuth, McCarthy, Dijkstra, and Hoare. I'm willing to bet that most of you have never read any of their work. Few people really understand their impact on the tools we use today or the importance of their work. CS courses should teach that and expand on it so we can get more huge leaps in tools and concepts.

But we also need Software Engineering to teach students current tools and the latest paradigms.

CS, as it is, doesn't do that.

I'm not going to lie, the surge of bootcamps really irks me. Not because I'm afraid of competition, or that I'm an elitest. Mainly because a lot of people who attend these bootcamps have no real interest in software engineering. I sometimes attend a meetup, and it's a beginner meetup. I try to help out. And a lot of people clearly have no patience for learning software engineering. I try to be encouraging, but sometimes I just want to be dick and tell them "Why the hell do you want to be a dev, if you're not interested in how computers work".

I'm an 100% myself taught developer. Granted I'm 38 and taught myself programming at 14. But it came out of an earnest desire and love for technology in general. So I never shyed away from learning? C and assembler? Bring it on. Theoretical computer science? I can get with that. For me I loved computer so much, that I was willing to learn about anything in the realm of computing.

This is what annoys me with the adult bootcamp crowd. I feel they're only willing to learn as long as it's easy. If something gets complicated or complex, then they check out. And I a lot of their questions is "tell me how to do this/that". But they don't know why they would do it.

To me it feels like they're trying to fast track themselves to a dev job. Yet you would think if they're trying to do this all professionally, they would be open to learning as much as possible, and not closing themselves off.

My semi-friend who runs the meetup is trying to start a bootcamp himself. So I try I severely hold my tongue when I attend those meetups. And I want to be supportive. I certainly don't want to be the reason why people are turned off by programming. But at the same time, I hate how people are abusing this profession because they think it's fast money and an easy way to earn 6 figure salaries.

Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.

I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.

People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.

hey guys yesterday I got roasted cuz I was using a pc instead of Mac for development work and this was my reply. For me I don't gonna spend 2000+ $ only for 1 sec faster app loading and only for writing codes if someone willing to spend lot of money then they have completely command on there system Mac is very overpriced and overprotective it doest allow dual boot tell u what Mac sucks in 4k video editing,games,it don't even support maya or 3ds max rendering on Mac is gonna hit you hard , and there is same for linux but because it's free I don't much care about it but it is extremely crash and error prone I've installed Ubuntu nearly 20+ computer and after few days some kind of internal error occurred if u cancelled any ongoing installation it's going to hijack your system not let order program to install unless you manually clean that shit out ,yea Unix systems have bit faster app opening time and I appreciate that .
For nerds like me it's not only about coding stuff I like to do crazy stuffs

Well, my country aint very bright at least for me.

So you have few options, i will arrange them from generally percieved as shittiest place to best place.

You are student or whatever and work in small company. Thats where lot of people are stuck. Like me. Pay is... Sigh. When you hear dev can earn more than 1k$/mo its like "yes, yes, gimme, gimme". Forget about beeing just dev. If I left my company it would collapse within week, but bosses greed is insanity. Oh well.

Than you have that middleground that I would love to be in. Freelancing. Here freelancers can live really well if they can find contractors willing to pay for their services. Wuthin this space there is most profit but also that uncertanity. But its my goto.

Than you have miniscule group you **really** want to be in, medium companies writing software, usually b2b. Well, here you get often 2k$+ and bonuses for working your ass off etc, and benefits are minor but there is usually *something*

And than you have corporations. They often pay a lot, lot of benefits, but.... Its corporation, all ypu learned in small companies usually goes through the window, their expectations are high etc.

In my country everything is like everywhere else but pay is much less, especially in small company space, and somewhat smallish in medium company/corpo. Freelancers are least affected.

I had very small experience on programming and applied for a dev Job kind of accidently.
But having good mathematical Background I convinced the Interviewer to give me the chance of learning during an internship. So I started a console Tool for special testing purpose with good success.
After the internship they asked me if I'm willing to lern Javascript and HTML. Though I had a lot of fun there, the answer was easy 😏
Now I'm a senior there having a team of 4-5 devs
And I still enjoy coding a lot 😎
So basically I learned coding during work

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

We support a system we inherited from another company, it’s an online document store for technical specifications of electronic devices used by loads of people.

This thing is the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t written by developers but rather by civil engineers who could write vb...so needless to say it’s classic asp running on iis, but it’s not only written in vbscript oh god no, some of it is vb other parts is jscript (Microsoft’s janky old JavaScript implementation) and the rest is php.

When we first inherited it we spent the best part of 2 months fixing security vulnerabilities before we were willing to put it near the internet - to this day I remain convinced the only reason it was never hacked is that everything scanning it thought it was a honeypot.

We’ve told the client that this thing needs put out of its misery but they insist on keeping it going. Whenever anything goes wrong it falls to me and it ends up taking me days to work out what’s happening with it. So far the only way I’ve worked out how to debug it is to start doing “Response.AddHeader(‘debug’, ‘<thing>’) on the production site and looking at the header responses in the browser.
I feel dirty doing that but it works so I don’t really care at this point

FUCK I hate this thing!

!rant !dev

I was just on my way to work back from the University cafeteria when a guy in a black car - who I thought was moving the car out of a parking lot - stopped the car and asked if I had a second.
Naive me, thinking he might need directions or something decided to listen to him.
He looked older, around 60ish, with sunglasses on ( making it harder for me to read him).
He said that he had a stroke (or something) a few years ago and got damage to his brain, so that sometimes it can happen that he would faint. Therefore, he cannot go swimming unsupervised, and was asking if I would have the time to accompany him to the university lake, so that he could swim for an hour or so. He offered to pay me 40 bucks.
Me, being paranoid af, declined politely, saying I have to go to work ( which was actually true).
He goes on to say how he was a teacher, how he worked at the university before, how I look trustworthy, how I am the first person he asks today, and asked if he could have my number, so that he could call me sometime to supervise the swimming. I would just need to look out for him not to drown and if anything looks weird I should alarm the people working at the lake ( lookouts? not sure what they are called).
I kept declining politely and he backed off, letting me go without any fuzz.
Previously he also mentioned how some students are rich, others are poor, and how he would have done anything for 20 bucks back in the day. But also said that he accepts a no and won't bother me further.

He also mentioned he wouldn't lay a hand on me, that he is not a creep, since I could see his car and license plate, and if I gave him my number, I would also have his. That I shouldn't worry about anything, if I later decided to say no he would delete my number, and that he is not big on the technology and Internet so nothing would happen.

Uhh... well if he was genuine I'm sorry for him, but then you can just ask authorities at the beach to pay more attention to you, no?
Mentioning "all my worries" raised a red flag for me sort of.
Also, if you keep on fainting occasionally, even if you haven't fainted in 2 years, how are you allowed to drive? Or actually, why do you even drive then?
I don't know. The more I think about it, the more I think I should have taken a picture of the car or license plate.
And there are literal services for this kind of thing. Pretty sure you can get one of these if you are willing to pay even.
Jeez now I'm worried for the entire population of my university...

I landed myself an interview with a really great company for a DevOps intern position tomorrow.

Im really hopeful about this. The company truly seems like a great place to work with incredible opportunity to grow, and I desperately want to pursue a career in DevOps, but Im worried that Im underqualified. I lack true professional experience, and have really had no adequate time working with CI/CD tools, but I am very interested, excited and willing to work hard to become proficient.
Ive been prepping myself as much as I can in this last week (trying to gain familiarity with tools like jenkins, artifactory, chef etc), and so I ask to you, my fellow ranters (particularly DevOps), are there any final tips or bits of advice that I can take to really impress my interviewers and better my chances of getting this position?

Also, hello again to my old devRant pals~ I miss hanging around here and conversing with you great people

!rant
Tl;Dr: I ate shit for 3 months and finally got rewarded.
If you read my last rant you might remember that for the last 3 months I was tasked with a formal QA of some hundred word documents. (Checking headers, footers etc.)
This is almost over (8 days left)... Finally...
Today I had to present the work I did to the head of IT. The presentation went fairly well and at the end she offered me that she would be willing to get me a job the city where I'll be moving to study.
I have only met her 4 times during the year that I worked there but someone or something must have convinced her to care.
So it's seems like I'm not going to have to bother with all the usual HR bullshit and will have the opportunity for a steady income during the next 3 years.
Today was a good day.

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

I just joined a new company.
Their CI pipeline is to give root access to staging and prod servers to every developer in the company and the manually git pull each repository (8-10 repos per server) and manually set nginx and port configurations. And if this wasn't enough, all of the 30 sites they have are basically the same site and they make the changes manually for each tenant (no env file). I'm amazed at how hard some people are willing to work.

I haven't felt an urge to post on here in a while just because things have been going so well. But this month, is just not that kind of month anymore.

I'm upset. I'm upset by how I've been uprooted from my routine. I know I shouldn't be that bothered by it and things always change. But what the fuck is this company thinking to be using it's own fucking home baked ticketing system!

WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS THIS SHIT!

Let's go over the issues it has
1. I can't fucking email my clients through it
2. all emails are not recognized automatically. In other words each new email creates a new ticket if it does not have the tracking number attached to it.
3. I have to fucking hunt around in my inbox that is now bombarded by every email that is created for this ticketing system. Slap on a fucking tracking number. And then HOPE TO FUCKING GOD that the person on the other end doesn't erase the subject and cause the system to create a new ticket just for it.

Let's go over Zendesk which they've decided to decomission.
1. I. DON'T. HAVE. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT. FUCKING. SHIT.
2. That's it. It's fucking simple

Seriously. They forced me off of my original platform because this company already had a "ticketing system", if you can even fucking call it that, working.

And just if you weren't aware, all of this change happened because my company got bought out. It got bought out by this behemoth company that isn't willing to let me continue using a system; that has been very efficient, mind you, and instead make me use their system.

I. FUCKING. HATE. THIS.

Every fucking day! I have to do this stupid bullshit of emailing clients from my personal work email instead of on the direct ticketing system.

When I first started using this thing I actually thought I could use it to email the clients. For a solid two weeks I was "communicating" to clients through their ticketing system. Only to find out that the entire time those clients were not getting my actual fucking email! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

Then these guys tell me after the fact. "Oh that's strange... We never noticed that you can't send emails through it... We always just had used our work emails."

Are you fucking jerking my chain! You guys have literally been sitting in this slimy pit of hell for so long that you don't even know there are better options out there!

You don't have to fucking live this life!!

I don't think I'm going to make it. Something needs to change. And I know upper management isn't going to do it, because I fought hard to try and keep Zendesk. They are not keeping it. After this next quarter it is officially gone.

I'm trying to think of coding solutions to make my situation better... But I shouldn't have to fucking do that! There are perfectly good working solutions out there, and this company doesn't want to budge because "that's the way we've always been doing it"

I'm going to fucking rip out my hair.

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

If you are a developer and you are proud of the work you contribute whilst remaining open minded, I applaud you. If you are a developer and you are overly proud of what you do, and you believe the work you contribute to a software project caries more value than the work another developer contributes, then go fuck yourself.

I am sick and tired of working on teams with people who are self-righteous. What you bring to the table is important, but it isn't the only thing brought to the table, so stop acting like what you brought to the table is the best thing on the fucking table.

What makes it worse is when someone disagrees with your work and you aren't willing to take any of it. You deny their opinion as if yours is vastly superior. YOU need to improve your teamwork skills, YOU need to stop being so arrogant and self-righteous, YOU are the problem.

An UI guy which actually complimented my will to work with non-dev professions in order to deliver quality features.
Spoiler: I am willing because you are awesome and are not offended in me asking questions outside my area of competence in order to be sure what I do is what you want, so if you happen to read this post kudos on you M. , not on me :)

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

Typical interview response from employers nowadays on a candidate's tech skills:

"We don't have the budget to teach someone how to work with the technology. We expect from you that you are already an expert and you need no guidance. We have neither time nor money for slowdowns. We are under pressure to deliver"

Back in the days "I'm willing to learn" used to be of value, but things have changed.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

So i have been learning c++ for more than 2 years now and i the most useful thing that i have ever created is command rine program in Windows that iterates over all the files on a drive and deletes those with a specified extension. So yeah life is pretty bummed up right now.
So i was thinking why not start by contributing to some of the open source projects.
Therefore i went onto github to find something to work with. However the list gontained either projects in languages other than c++ ( i have been trying to learn those) or based on machine learning.
So i thought why not get on devrant and find some people who are willing to work on some projects with me and in the process teach me some stuff. Therefore here i am asking you guys to collaborate with me as i am now sick and tired of making stupid patterns using nested loops.
PS: I am now 18 and in second semester of college pursuing a b.tech in cse

I see many people are FOSS enthusiasts here. Some only use free software on principle. I like open source alternatives too, but not every time.

As devs, our job is to make software. How can one justify preferring free software for all our needs, yet working on proprietary software?

Does advocating free software devalue your professional skills, while you're working on paid software?

If you do good work and sell your software, then someone releases a free thing solving the same problems, that's obviously bad for you.

Why should software be treated differently than other things? Have you seen a construction company building stuff for free? If you don't want to pay for your house to be built, can you find someone who builds it for you for free? I doubt that.

Yes, you can make your software free and accept donations. But you can't plan with that financially, you still need to be treated and payed as someone who creates value.

I have no problem with free software, I love the fact that many people can find the time and are willing to contribute to the public without compensation. What I'm saying is, software is a product of hard engineering work and builds upon knowledge and experience of individuals, and should be compensated like any other work.

What do you think?

Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.

I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.

WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.

I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.

Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.

I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,

Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.

I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.

Feeling overworked and underpaid, as my skill set improves I find myself less and less willing to do actual work, I consider my payscale far to low for my ability and as such I work far less than I probably should. My partner is doing well though, I guess that’s what I get for working with a start up.

Here’s hoping I can land a new job soon with that chunky pay raise I deserve.

On a positive note, I got pre-approved for a mortgage today so that might mean I can move into an actual home instead of this land lord bullshit.

I’m back on this platform after an awesome year of progress in my dev career. Here is the back story:

1. I was a junior dev at a financial technologies company for a little over a year.

2. The company was looking to hire an Integration Manager for its software with both our vendors and customers.

3. The pay was good and I was offered that position as a promotion.

4. I accepted it and said to myself that this is temporary. It will help me pay the bills and secure a better life, which it did.

5. Lost two years of my dev career in that position doing nothing but basic integrations (rest apis, web and mobile sdks, and work arounds for what does not work). Zero challenge. This is when I started to use devRant often.

6. On the bright side, the bills were paid and life style got better.

7. Two years in, any way out of the integration department is something I am willing to accept. So I approached every one and worked extra hard as an Application Support Engineer for every product in the firm for free, in the hopes of making good connections and eventually be snatched by someone. This lasted six months.

8. Finally! Got an offer to become the Product Manager for one of the apllications that I supported.

9. Accepted the offer, left the department, and started working with the new team in an Agile fashion. This is when I stopped using devRant because the time was full of work.

10. Five months in, I was leading a team of developers to deliver features and provide the solutions we market. That was an awesome experience and every thing could not have been better.

Except…

Every developer was far better than me, which made me realize that I need to go back on that track, build solutions myself, and become a knowledgable engineer before moving into leading positions.

11. After about a 100 job applications online, I’m back as a Junior developer in another company building both Web and Voice Applications. Very, very happy.

Finally, lessons learned:
1. The path that pays more now is not necessarily the one you wanna take. Plan ahead.
2. There is always a way out. Working for free can get you connections, which can then make you money.
3. Become a knowledgable and experienced engineer before leading other engineers. The difference will show.
4. Love what you do and have fun doing it.

Two cents.

Searching how to (insert dev related skill) then after that getting only adds shown for places that do professional dev work. No, obviously I am trying to learn the shit myself not willing to pay someone else, in fact add a sync my bank account to search just so google can comeback with results filed under you are too poor to pay for shit here are the diy results you poor dumb fuck using free wifi. :)

How hard is it to make a custom steno-lithography API? And do I even need one?

Hi, all. My name is J.A and I am co-owner of 3DPrintedDreams with my best friend. (We are both 17.)

During a brainstorm of what should be the flagship feature of our shop should be. We decided to take user images, (exact specifications TBD), and then use an API to transform them into .stl files so my friend can print it on his 3D Printer.

I am asking how hard or "easy" would it be to make such an API and what would be the bottom dollar if I were to make a collab post here about it? If anyone would be willing to listen, I could explain how all this would work in relation to the full stack of my website.

p.s. I understand that experience costs money and I myself have experienced this, but, we spent most of our money on the Pallete 2 from Mosaic. (about $500).

HOWEVER, we still have some money left. If a suggested price is to much for us to pay up-front, 3DPrintedDreams is willing to pay you in installments dermined by mutual agreement.

Thanks for your time and have a nice day!

-Josh

Co-founder of 3DPrintedDreams, LLC (Pending).

I chose Network/Cyber Security because it was my internship experience and they were willing to pay me good money to stay on... No but seriously I am much better at understanding how complex systems work than coding them. This job, as stressful as it is, is a different kind of stressful that the deadline-fraught jobs of software developers worldwide.

And i can do it fully remote.

Okay i am torn here.
Specifically for Indian devs(better if you into android)
Would you be willing to work for Rs 10k per month for 6 months at a startup as your first job?

Perks:
- nearby job. Its like 20 minutes metro ride
- known people and code base. I had worked with them last summer and know all their codebase. Its very large and will make me learn lots of new stuff.

Cons:
- nothing formal: its a startup, they don't have any bonds, they don't give any equity, any bonus, any compensation stuff etc.

- Too less salary: lesser than that of a delivery guy or auto driver

- Too much work load: they are going to fuck me up straight in terms of work. They got only 1 super man sikh who made the whole stuff and who wouldn't be there most of the time. I have to read his code, understand it , learn all the libraries and then make new features all by myself

- Too much pressure : they are going to take away my 6/7 days and then may call for update on sunday. Plus they will be expecting me to complete a task(which includes all the stuff i added in the workload point) in like 1-2 days

- better options available (i guess?) : If i don't go there, i would either continue to apply for more Android related jobs, or would start learning more on competitive i.e changing the whole path stuff,etc.

Alright, I'll try writing about my recent experience without getting too emotional.

A few months ago, I started a tech job in London and immigrated here for that job. I was glad this company wanted to sponsor a visa, as that was a requirement for me to live here.

Unfortunately, after only a few months in, I learned that the company I joined wasn't quite as nice as I thought it would be. Bullying seemed to be part of the culture. On occasion, I saw coworkers crying. One of my close coworkers was dangerously close to burnout and then "left with mutual agreement". The environment felt like a high school cafeteria. People were drinking heavily early in the afternoon and people were leaving almost at the speed of a revolving door.

I recognized very early on that this was not a healthy environment for me, but as I just signed a rental agreement for a year, and spent a large amount to move here, I was kind of trapped.

Very early on, I was told that the two people before me in the same role were let go right before their probation ended. That scared me off, for reaching out to management or HR. I didn't have the financial needs to lose my job, and due to visa restrictions, therefore would have to leave the country.

When my probation was about to end, and I learned that my performance was good, I decided to provide feedback to my manager. I only mentioned a few things, but still enough. The manager seemed receptive, but it did not seem like he was actually willing to approach the problem itself.

Sometime later, I spoke to HR, explaining some of the issues, and explained my intent to resign. The rep pretended to care, but it did not seem sincere. At the same time, I reached an agreement with my landlord, so I believed I had enough money to safely move out of the country.

A few days after I resigned, the HR rep told me that I owed the company a large amount of money. A part of it was in the contract, which I accounted for. Another part, she was claiming, but was not properly defined in the contract. It said something, but it was confusing. I got a checked later with a legal advisor, and from what I understood, the company would never be able to make me pay that extra amount. This simply because of the contract being so vague.

I told the rep multiple times in the initial meeting about the flaws in the contract, but she ignored everything I said. I then made a counteroffer trying to get her to back off. She then put that in writing, but manipulated my words and kept out all the arguments I made about contract flaws, and my departure being the company's fault.

I didn't receive a reply to my counteroffer for days. It was stressing me out as this could mean I would run out of money soon. Only a few days passed before I got a medical emergency at work just because of the stress all of this caused me.

I saw a doctor and immediately got 2 weeks of sick leave. When I contacted the company again, I was able to terminate my contract, without returning to the office. However, they still didn't want to waive the extra amount of money.

The HR rep pointed out in written communication to my lawyer, something in the trend of "if something wasn't clear in the contract, he should've just asked for details". In that same correspondence, it also stated that they were offering 'as a favor to me' to reduce the extra amount to only a third of it.

Since I never actually wanted to go to court anyway, I decided to settle with that. Now I'm packing to move out of the country, without a job and soon to be completely broke. If I would've stayed where I were and never moved to London, and never worked a day for the past 7 months, I would've had more money on my savings account than I have at this point in time.

I hope I at least learned something from this. I don't think I will move somewhere with a company-sponsored visa again anywhere soon...

Thanks for listening. Ranting does make you feel better :)

Co-workers with low commitment to a project are the worst to have. I am willing to trade technical depth for commitment in a team member any fucking day! Tech is easy to learn, work ethics not so much!

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

I suggested we make a feature that has a checkbox that is greyed out and always selected. It would have words describing what the checkbox does. This would inform the user about how the feature works, but won't allow them to change that behavior.

So I am ready and willing to create user hostile software features. I am ready to work for Microsoft.

Recently I've been considering switching to another job. I've been at my current employer my entire working carreer, and a switch might be a healthy choice soon. My current working environment is changing (and not for the best in my opnion), and I have never really looked over the fence. I've also felt that my current job lacks some real meaning.

I currently work on software for logistical purposes, but I don’t feel that my work aligns with my values, or that it tries to solve issues that are important to me.

I have received many job offers with higher pay and benefits, but again, none that really work on issues that I find important.

My question to you is wether (and if so: how much) you let your values and ethics weigh in your choice of an employer/project. And are you willing to offer up (financial) benefits for a job that aligns better with your values?

This is what I’ve got on LinkedIn today People are getting creative, not sure how to respond to that. I am curious to see what this scam is all about 🤷‍♂️

Dear PappyHans,

I hope this email finds you well and safe. My name is **** and I work for ******, a leading expert network company based in New York. I am currently working with a client who is conducting a project and needs expertise on Digital Engineering - ***** .

After some research I did regarding the topic, I concluded that you would be a great fit for this project, given your experience.

Please, let me know if you would be willing to share your expertise on this subject through a paid phone consultation. For your input and time, you will be compensated with a fee that you can set yourself. As a reference – the average rate of our consultations is around 400$/hour.

It is essential to note that in no way will you be asked to discuss your current employer nor any kind of confidential information during the phone consultation.

Should you be interested in this subject, I would be more than happy to address any questions regarding the topic on LinkedIn or by phone

Kind Regards
(Sender name)

Why are most projects only fun at the beginning? I feel like there should be a "first half" and a "second half" during development.

So if I have worked the whole of first half someone else should work the other half with full bar and zeal just like a football match because honestly most times I feel like I'm gonna die towards the end of the project hoping for another developer to come on as a substitution.
However, in this case instead of going to seat on the bench after being substituted, I am willing to play another match immediately.

!dev

Still haven't got a schedule for my master thesis defense after 2 months. The normal deadline is 1 month.
My professor is ignoring my follow up emails, even after the head of the program urging him to finish the review.
I feel discriminated as this didn't happen to other students that worked under him before.
I am job searching now, what if a job offer came but I still couldn't get a graduation certificate because of my delayed defense.
Will the university willing to compensate for the time loss not being able to work?
Maybe I should start finding out how to hire a lawyer in case I have to sue the uni.
😡

!Rant
Help/ideas needed

I need ideas of projects to develop in my free time, I'm tired of the old technology and ugly projects from work, I want to develop something new, fun, to feel the excitement of coding again ;)

The field does not matter i'm willing to learn.

And , no , I can get another job, that is not an option because of the special benefits it's offering that I can not find in another company(very flexible schedule, I'm a student and need it).

Software Developer Interview Questions!

Hey friends, for my IT Careers class I have been assigned to interview a software developer. I was wondering if some people would be willing to answer the following questions. Thank you so much!

Name:
Title of position:
Company you work for:

1. What is a typical day at work like?
2. What are your hours like? Are you ever on call?
3. What are the best parts of your job?
4. Are there any downsides?
5. What influenced your decision to choose this career? Are you glad that you did?
6. What education did you need to get?
7. Do you specialize in certain languages or types of programs?
8. Do you work remotely or at the job site?
9. What is your pay like? Are you paid by the hour, or do you get a salary?
10. Was there ever a specific project you've worked on that was your favorite?
11. Does your job require any work outside of work hours?
12. What are the biggest obstacles you run into as a developer?
13. If you could change something about your job, would you? What would it be?
14. What are some tasks you must complete for your job?
15. Is there anything you wish you knew before starting your career?
16. Are there days that seem too repetitive?
17. Do you often have to learn new languages?
18. Have there been any big changes in your career since you first started?
19. How long have you worked as a developer?
20. Is there any advice you would give to college students looking to pursue a development career?
Any responses are appreciated! Thank you so much!

fuuuuuuuuuuck. found this site with rant in the name so i decided to rant. fuck the system fuck politics fuck everything. IM A FUCKING 16 YO. I just want people to hear my voice and listen to me. i want to make a change but because im 16 everything i say is invalid. the school system sucks. i want to change that. oh wait first i have to change the people who manage that. well dang to do that i gotta change that part. before long its the entire fucking system. for fucks sake cant anyone do anything. i just want to be happy in this shitty world. maybe the world ending wouldnt be so bad. just fuck it all to hell. i mean jesus christ everything is screwy. we live in an outdated system in a modern world. when are things going to change to keep up with the times. we donbt need machines to work in factories like the school system makes. we dont need politicians who are so old they cant keep up with whats going on in the world. we need people that can keep up with current events and work to make a change so that the place can be better. just fuck it all. no one is willing to put in the work needed to get that. i say we should just destroy all humans and start anew.

!rant

The new end to the idiotic code snippet head scratchers interviews (awkward for both parties but nobody is willing to admit it)?

Hometasks.

Infinite internet access, use whatever tools you want, do as much as you can in 2-3 hours.

The best non-toxic way to see how someone works as a dev.

This is the way I expect you to work, so this is the way I will interview you.

Sorry silicon valley, we don't need people who can write up a binary search algo from rote memory.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

I left work early today, you know, to enjoy heat wave and the sun. At home I can take a nice shower and forget all the bugs from today.

Destination: Bergen op Zoom (boz)
Departing from: Rotterdam

1 train, straight through the country, sounds easy right?

Issue 1: boz train is 15 minutes late
Issue 2: massive issues emerge between one of the stations on my track and my train won't move

Solution 1: Take the train to Breda and then go to boz
Issue 3: that train has door issues, 15 minutes pass
Issue 4: During my trip to Breda all traffick between boz and Breda dies as well
Issue 4: the doors of the train ahead of us fuck up as well
Issue 5: I can't leave the train at the current stop because the doors are stuck

Thank god my father is willing to help me out by picking me up in the middle of nowhere in a place called Lage-Zwaluwe

And I'm wearing jeans and a backpack with a hot laptop in it from a hard days work

Luckily I don't have to work the following 2 days

Been thinking about this a lot and I'd love your thoughts. Recently a friend was starting in dev. They asked me for some advice. I just said "be humble and hungry". I've built my career on that phrase. Be willing to listen and willing to put in the work.

What is your best advice for the young devs out there?

I hate websites like upwork and freelancer, its impossible to outbid the other applicants while maintaining a price that makes the work worth the trouble. Yet without them its impossible to find clients who are willing to pay $1k for anything no matter how big of a project it is, they keep looking for $200 solutions. Hows a developer supposed to raise some cash for a house and shit like that.

#justathought

(Disclaimer: Don't think am being racist or anti feminist, i am currently studying about industrial revolutions and trade unions, nd this thought came to my mind )

We went from the time where women were forced to work in industries, to the time where women were forced to stay at home, to the time when women are willing to work in the industry.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Watched 2 different vendors struggle to get something going.

I stayed quiet during both meetings, the first, was a misconfiguration error on their project code. They were tailoring the product that they sold my institution, I could see the simple error: key-value settings on one of their json files (it is a dotneto app)
I don't get paid to troubleshoot the code for an external company, so I was silent, knowing full well this would take longer to get done, needless to say, I had originally advised against purchasing this product but was not listened to, very well then.

The other was a configuration issue on the side of a different Java based product, there were some strange XML configuration entries, some other project files that made little sense, but again: quiet.

Department head is concerned about the delays that this might cause and will still not ask if I am willing to help since he knows I A) was against this product purchase from the get go and B) knows DAMN well I will say that I don't get paid to troubleshoot the issues that third party vendors charging us over 100k of product "worth", they wanna spend the money on "enterprise" shit that does not work,they can deal with their own shit programs.

Morale of the story: money moves people. If there is no bling in my account: then I ain't doing it.

Now, I do get paid well for what I do, and for that I do bust my ass, for everything else: there is mastercard.

The company I'm contracted to have just realised they're a tad behind with product delivery after the Development Manager and his second in command left. Leaving two contractors and one junior member of staff to deal with the backlash of "wtf is going on with x product why is it not delivered?".

Company: "Ok we're going to need to do overtime, you guys will be willing to work overtime on weekend and nights, right?"
Me: "What's the rate?"
Company: "It's day rate is that going to be an issue?"
Me: *mutes phone to pmsl*
Company: "We're all up against it so we all have to help out"
Me: "Not interested in a day rate for overtime, thanks"
Company: "Your holiday you have booked in two weeks time, can it be moved?"
Me: *laughs* "No I won't be cancelling my holiday to work"
Company: *salty as fuck now* "Well the question needed to be asked"
Me: "I'm not cancelling a holiday I have paid for to make up for a lack of planning"

I come in the office today and Mr Company has fucked off on a three week holiday!

Nothing much here, keep scrolling...

I think my manager does not like me. I might sound like a broken record because I keep asking feedback at the end of every call (which is every other day).

I genuinely want to make her proud of the decision to hire me and want to learn for which I am willing to work smarter/harder.

What I feel is that they find me annoying. They seem to be happy with my work but guess my Indian roots of typical behaviour are showing up.

My co-worker evidently isn't confident to lead on her own and keeps me looped in to all her tasks which I am fine with. Though, I feel that I might be overstepping in her zone and manager doesn't want me to do that.

I may not be perfect and also a very sensitive guy, but I am trying hard.

Maybe they have plans to get someone else to lead and just keep me as a pawn on the board.

I don't think it is the imposter syndrome this time and surely the teams in this org are working in silos with very little communication within or outside their direct teams which kind of makes it even more difficult for me to operate.

However, as always, I have enough free time in here to resume my side project, learn another hobby, or learn new skills. Or is it just that I am assigned less task or underperforming?

Sometimes things are very confusing and one can never find an answer.

What's the best thing to do in such a situation?