Interviewer: For this next code challenge you will not be allowed to use the internet, or an IDE.

Dev: …

Interviewer: OR a keyboard OR a mouse. I will be verbalizing the code to you and you need to memorize it and tell me where the bugs are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: We must do this exercise to know how you are as a dev without any performance enhancing “aid”. This way we can understand where you are truly at skill-wise, and what you are truly worth from a compensation perspective.

Dev: …

Dev: If I get a job with you will I be allowed to use the internet and an IDE and a keyboard/mouse?

Interview: Of course you would! Getting anything done without those is just about impossible. We just need to evaluate you without them to see how good you REALLY are.

Dev: …

I hired a guy on upwork. His english is shit. But hes done the work correctly. Fast forward today he asked me "off topic question but do u have any female friend who can accompany me to fuck?"

WTF IS THIS SHIT

That is not professional AT ALL. I dont give a shit about the fact he cant get no bitches so hes begging me as if im some kind of a pimp. On upwork?? Gtfo.

Now i understand why companies want to hire only people with college DEGREES because they have went through the process of conforming and dont ask stupid shit questions. Eliminates a lot of bullshit and Neanderthals like this guy

Ffs

*CTO in panic, as always, invites everyone to the war room*

CTO: We have a MAJOR problem where 0.0001% of our customers are not receiving SMS confirmations.

Me: Cool. But, 0.0001% is very less compared to the other problems we are solving.

CTO: You don't understand, this is critical issue that needs to be addressed immediately.

Me: But even those.0.0001% customers are receiving e-mail confirmations, so this is not even blocker as we have other channels working.

CTO: I am emotional at this point. You need to prioritise this now.

Me: Okay, do we know the root cause of this problem?

Engineering head: we have blacklisted those numbers in past as our system detected them abusing our platform.

Me: Cool. Let's whitelist them, nothing much to worry here.

CTO: Floyd, you need to understand that 0.0001% of the customers are not receiving the SMS and the solution you are proposing is incorrect.

Me: Okay, what do you suggest?

CTO: We stop sending the SMS to all the customers.

Everyone on the call: 😨

Me 5 years ago : "Guys we are gonna have a perf..."

CEO : "Not now, we need to deliver that functionality asap"

Me 3 years ago : "Guys, performances/scalibiluity will hit us like a trucK'

CEO : "Not nowem a new functionality needs to be done ASAP"

Me 1 year ago : "We are gonna be hit by a tank. We won't even understand what happens"

CEO : "I'm sure we can manage"

2 Days ago : Plateform quasiment down, response time in MIONUTES instead of milliseconds, database on fire.

CEO : "WHAT THE FUCK !!! GO FIXC I ASAP WE CANNOT HAVE THAT SHIT HAPPEN".

This is a brief summaru of working in a startup.

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

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

And later:

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

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

And later:

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

*twitchy smile*

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

Manager: Here's the design for the next feature, we're ready to hand it over to the consultant

FullStackClown: Uh... okay... is it spec'd out with requirements?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Well, already look at this design and user flow, did you consider what happens when <insert edge case X here>, <insert edge case Y here>, or <insert edge case Z here>? How is the consultant going to know what to put in for business logic if you don't even know or define it yourself?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Sigh... yeah, I'm too busy right now to be a kindergarten teacher, come back in a few days once you understand how your own feature is supposed to work

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think my days as a dev are over
shit fuck!!!!
All i know is writing code, schematics, systems recommendations
Was given a tender doc for a project
the doc was in 2 parts "Technical" & "Financial"
I HAVE NEVER DONE A TENDER BEFORE and little did i know a shit load of documents are required
MY BOSS GOT FURIUS SINCE I DIDNT COMPILE ALL DOCS and 1 required doc was expired tried to get it renewed and renewal will take 3 week or 1 month and deadline was in 2 hours time
FUCK!!!!

F U C K M E ! ! ! ! !

[CMS of Doom™]
The gift that keeps on giving...
When you think you've seen it all after 7 months in legacy hell, you get another gift:

Let's say you use PHP, but your IQ is in the zero-ish range, then it is obvious to:
- use define() for constants in all your config.*.php files
- then include said config.*.php files multiple times
- and because define() doesn't overwrite the same constant, because it's - you know - a constant, you instead of including just do a file_get_contents() to read the PHP file as string and then parse the values by Regex.

The dev who wrote this was truly one of the devs ever.

y'know, if your coworkers annoy the shit out of you, sometimes it's worth looking at how the company is treating them.

a lot of what i have to deal with spans from an environment that demands speed at the expense of quality and won't reward developers for their effort, cause they simply don't understand the effort it takes. we have a tiny team responsible for a nation wide program, and people are just shocked when they hear this, because the work we do is in fact amazing for a group of 5. everyone is just tired, overworked and badly recompensed for it. this shit will hit the fan pretty soon

After a decade of working in the web development industry, I have given up all hope, it's the same fucking stupid ideas, the same retarded problems in every damned company . Monkeys discovering and reinventing the same fucking wheel over and over and over again. From a 5 man company to the unicorn scaleup (and everything between) I have had to implement access control systems, and various REST API's following the design made by mongrels who do it the first time . I have become to hate the work I once was so passionate about. Just fuck this shit , if anybody had told me when I was in my early 20's that this is what I end up doing I'd go and learn to be a carpenter instead.

There's this guy who randomly make sexual remarks. Not the usual guy's talk kind sexual remarks, but more of "I am going to rape this girl infront of her boyfriend and her father " kind of remark. Also he sexual harassed women coworker like take video of them in the toilet.

What we did was gathering every rape case possible (which is not related to him, but somehow the victims don't know who the rapists were) , all the evidence of him taking nude video of girls and report to police . We launch the statement that "maybe" the rapist was this phallus.

And the authorities got his arse and tracked. Well he asked for it.

Always remember "with great power of boasting bullshit, comes with a fat shit of consequences". The difference between the actual Spiderman and this phallus is that Spiderman think with his senses and shoot webbings from his wrist, but this phallus don't have any actual thought involve and shoot webbings from his micropenis.

I resigned after that.

At a large enterprise-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from outside / bad actors constantly trying to break in. (🧠)

At a medium or small-sized company, you are protecting the code and product from clueless customers or users who can potentially break things for themselves. (🧠🧠)

At a sTaRtUp, you are protecting the code and product from being destroyed by the incompetent owners themselves. (🧠🧠🧠+)

So fed up of existing.

I am not saying that I am suicidal, but if a truck was accelerating towards me, I would not bother to move.

Even though I consider myself decently successful in life in terms of career, friendship, and to some extent, family. I strongly feel that I am in a very wrong environment.

I have zero trust, safety, love, and nurturing care from my parents and others around me.

I lack physical privacy, psychological safety, and emotional void.

My hypothesis is that if I was in a better environment with slightly lesser responsibilities and needs better met, I could have achieved wonders. With that, who wouldn't?

Why do we exist? Just to suffer?

When I worked in a non-dev env, the best part was that I was done with work after working hours. I didn't stress out or even think about the issues. It was something for tomorrow or someone else to worry about. And so, I was not mentally exhausted and stressed out all the damn time.

So, I shall try to bring that mentality to my dev life too. With this new position I'm starting soon, I really want to do well for at least a few years. And that would need me to chill the fuck out. Particularly after work.

I lost my job 😅 tbh did me a favour. I was backend, this guy was frontend and was a typical opinionated JavaScript, magpie dev and I just did not give 2 fucks about what he thought was “amazballs” and we had a small tiff, we’ll he was arguing, I was trying to do my job and I just didn’t care enough about his feelings on the subject, forget what it was about but I think it was trivial. But anyway, I was let go soon after 😅

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

!rant

It's funny to consider that my previous rant (https://devrant.com/rants/4510906/...) before I stopped checking this platform as regularly was about what the perfect job would look like to me

…

Because I just landed it today, people!

Signed with a very chill, medium sized, local dev company that appreciates me as much as I do appreciate them. Starting next month I won't be just a random intern (although they never treated me as such anyway) anymore but a professional developer, with even a slightly more important pay than what you (at least I)'d expect for a junior

Adios annoying courses and mediocre marks, now the fun begins!

X: Hi, regarding that ticket that you made...

You said "Implement logging to find out the culprit in site generation"...

What do you mean exactly?

Me: "Read the meeting notes, we had a full discussion on this 2 weeks ago".

X: "We don't understand it..."

Me: "As I said before, I have no experience in this tech stack... I'd expect bla to have a logging framework and I'd - for easier recognition - implement additional logging levels based on criteria <me just reading the meeting notes>"

X: But how do we do it?

...

I wish I had invented this discussion.

Because it hurts.

For the jolly of it, I had similar discussions today.

Three times to be exactly.

As I asked some dev what I should do next, put a foley catheter up his urethra or change the bed pan he wasn't amused.

Guess I'll get monday a call of HR.

So Monday I have less work to do, which is awesome.

Shit will hit the fan pretty soon. We're understaffed, the team is all talking about jumping ship and all other teams rely on our work, so if we jump ship, it sinks. It's really amazing that management is unaware or choosing to actively ignore the possibility. Either way, they're fucking up big time. Honestly, if it happens, it will be well deserved, it just sucks for everyone else working under them