Manager: This button is too dark, you need to lighten it. Have you no sense of design?

Dev: …

Dev: Hows this for an adjustment?

Manager: Wayyyyy too light now, jesus you need glasses if you think that’s good.

Dev: …

Dev: How about now?

Manager: It’s close, make it just a little more dark. God why does this have to take so long, do I have to hold your hand through this entire process!

Dev: …

Dev: There that good?

Manager: Yes that’s perfect! Send me a PR immediately so I can approve, we need to get this out ASAP, it’s critical!!

Dev: I can’t.

Manager: ????

Dev: There’s no diff, you had me gradually adjust the colour back to exactly what it was originally.

Manager: THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE IT LOOKS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. HOW DARE YOU INSULT ME LIKE THIS, I HAVE A MEETING I NEED TO GET OFF TO BUT WE WILL BE HAVING WORDS LATER ABOUT THIS INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR.

Dev: …

bitchface micromanager keeps telling me i don't communicate enough, don't do enough, am not fast enough, etc.

So i've been sending her a weekly summary of ~50 bullet points of things I did during the week, issues encountered, workarounds found, research findings, who i talked to, etc. all organized by task with links to the tickets.

My work volume hasn't increased (probably decreased, actually) but it certainly looks like I'm doing a lot. probably because i am? but she doesn't listen during standup, so... victory by a hundred bullet points it is!

Tldr : In my country, there is always a middleman .It is so rare to work for end client directly and it is very common to be fuck over by them, because they want milk you out as much as possible

Job description : Salary range from X to Y

Me : I expect 90% of Y $
HR : if you pass technical examination we can agree on this amount.

*Technical interview*
All correct answers, perfect match with stack etc.

HR calling next day:
HR: Great job on interview, but you need to lower your financial expectation to X (around 50% of Y)
Me: Why? We have spoken the other day and you said there would be no problem with the money. I nailed the interview, I don't understand why I should agree to lower wage.
HR: I know I know, but right now we cannot give more. Maybe later
Me: I am sorry, but I feel kinda cheated. For me this is red flag since I don't know what I can expect later if you are not sincere from the beginning. I won't take your offer, goodbye.

Boss: Our customer's data is not syncing with XYZ service anynmore!

Me: Ok let me check. Did the tokens not refresh? Hmm the tokens are refreshing fine but the API still says that we do not have permissions. The scopes are fine too. I'll use our test account... its... cancelled? Hey boss, why is our XYZ account cancelled?

Boss: Oh, "I haven’t paid since I didn’t think we needed it" (ad verbatim)

😐

!rant

It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.

But now I am working at a place where:

- People are 0 toxic.

- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."

- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "

- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.

- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.

- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.

- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.

I need to keep this job no matter what!

Walked into the office in the afternoon, everyone was kinda panicking
Asked what was going on, well, the ticket system is not working anymore, can't put in any new tickets.
So I started to look for the issue as well, checked the system and... The last tickets' IDs were at ~32k. Ha. Looked into the source code and, sure enough, they used a data type with an upper limit of... 32k. So when trying to get a new ticket ID it just crashed and burned.
Quickly changed the data type and stopped the office panic in around half an hour.
Memorable not because of how tough the bug was, but because of the impact and the simplicity of the fix

Coworker: "can you help me with this thing?"
Me: "sure, what have you tried so far"
Them: "nothing yet"

Hdhajsgrbeiry JUST TRY _SOMETHING_ AT LEAST BEFORE ASKING FOR HELP.

It's literally your job to solve problems, not get other people to solve them for you.

Asking for help if you don't understand something is one thing, but constantly trying to get people to show you exact examples is not doing your job.

This has been a chronic problem with one of our devs and despite advising them multiple times on it, it continues to happen.

I told these people that this issue would happen. Did they listen? Nooo

It'll be fine, they say. We likely won't be having that much data returned to the front end, they say.

Day of the install. Web Application attempts to query 68,000 rows of data straight into the web page.

*Surprised Pikachu face* when they are consistently getting crashed browser tabs.

And now everything gets pushed back and we're behind by an entire month because they didn't heed my warnings.

Oh, and now I have to pick up after them, and do some stupid work arounds that will likely be defunct in a month or two. 🙄

I am working on my passion project, on my own vacation days because my advisor did not approve it and I can't take no for an answer.
But I had 3 amazing days working with my friend and research partner, full of stupid bugs, moody hardware and a lot of nutella-covered food.
I think I am going to document some of the progress on Twitter, because it supports uploading videos. If anyone is interested in failing robots, I can share the link/handle :)

....

I give up trying to write this.
I'm just too fucking pissed off.

My interactions with my micromanager make absolutely no sense -- she is clearly just trying to piss me off and blame me for everything, facts and reasoning be damned.

I tried detailing this week's examples (there are lots, and it's fucking Tuesday), but. screw it.

Fuck working for (and with) her.
She's a bitchface and a thundercunt.

I'm updating my resume and fucking off out of here.

God fucking damnit i hate her.

Micromanager: “@Root, you need to do <thing>! It’s important, and very unprofessional if you don’t. Bad things can happen if you don’t do the thing. You need to get into the habit of doing the thing.”

@Root: Already does the thing.
Micromanager’s boss: Doesn’t do the thing.
Micromanager: Doesn’t do the thing.
Team: Doesn’t do the thing.

Micromanager: “You need to work on your reputation, @Root!”

Managers: wE wAnT tO bE LeAn aNd MoVe FaSt As PoSsIBLe wiTh NeW FeAtUrEs

Same Managers: Can you make this icon 2 pixels smaller?! Shift this element left?! Swap out this icon?! Use a different color here?! A perfect feature and design is critical!!!!!!

FullStackClown: You can either be lean and fast, or be fucking nitpicking clowns 🤡 about this stuff and slow us all down. Choose one.

Managers: ...

FullStackClown: Sit down and shut up

Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?

Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!

Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?

WEB FUCKING THREE

Ok, some of this shit is interesting, let's get that out of the way:

Crypto - great for doing illegal things, great for financial speculation, interesting mathematically. But as likely to replace actual currency as I am to replace the fucking Queen.

NFT - should be written on the headstone of humanity. Entirely fucking useless, planet-roasting bro-wank dressed up as a revolution in...pretending to own shit. The only difference between a Bored Ape owner and my nephew pointing at a castle and insisting that it's his, is that he isn't thousands and thousands of pounds out of pocket by doing so.

Metaverse - AR and VR have been around before this dogshit rebrand, and they'll outlive it.

No, it's not that. It's that we now have a new species of parasite - the "Web3/Metaverse" LinkedIn guru insisting that this shit is even needed, let alone the next big thing.

Web 2.0 was a stupid fucking term alright, but it did represent a new generation of technologies that were badly needed, and adopted by the entire community. Web3 is a bunch of shit that some cunts think they can get rich off, so insist that we need. I wouldn't even give a fuck but I've already spent hours of my life explaining to clients and peers that this is UTTER FUCKING BOLLOCKS, there's no need for a blockchain in your app, there's no need for a blockchain in virtually anything. Yeah if you want some fucking 3d in your app or your page I'm your man, but if you keep saying 'metaverse' I'm going to fill it with easter eggs.

None of this shit was needed before and none of it is needed after. Have you looked at web3 games? It's Steve Buscemi asking 'how do you do, fellow computer games?', it's a fucking gambling app pretending to be something a human would do. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush already cornered the market for that type of fucking mug, right now you're making the Candy Crush business model look responsible and efficient. You CUNTS.

Root has standup.

Root: I had no ticket yesterday morning, so I followed up on <TicketA> with <PersonA> and updated it in Jira and linked its related tickets; talked with <PersonB> about <TicketB>, and reviewed code review comments on <TicketC>, and thought about those while looking into the CI spec failure on <TicketD>. I collapsed for 3 hours before fixing it. Halfway through the collapse, I talked with <PersonC> on <TicketC> CR comments and the spec issue in <TicketD>, then went to lay down again. Afterward, I solved the spec issue in <TicketD>, and started on the new ticket <TicketE> before calling it a day. Plans today are to <…>.

Manager, in private: I need you to proactively let me know if you’re taking long breaks and aren’t working as this impacts business flow.

—————

Yeah.

My update was four times longer than the others’ despite her not giving me a ticket to work on. I responded to slack while I was collapsed on the floor and discussed tickets. And, after I recovered, I went back to work to finish my 8h shift. But this isn’t good enough? And I need to let her know in advance when I’m going to collapse and be a bloody mental zombie for hours? It would be amazing if I knew. I barely have a few minutes notice, and that’s only if I’m really paying attention and looking for signs.

And (conjecture) she probably still thinks I’m not performing well enough. “Affecting our business flow” probably means she’s angry I didn’t talk to other people about low-priority <TicketE> yesterday while I was laying on the damned floor.

Goddamn I hate her.

In an effort to deal with the number of “top priority” tickets, management has come up with a new priority level, “urgent”, to help differentiate between tickets that are “top priority” and tickets that are actually “top priority”.

So as you can guess all tickets are now codified as “urgent”.

I’ve suggested management downgrade some tickets back to merely “top priority” as we’re clearly right back where we started with it being difficult to determine which order to do tickets in.

They’ve ignored my request as the bletherings of a clearly unenlightened peon, and have instead came up with a new priority, “mission critical” which will be reserved for the most hallowed of emerg— oh no wait everything is now “mission critical” who would have guessed?

So “Top priority” is the now lowest priority a ticket can have…Naturally.

Interviewer: Time limit for this exercise was an hour and you took 2 hours so you fail. Best of luck next time

Dev: Look I really don’t think your assessment has a very fair time limit. The only way you could do this in an hour is by knowing what the problem was beforehand and having all these niche utilities written ahead of time.

Interview: Oh yeah we had one guy that did that, he did the entire thing in only 45 minutes! We hired him immediately!

Dev: …

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

I’m so sick of the programming industry. It’s no longer fun. After 26 years, I’m utterly unable to keep up with all the new BS I’m supposed to know. I’m currently unemployed and every job description I see has a kilometer-long list of dozens of languages and protocols and technologies I’m supposed to have 10 or more years with. Utter bollocks. I’m completely unemployable according to these expectations. Nobody will even consider me for hire. Do these candidates actually exist?

Sure, I could do what everyone suggests and “go back to school”. But with what money? And only to find out that the tech bros have invented 20 new things I should have been learning during my 2-4 years getting on the new stuff. Not to mention all the time I will have lost in not being employed for going to school. And then STILL not having the “10 or more years experience”.

My wife is tapping her foot wondering when we’re gonna be able to stop eating through our savings while I dither around and try to find ways to make money. I’m starting to feel like I’ll never be employed or employable again.