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?

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.

Managers: fullStackClown!!!! The image uploader on the dashboard at <insert 3rd party service here> isn't working!!!!!

fullStackClown: Yeah? What do you want me to do about it?

Managers: Well, fix it!

fullStackClown: ... * sigh * Well, in case you didn't realize, I don't work at <insert 3rd party service here>, so... unless you want me to go work for them instead of you absolute clowns (which I dream about daily), I cannot help you further in this matter.

Managers: ...

fullStackClown: ...

Kill me. 🤡

Absolute asshat level clownly clownshipness:

Manager: Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... what about this? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: ...Because you defined the feature like this.

Manager: Hmmmmm ok... and then this thing here? Why is this like this? 🤡

fullStackClown: Well, I hate to tell you, but it's a huge surprise. Guess what?! BECAUSE YOU DEFINED THE FEATURE LIKE THIS!!!

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: Any other absolute asinine questions to ask me to continue breaking me from flow?

Manager: ... 🤡

fullStackClown: ...

To those interested, I believe there is an evolution of my devRant career in order... I'm passing the clown phase... and entering the full-on circus phase...

Them: "What can we do to fix this?"

Me: Contact the vendor

Them: Ok, but from our side?

Me: Wait for the vendor to reply

Them: And what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Me: get better vendors, include I.T on the process when the org decides to purchase shitty third party software.

Them: Ok but besides that?

Me: Drink?

Seriously tho, tf you expect me to do?

Ticket user story:
“Brown Chicken Report A and B do not include rows for Blue Chickens. I want to see Blue Chickens in both Brown Chicken reports.”

Ticket summary:
“Currently, the Brown Chickens reports mentioned above do not accurately report Blue Chickens. The columns P and Q are incorrect and need to be updated. See below:

<Copy/pasted table from All Animals Report showing a White Chicken>”

———

Are you okay? Do you have brain damage?

(Also: Blue Chickens are not supported and do not exist)

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

Oh man, today just gets better and better...

Manager: * Creates ticket, which has a link to a shared pdf, with each page being a link to another ticket in our JIRA with unrelated bugs of what we are currently working on. *

fullStackClown: I'm closing this ticket and putting this feedback in the original ticket that I assigned to you to review days ago.

Manager: Rages like a little baby and removes my access to said shared pdf.

fullStackClown: Welp, looks like I'm done for the day! Cheers!

Who in the hell has time to upgrade JavaScript frameworks? Nobody! Take as an example, Strapi.js. I have a version running that I installed EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO. Already it's gone up one major version, and there's three different migration guides between minor releases! And each migration between versions has three different portions that break into even smaller portions! DO YOU THINK I HAVE TIME TO FIX MY PROJECT EVERY 3 MONTHS BECAUSE YOU MORONS CAN'T BUILD A BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE PRODUCT?! AND IT'S RIDDLED WITH SECURITY ISSUES! FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT "CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM"!!!1 THIS IS WHY I USE LIGHTWEIGHT FRAMEWORKS AND NOT FULL BLOWN SYSTEMS!

Good thing it's only for my personal website so I couldn't care less.

Wrote some code that solved a program in a semi unique way for the codebase. As in not oft used functionality of language.

Some time later... This might be hard to understand. Maybe I should do a different way.

Some time later... No, I will leave a comment to describe what is going on.

Some time later... That comment is kind of cryptic. Maybe should rethink.

Some time later... No, if the next dev doesn't know how this works then they should learn how it works. (reasoning here is that the functionality requires a knowledge of internals of language)

Some time later... Also, if nobody else gets this then they have to ask me how it works. Job security?

Some time later... STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS CODE AND MOVE ON!

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

After I finished my probation of 3 months, which was also almost 3 months ago I noticed that Im doing better than half of the team so I asked my manager for a raise of 43 percent. Was given the green light but havent actually received the raise and was being fed excuses and promises . Started applying, got a better offer and gave my notice today. Suddenly hes shitting bricks and wants to talk with me tomorrow and asks me not to accept that offer yet. I smell a counter offer. Fucking lazy cunt couldnt move his ass for 3 months now all of a sudden hes my best friend. Seriously this sounds like a cliche but its surreal to see a respected person do this stuff, I guess all of the managers are the same even if they seem different in the start?

Best part is that Im not even a big contributor or even own some big features in that company. Ive been here 6 months only. He says he sees potential but tbh Im just a regular guy who crunches tasks and asks questions. I come in to the office only twice or three times a month. Seriously idk what he sees in me. Anyways.

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

I took some days off and they are almost over but I still feel like shit and the idea of going back next week makes me anxious. But I work from home, earn more money than everyone I know outside the company (despite the equity politics that makes them pay me like a junior instead of a senior) and have more benefits than the ones I’m offered via LinkedIn, so quitting would be stupid.

Our team is only 3 members because the company fired too many people. Most tickets are max priority bugs and we can barely work on our team goals, which are also max priority, and when they say the clients with problems are getting angry I feel like they are going to get angry at me. That and I’ve been getting after hours messages during my time off telling me to hurry up because the client had been waiting for more than a week, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to work or to explain I was on vacations (feels like sick days) or apologize for leaving before solving the ticket.

TIL you can crash a Tomcat request processing if the app reads request bodies using a reader() and you feed it a json body with an innocent nbsp :) the whole request processing just goes *pooooft*

reminds me of an ios bug which could brick the phone if it received an sms with weird chars.

These lynch-pin-bugs where a single byte/char in the right place at the right time can tear things down, are so subtle and fascinate me for some reason :)

good bosses - hell yes

ive had a few. the relaxed, understand reality, not corporate sucking shills.

1 in fast food working midnights. great guy. loved musik. would break the rules when it made sense so we could get some r&r.

2nd in tech, first big boy job. i remember one of the first weeks i put in my 'honest' hours and he got asked about it. he just said 'ya just, fill out 40, no big deal' B) was always ok with us doing w/ (a lot of ppl lived close by) as long as we got our work done. great guy

3rd, not really my 'boss' but he should have been since he knew wtf was going on and basically spoon fed our non-boss boss that just wanted to look good. was pretty much the only guy on my direct team that would get shit done when i was pulling all the weight.

ive had a few other decent ones. some skummy ones, legit swindlers, assholes, corporate fuck heads, use and lose abusers. but im glad for the good bosses. chill, dont take things too seriously, good at what you do.

Just when I had almost fallen in love with this new job which I started 8 months ago, this happens.

My “manager” had conversation with me. He was complaining that my work is of poor quality (objectively speaking, it is not). I don’t even directly work with this manager anymore. He “leads” this big project and he really wanted me to get involved in it but I struggled because it’s a big codebase and I was a new joiner. Months later, a new project was started and I worked on the backend for it. And I really liked that project more as I literally wrote it from scratch. And even the “mangers” for that project was a bit chilled out.

Now, the first “manager” kept trying to involve me in the first project but new requirements kept popping up in the second project and I was happy to work there. Somewhere down the this, this irked the first “manager”. Also, the company is known to be very cheap with salaries (a good work culture though) and they are paying me more than others since I switched from another company to work there. So they are probably expecting more output for the salary they are paying me. That seems to be the main problem here.

Obviously this first “manager” has never worked a development job before, let alone reviewing my code or something. So I was confused after this conversation. He’s asking me if I noticed these issues in my work and how I can do better and I bluntly replied no, I don’t see any issues in my work. He said he’ll speak to me again on Friday (2 days from now) and expects me to give an answer about how I can improve and stuff. He seems to be power-tripping do so I’ll probably be firm about my position. Will probably mention the money part as well.

It sucks that I left a corporation because of work culture issues and joined this smaller company. And I see the same corporate disconnect cropping up here.

!rant
Communication is IMPORTANT, and the way to approach someone is also IMPORTANT.

I experienced that my colleague is from China, and his English accent is so strong (in the context of not understandable, like the word 'folder' he pronounces it 'foda', and the word 'code' he pronounces it 'korr') that I have to ask him to repeat himself (which sometimes I felt guilty to ask him to repeat for thrice, and I am still not able to understand) or maybe we can do it over text. It is much easier to understand him that way and I can leverage these texts to see a bigger picture of the message.

From this, I realised I need to work more on understanding what he is going to say and what he actually meant.

Any advice for me?

I got a little jaded at work (the normal officer politics stuff), so I started doing less work, and reaching out to recruiters.

My boss noticed I was having a go, reached out and offered a raise and a new computer. I told him I'd have to research market value for the raise.

In the mean time I got an offer for 50% more than what I'm making now. I'm heading to him today with my research in writing. Either way I'm getting that raise!

Riddle me this

Client wants solution based on open source software.

Any additional software that I write (let's say, an offline store plugin for Feast feature store) to add missing functionality has to be closed source.

Fuck you. Intellectual property my ass. You and me wouldn't even have projects if it werent for OSS.

Good luck maintaining the plugin after I am gone.

I'm doing a lot of work and will have close to nothing to show to future employers.

(BTW, if it were for the old Microsoft model of code source, I would have never become a programmer of any sort. God bless OSS)