My wife asked me if I could take a look at her keyboard because some of the keys suddenly had stopped working.
I checked the keyboard and saw that crumbs were literally blocking the keys. I gave it a shake, the crumbs fell out, and the keyboard started working again.

I am at the meeting and I keep hearing bird signing, wind humming, sounds of spring. It seems boss is in a forest's cabin right now while every other dev is in a cubicle...

Sometimes I wonder if other developers in my team are paid by lines of codes they produce, because I cannot find explanation for shit they write

In 2014 I made a promise to myself that I will never work again in webforms again. Next day I put a resignation notice to my boss and said : "I have dignity". That was my last day when I looked at aspx file. Fast forward to 2024. I break my promise everyday for the last half a year. I can't quite because I don't see any job offers paying that handsomely as 3-4 years ago and I fear that now it may be difficult to find any work at all... I am imprisoned again in VIEWSTATE :(

Writing code is a tedious job.
Let's write 20k lines of XML transforms instead.

When I have bad day and I doubt in quality of my code and my skills overall I open another project that is backbone of company business and I immediately feel much better after seeing what crap others produce.

I have recently attended an IT conference for finance sector.
In invitation organizers stated that dress code is casual.
Me : Jeans, funny t-shirt, trainers
Everyone : Full suit, dress shoes or 'casual' version : suit and white sneakers.

TLDR : Some dude was immediately fired by creating union. The email from the CEO of Sii Poland (one of the biggest software houses in the country) shocked the whole IT community

I cannot read programmers blogs on work's laptop, becase blog sites are blocked by the company policy. On the other hand I can enter any imaginable gossip news portal...

Everything in application is aligned to right

🤡 Can you alight text in that form to the left
Me: Why? All forms have text aligned to the right.
🤡: It looks better
*Add !important*

A couple weeks later, a new BUG is assigned to me by the 🤡
"This form has text aligned to the left, while all other forms have text aligned to to right"

Large majority of rants is about incompetent project managers.
No matter where you live the problem stays the same. Most of them have no clue how software is being made and how dev/qa work looks like.
I frankly do not understand this phenomena. I have friends in automotive/constructions industry and theirs managers are engineers too in that field. Why it can't be the same in software development?

Task estimated for 2 days
*Half day later*
🤡 : Have you done it?
Me : No, I told you it would take 2 days

*Day later*
🤡 : Have you done it? Do you need any help?

So I was browsing glassdoor the other day to find out opinions about particular company and out of curiosity I also have check my first company I worked for and OH BOI, old memories that were buried and forgotten long time ago, came back after reading just a few feedbacks.

IT WAS DREADFUL PLACE.
To give a context that company has ~80 written negative feedbacks with 12 years on the market and never exceeding 50-60 employees, while other companies I worked for with ~5k employees, more then 20 years on the market have roughly ~100 written negative feedbacks each.

- Hey I have to add new field, but this class is autogenerated, I do not know what tool generates it"
- Your fingers
- But this class has over 20k lines of codes and the header says it is autogenerated.
- It is a inside joke, it was generated by hand

Demo

Backend Team : No one want to listen to technical details. A short 2 min demo what we have done.
Shareholders : Have you done anything?

Frontend Team : half an hour demo of validators and fields that sum values from other fields
Shareholders: Wow that is awesome, great job, nice to see, great value, lot of progress.

After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.

Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.

Management : We need to deliver this by September!!!

Meanwhile every dev took 2-3 weeks of vacation in August.

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.

My friend lost his job. Company closed brach he worked for. He was very depressed because it took him 2 days to find another job in different company while all his collogues had job offers the same day they find out about branch being closed.

I used to work in project tailored for specific companies used by at most 100 daily users.
Right now I work in a project with 1mln unique daily users. I am on a call where it was decided to scrap one feature because it generates "only" 20k monthly usages. This is more traffic generated then all my provides projects combined :D

Jira is powerful tool, especially when we combine it with Bitbucket. But, have you ever worked in a company where for example creating feature branch or merging PR changed jira ticket status? Personally I have never seen such automation, even if all clients I have worked for always complained about dev not changing statuses in jira.

Usually when you ask "I have a problem with service X, who wrote it?".
The answer is "Y wrote it but he left the company XYZ years ago".
In company I currently work the the answer is "Oh yes X wrote it 20 years ago, go ask him"

We have a new manager who wrote in his bio that he is into astrology.

At least we will no longer have to answer to "How long will it take?", because it is written in the stars XD

Devs : Lets pick library X, it is well know piece of open source technology, actively maintained by community for over 10 years.
Architect : NAH, it is an overkill to use it in our project , lets build our own solution.
*2 Months later*
The code base is hundreds of thousands lines of code, we basically started to look at library X on GitHub to copy features or get inspiration from that code. In that time we delivered 0 business value, it is horrible to use it and we constantly adding something or bugfixing because no one thought about something in first place.

Right to repair by Corsair
My mouse has double click glitch...
To disassemble the mouse, first skates need to be peeled off and destroyed in order to get to mounting screws...
I was unable to find those skates online, so I reached directly the Corsair to check if they sold them. Of course they don't sell them...
Next I tried to find professional shop. I found one willing to replace switch for 50$ while brand new mouse costs 60$.
FUCK YOU CORSAIR

Probably everyone at least once had situation when they receive a meaningless screenshot with 500 page, a message "Application doesn't work fix it" and 0 info whatsoever.
Here is my tip that saved me a lot of trouble.
I display error id in the center of the screen, large enough so no matter how small and blurry the image is (yes users, send us photos of theirs displays) , It is always easy to ready it so we can start investigation without talking to those monkeys.

I am starting new iteration of microservice X.
The new repository is named: new-new-new-X
And as you suspect, previous iterations are named:
new-new-X
new-X
and X
:D

I have started reading The Phoenix Project and I suspect that story is based on current situation in company I work for ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.

It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/

Many people were hired to work on new product, but no one have told them that for one or two quarters they will have to maintain 20 years old project. I was ranting about this, but in the end accepted my fate, wiped tears with money and moved on. However one of devs took another path. When he was asked to work with .aspx and jquery 1.X instead of react, he just said : "Not going to happen" and left the building.