Let's get ready for another rant. I work at a new company now which claims to be "fast paced" and startup-like culture. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen a place with more rules and bureaucracy when it comes to engineering.

By the looks of it, my manager seems to value process a lot more than actual outcome. Both my manager and another engineer in the team tend to nitpick over every line of code and will not approve anything until they believe it's absolutely perfect and up to their liking.

Every PR I create has to go through 5 cycles of review. On top of that, the comments that get added are rarely related to product impact, but rateher "let's rename this variable in a test file to this", "maybe we should have this many spaces in a config file". There's been actual cases where I had to go through different cycles and had my PR's blocked for days because of some minor comments about variable names and styling they "liked" more.

This is one of the main reasons why we lose critical time during the development of our features. There seems to be no sense of priorities or urgency. The other reason we keep losing time is because of the massive amount of team meetings we have. Our team has only 3 engineers. How many meetings can you possibly schedule in a day to "realign". We have technical meetings where it apparentely is necessary to all agree on every tiny detail, such as which types we're gonna use etc etc.

That's not all. Last week, weeks of my work was thrown out of the window, because it was slightly different from how "we" usually do it. Even though, I explained and motivated how my solution solved issues the other proposed solution did not, we ended up spending an additional two days reimplementing the same fixes more in line with "the rules".

I recently reviewed a coworker's PR pointing out actual functionality that was not working as expected. Real user impact...
I created an alternative solution that covered all cases, and sent it. It got basically ignored. Then we ended up having a meeting for hours with several engineers where they made me watch how they started fixing the same issues as I had already fixed.

Each week, I'm losing around 2-3 days of development time dealing with this nonsense. But then there's a deadline. Then the manager goes full-on wild and pushes everyone into overtime and will send you 700 messages a day in channels or privately to you if "you need help" and how things should be done.

I'm not looking forward to switching jobs again, but please tell me... how can I cope with this?

Thanks

To the housemate that wondered into the kitchen at 4am and turned the oven off at the perfect time for the chicken I'd forgotten about, thank you.

Signed,
Person eating not-burnt chicken

homebrew, asdf, pre-commit, pip, pkg_resources, setuptools

as a group i have no idea what the fuck is broken with you all trying to work together

Tbh, ostream is a nice guy. Once you get over his

- Racism towards Germans
- Racism towards Jews
- Closeted racism towards anyone, really
- Psychotic episodes of rage
- Borderline criminal tendencies
- Bipolar disorder

It's actually fun to talk to him. You have to invest time and patience though.

Love you ostream bro.

Ssooo.. Turns out, I'm starting a new project in less than 2 weeks. Gotta go to Dublin for 2 weeks.

Fuck.
I'm not a traveling kind of a person...

You know how everybody just streams music nowadays?

Not everybody, though. The record shop in my city are blooming because of all the tourists and hipsters. I was thinking I could sell my music that way.

I do a little wooden "jukebox" with an old phone, some headphones and a POS (a credit card reader), and I offer to sell tracks for a small price (maybe 1 euro). I bet a few people would bite if I ask the record shop to keep it for a week and we split the profit.

All British inventions:
- were invented in a garage
- are still being built in a garage
- would've been better if they were built in a garage.

There is some construction works going in my street and they just cut the internet cable by accident... for the second time.

I love having no internet to get work done :v

Had a job interview 3 weeks ago, all went very well.

They asked me to do a dev task, I did it and delivered it the same day (simple task really)

Got no confirmation of receipt and eventually chased a week later and they confirmed they had it and would be in touch by that weekend. Another week beyond that passed and still nothing.

If the interview hadn’t gone as well I’d not be bothered but why the fuck do companies go as far as asking you to do a dev task to not communicate with you after that.

Just heard that we don’t have testers anymore. There was already a low test capacity and now it’s full focus on clients and not on software building anymore.
Who needs testers any way right?
We need to just do everything right the first time!

Every day hour minute i have to work on these charts im getting more sad frustrated and annoyed.
I have a function which works perfectly in the mobile versie of the webapp. Copy paste it to the desktop, it’s not working. Something is wrong and i can’t get my head around it. Neither does AI.

Kendo is hell.

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

The early 2010's were the best period in time ever and it has just been downhill from there

I regret talking shit about my coworker because despite being not a great programmer, he is a nice human being, and at the end of the day, this is what matters.

Your computer is probably vulnerable to Samy Kamkar's poisontap: a Pi Zero-based device that connects to usb and does the following:

- emulates an Ethernet device over USB (or Thunderbolt)
- hijacks all Internet traffic from the machine (despite being a low priority/unknown network interface)
- siphons and stores HTTP cookies and sessions from the web browser for the Alexa top 1,000,000 websites
- exposes the internal router to the attacker, making it accessible remotely via outbound WebSocket and DNS rebinding
- installs a persistent web-based backdoor in HTTP cache for hundreds of thousands of domains and common Javascript CDN URLs, all with access to the user's cookies via cache poisoning
- allows attacker to remotely force the user to make HTTP requests and proxy back responses (GET & POSTs) with the user's cookies on any backdoored domain
- does not require the machine to be unlocked
- backdoors and remote access persist even after device is removed and attacker sashays away

I need several minutes with your laptop to perform the hack, even if it's locked. Full-disk encryption and secure boot won't save you.

If you use GNU/Linux, install usbguard today. If you use macOS/Windows, idk, pray.

Manager: Keep the debug logs
Me: I won't use them as I use the status report or run it manually to see the problem, but fine whatever.

1 week later

Manager: the debug logs are hard to read, the status report is hard to read too but it's a bit more concise
Me: Yes. The fuck you want me to do? I don't use logs and don't care. You can write code, make the logs more useful to you if you want to use them.

my scrum master keeps changing the format of retro and it works worse every time. We're at the 2.5 hour mark right now. It is aggressively hot and humid in the office. Everyone is asleep.

I don't think there's a way to explain to him that the purpose of a retro is not to magically fix things within the format but to financially commit to the preference for conversation, from which the hidden work of resolving conflicts can be billed.

I got so good at optimizing $3 VPS servers' performance that I want to buy https://shitbox.engineering domain and start a company.

Apparently I'm now a suspect in a criminal case. I would have commited identity theft between 2007 and 2025.

Except no, I didn't lmao I'd be richer.

I need a polite way to ask someone if they're brain damaged.

Video generation in comfy is 2x faster if you use sage attention. The install process is not for the faint of heart and if you can manage it, you will have earned your much faster AI slop generation machine.

This is the guide I used
https://reddit.com/r/...

If you use conda, deactivate it before doing the installation. It will cause conflicts.

I'm finally thinking of getting back to work... What's the current trend when it comes to remote IT job offers - any websites worth mentioning?

If you were a code antipattern, what would it be?

I'm definitely NIH -- "Not Invented Here".

I write everything from scratch. When I don't, more often than not, I don't install code deps -- I copy their code and modify it. I port it to my set of utils, my syntax preferences, optimize it, strip parts and modes I don't need, and at the end there's no clear line between what was my code and what wasn't. My code doesn't import, it absorbs.

Designers are divided into those who did create fonts and those who didn't.

how are vampires real

also whoops

FUCKING WHOOPS

I did not expect to pick a fight with fucking magically enabled people

I have no idea what they can do. I am at such a disadvantage. fuck.

I have regrets. these people have fucking drama. like discord-level drama. with trolling and shit. but it's your life energy. what are you doing! something just tried to eat me for like 20 minutes and I did not like it. I did not learn shielding. my aura seemed to have contracted by itself but this is so unnatural to me

seriously how the fuck are vampires real. it's not a metaphor. how the fuck

Omfg.. I couldn't understand what the doc jotted down on the recipe about using the prescribed drug. Took a pic, uploaded to chatgpt -- it transcribed dvery single word correctly.

Dear Lord....

Job search isn't easy.

Not because there aren't any jobs, but because I am afraid of anything that seems remotely like my current toxic workplace.

Fack.

I was asked to work more in the backend. I came in as a frontender/ux’er. Had to do one small thing in mvc and now everyone is like whaaat, he likes that? Let’s make him the new ios developer. Yes!
*One of us! One of us! One of us!*

Meanwhile i’m going like, sure i like a challenge and i have a curious attitude but i had a tremendous amount of help from a coworker here?

My twelve years old daughter saw me using an eletric mixer to puree potatoes, instead of the potato smasher.
She screamed: "You're using AI! That's cheating!"

When did "AI" replaced "Automation"?!?!
It's just like "woke", the word is meaningless now.

I'm working w/ idiots.

Since a week ago, builds have started being bundled w/ this interesting folder called 'DeleteBeforeSubmission'.

Immediately mentioned the problem, but no action has been taken thus far. Sure, they might !care whether it is bundled or !. If whoever submits the builds for release manually removes those folders prior to submitting the game - fine.

Thing is... the shit is heavy. Depending on the platform, it's ~~500 MB up to some ~~2 GB on top of the actual size of the build. So, apart from our NAS storing garbage, people have to download unnecessarily larger files.

But hey - why do something about it. It's fine, right?
/s