Quite possibly the worst advice I've ever received on the job:
"To learn the language, take large, existing applications and mess around with them to see what works and what doesn't"

What's been your worst advice ever given?

Story Time:

In the late 90s , early 2000, I remember we had our first landline (phones where a luxury on our part of the world) , with that our first 56k internet connection.

I remember vividly waiting for 14:00 (02PM) so I could connect to the internet paying only a single "pulse".

Back in my tiny remote rural village in brazil, most houses where build by brick layers people hired directly and I lots of owners worked with them to speed up the process, run plumbling and
eletricity, paint and do the floors etc, mylate father included.

Being quite handy, he also did all the wiring for the landline and the for modem.

While he was handy, he was by no means an electrician, so one bizarro side effect for the amateur wiring was that whenever someone turned on the Shower, the internet connection would go down.

And for some bizarre reason, it was only the internet connection, while the shower was turned on, the phone would work fine... some years later broadband internet got widespread and it was unnaffected by the shower.

devRant is fast enough to use again? Excellent.

!rant Lovely quote:

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One
way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no
deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
—C.A.R. Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

*me reviewing a resume*

"Optimized backend APIs and increased speed by 40%"

*resume straight to dustbin*

why tf do people write like this

I'm rewriting this horrendous piece of software that's like, real ugly, I mean, seriously ugly. A non stop mess of global variables and aliases and logical tantrums and fuck I know what else...

That's until today.

Today, after a ton of time spent clenching 2k LOC of ASS into readable 1.2k LOC, all tests passing, and passing faster if I may...

Then came a horrifying realization...

It downed on me, harder than a naked superman for a young Louis Lane

Tha maybe, just maybe, if them codes 's só shitty then probably so is them tests

So I tried deleting a obviously important conditional and to my dismay... oh boy, tests kept passing

...

Stolen:

Me - "What are you doing?"
Microsoft - "Leaving you alone?"
Me - "Then why are you here?"
Microsoft - "We have to watch you to know how to leave you alone."
Me - "Who is we?"
Microsoft - "Microsoft and our affiliates."
Me - "Who are your affiliates?"
Microsoft - "We can't tell you that."
Me - "Why?"
Microsoft - "They asked to be left alone."

Diary of an obsessed company.

So at our company, the interview loop includes Sudoku.

Why?
Because if you can’t solve a puzzle with numbers, how are you going to survive when product throws 47 Jira tickets at you with conflicting priorities?

We know you will want to ask:
“Uh… what does Sudoku have to do with shipping features?”

Our response to you is:
“Well… if you put a 3 where a 7 should be, the whole board collapses.
Same thing happens if you deploy on Friday at 4:59pm.”

Next:
We interviewed a candidate
He solved the puzzle.
We hired him.
He still deploys on Friday and can't close tickets. 😔😔😔

🔥 Fire him!!!!! 😆 🤣 😂 😹

Oh no, I've been asked to fix a printer. And I said yes. 🤦

Just checked the source code of our backend project with that tight deadline. So far, the backend consists of an in-memory database, 2 records and no API. 🙃

There is also no documentation on how it should look like 🤡

I used to think code review was about protecting engineers from themselves. It was always my goal to help keep them from making the same mistakes I made coming up.

But you can't, and it's exhausting. Give them the tools, give them resources, and automate as much as you can. Listen when they have questions, and give thoughtful answers and direction.

That's all you can do, and they'll learn through making mistakes the same way you did. The value is actually being a mentor for when hard problems come and they don't have the experience they need yet.

> These "AI doomers," as they've become known, > represent a growing faction within the artificial intelligence community convinced that humanity is running out of time to implement safeguards against potentially catastrophic AI systems.

Also rock music will be the death of civilization and turn our kids into satan-worshiping pedophile. A friend of mine killed himself because of dungeon and dragon and I lost my mummy to candycrush

I swear, people can't recognize a social panick when they see one.

"Can't you just write an if so the failing queue kinda restarts and processes the disappearing job when the bug occurs?"

No, you dense fuck. We've been over this every time you bring up this rotten, diseased garbage of a project. The queue does not work because the project was developed with a PHP version that was already EOL at the time, in an old framework that was also EOL at the time by the way, surely because someone told the brainless intern to "just copy paste from another project and change a couple of stuff" probably (that wouldn't be you? No? You sure?) and the queue fails because of a bug with the framework itself and I am NOT going to waste my time trying to decipher what the fuck this c programmer was trying to achieve with these 1600 lines of code in a single method. Yes I've seen the flowchart. No it still makes no fucking sense.

It reads from a csv. Updates some mysterious and undocumented mongodb collections. Some mysql tables as well. It also updates some fucking text files for good measure too. Text files. Oh, and It also connects to a third party API and does even more changes based on the responses. There are PHP IIFEs all over the place. Property names so short you'd think we were trying to save up on space but that clearly isn't the case, is it?

And am I expected to somehow unfuck this while babysitting the rest of the devs, write some fucking documents so that you can justify asking for more money because of your own technical debt fuckups, handle nearly all deployments, unfuck more doomed projects that were never stable or documented?

Can't wait to leave this shithole of a company. You can't attract talent. You can't retain talent and you actually made all the competent devs quit with your bullshit.

Now I'm the only senior, tech lead, devops, sysadmin and you want me to take on pm duties as well since the other pm left? Fuck. Right. Off.

Wanted to rant about DevExpress: what a pile of shitcode is that. But actually, just created my account on devrant: not happy with that either. It is all so 2025.

My scripts are made to be stupid-proof. Turns out I should have written them extra-stupid-proof.

wisdom is applied knowledge

which means useless facts are not wise. they're not helpful. they're also probably wrong. does your life get better by them? it's like hoarding. you have all this junk but you cannot can't do nothing

and this includes helping loved ones
and we as a society just uphold this as some virtue of the intellectual class. and then wonder why everybody feels alone, social media explodes, everybody is disjointed and fighting from their echo chambers, and nothing works, everybody cons each other as if they're starving animals... it's what we valued

Lost all the lead engineers in my org. Now I'm the most senior.

God help us all.

I really hate working on work that require constant reporting and decision making: I don't understand how people are olay with work like that. let me present 2 cases : for context we are working on a complete ui revamp of our app.

case 1 Screen A ui revamp.
task : change screen A ui as per new figma
me : evaluates, give estimates, make new screen by changing ui wherever applicable , adding logics for new screen wherever applicable , and removing old logics whichever not mentioned in figma. finishes a task in standard timelines
Engg lead : NO!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! WHY DIDN'T YOU ADDED THE OLD CHANGES/MENTIONED THEM TO ME! YOU ARE THE WORST DEV IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

case 2 : Screen B ui revamp
new eng trainee
- starts on screen
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 1 on day 1
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 2 on day 2
...
- ask doubt on whether to keep feature 1 form old ui on day 11
- aks the logic for showing box 3 on day 15
...
Engg Lead : UwU MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD. YOU ARE THE POWERHOUSE OF NEXT GEN. HERE TAKE THIS QUARTERLY AWARD AND THE KEY TO MY ****

wtf? i mean yeah i should ask questions if 9/10 changes are covered in the ticket and 1 festure is missed, but if you are asking for 2 changes and not putting 10 changes, why would i bother asking about the other 8? Its like asking for an apple from a farmer and then scolding him for not coming up with "5 sacks of green diced and cutted and packed in platic containers ready to be shipped" when he comes back with a single apple in hand. ASK FOR THE CORRECT THING!!

Happy Monday fellas. I'm gonna be pretty grumpy tomorrow morning because:

- Tonight's TO-DO list is writing unit tests and getting past a blocker to my project which I have been avoiding. Unit tests cause depression.
- After a recent bout of depression, I started smoking more weed than I was comfortable with and tonight starts my temporary sobriety. Withdrawal from THC causes more depression.

Wish me some God damned luck bros.

The next pirate bay is just "the internet without stupid age verification", I'm calling it now.

When everything works, but nothing feels right.

You ever hit that weird stretch where all your code compiles, all your tests pass… but somehow, everything still feels off?

No fires to put out, no angry PMs breathing down your neck — and yet, the motivation just isn’t there. You stare at the screen, pretend to refactor, maybe rename a few variables, and then just… stare again.

It’s like the calm after a sprint, except the calm feels more like quicksand.

Not burnout. Not boredom. Just... blank.

Sure, I'll just find the error in this very intelligible stack

(it's just HALF of the stack)

I spent the past two days running headlong into obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. I found solutions and workarounds for all of them, including for some obscure odd behaviors in Rails, and got everything working — at least as much as is possible.

At the end of it all, the proposed architecture is fundamentally flawed. It amounts to “we want to have our cake and eat it, too.” So I’ll need to argue with management and try to convince them to let me redesign this broken sewage system. I doubt it’ll go well.

I’m tired, boss.

For the people who work in the office, is there some music in the office or is the majority wearing a headset?

You can be jealous, it's fine.

Been at interview today for some mobile banking app. Female interviewer describes the process: tech scrrwning for their company, then tech interview for client company, then coding challengde than hiring manager offer. I said I am not doing that, I cannot pass those, my brain freezes at those challenges. I can offer pair programing up to two hours with their programmer. Interview ended quickly amd I am glad I stood up against that nonsense.

lol the UI has a new background and some color updates, but features that users requested last year and myself and my team have been working on for the past 6 months (and can generate millions of revenue for the business) get pushed back in the deployment pipeline.

these people are fucking retards.

I regret persuing Software Engineering as a career.

I am not sure how to grow. I graduated in 2020, been doing mobile(Android) development for last 5 years and after 2 switches, am stuck in a typical micromanaging toxic company with an average package and this is sucking the life out of me.

I don't feel excited about my domain. Earlier I had this twinkle in my eyes everyday I wake up, wanting to tackle the next big challange, explore the next unexplored area in tech. But now am in crisis

Firstly My domain(Android) itself is challenging. continuously evolving and people wanting to move to shiny stuff instead of what works. Wasn't technology the tool to fix problems? Why is it inventing problems?

2ndly when and where is one supposed to "live life"? i wake up at 6.30, leave for office at 7.30, reach office at 9.30, leave from office at 6 and reach home at 8.30 .

take 1 hour of dinner 1 hour of freshen up, and 6 hrs of sleep and poof! almost whole day is gone! why am i spending 20+ hours in a routine that isn't giving me any happiness?

I can't go to gym , I can't goto park to walk, I can't read a book, I can't make some side business/hobby, I can't play some ps game or go hang out with friends/family. is this normal?

Either am at an illusion that :
1. there are some companies that allow one to achieve all this with their remote work or
2. there are professions/business which allow this or
3. there are government job employees who love like this.

or everyone is doomed like me and we are all looking to die at early 50s. I sometimes think even a farmer is not that in pressure as us.

Lastly the work pressure to proof oneself every damn minute and the office politics. I just want to get out of this rat race

The latest and greatest bullshit at the workplace: when you're asked to be an 'ambassador'. This really just translates to: 'take on more work for free'.

Whenever management approaches you with 'honorable extra role', immediately ask how it's compensated and definitely don't do it for no extra benefits (a raise should be default).

Don't fall into the trap.

Ooooof. So I was booked off sick by my doctor not too long ago for a week and when I got back, I seem to have been removed as project lead with zero communication about this.

Talk about a fucking professional sabotage situation...

Glad I'm leaving as soon as I get a job offer.