My home feels like $work owns a corner of it, and I can’t walk near there without feeling this this intense psychological dread.

Lack of time boundaries is pretty awful, too.

I have a project at work that involves learning a bunch of AWS stuff and rewriting a couple credential-generating scripts. I don't even know what the ask is, apart from some high-level "make this SSO" so ... idfk.

I am so incredibly bored of it (and burned out in general) that I can't even look at it.

I would rather see how many times it takes to beat my head against the wall to make a hole than think about this ticket again.

"Oh, I thought you would find that fun" No. No I do not. I can't even bring myself to look at it anymore. "Well, try to push through it and get it outta here!" Ughhhhh

I hope Russia nukes the bloody company.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.

When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.

Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.

In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.

So, I discovered the air in my house is spicy. Radium spicy.

I closed my work laptop yesterday around noon and dumped water on it. I was just so fed up.

Some spilled off onto my desk, though, so i gently moved (read: threw) the offending piece of plastic frustration onto the floor and carefully dried my desk.

On my way to the trash can, i stepped on the laptop. I stepped on it again on the way back, and later, on my way out the door.

I came in to get something half an hour later, and stepped on it again. It remained a stepping stone for the rest of the day, and accrued considerable foot traffic.

I spent the day drinking peach whiskey and playing with my children instead of working on reports. It was a good day.

Don't worry: my laptop still worked this morning, though I declined to.

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

Fuck long covid / ME/CFS.
This is day two of being bedridden.

I want to have energy again. And be able to move and do even simple things without collapsing for hours or days at a time.

._.

Get a new job. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Boss: <Commits odd and breaking changes to my specs>
Boss: How did these specs of yours ever pass!?
Boss: That's not how this gem works!
Boss: <Doesn't mention that the gem was updated well after I finished the ticket>
Boss: Go fix your specs!

...

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

The park, under a tree. Preferably beside a lake or stream.

There can be people present, so long as they’re not too loud and don’t ask what I’m doing, hit on me, or try to chitchat.

No matter what I try, I cannot get sharp text on my work macbook. When I use my external display for my editor, all of the text is slightly blurry and a pain to read, especially the tiny text in the status bar, which is just a fuzzy mess.

Like, I know why mac fonts are "fuzzy" -- it uses subpixel rendering to attempt to stay true to the font's curves, whereas e.g. windows tries to snap those curves to the pixel grid. So, on macs, fonts look amazing when they're normal to large, but small font sizes are just yuck. Windows is the opposite: small fonts look crisp and clear, and normal-sized fonts look.. okay.

but why can't OSX just switch between subpixel and snapping based on font size? i'm tired of reading blurs! it makes my eyes blur!

CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.

CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.

CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!

CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.

CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.

CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.

CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.

NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?

dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf

Most tedious part of my day...

While meetings are boring and awful and all, it's probably spinup times for me. Each and every change requires a minimum of 35 seconds of spinup to test. If i'm testing something with mailers or other daemons, that increases to easily 90+ seconds (plus the worker thread pickup times).

It's not enough time to do anything useful, and more than enough time to lose my focus. It turns every task into boring, tedious struggle. It's awful.

Apart from my coworkers, this is the single worst part about my job. (Okay, the awful code quality totally pushes this to third place.)

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

$work: Ey @Root, make this super simple thing.
$work: No, not like that.
$work: It also needs to do A, B, and C.
$work: No, not there. You should build it somewhere else, but I won't tell you where.
$work: You need to build out F and G, too.
$work: What do you mean you don't have the data? Just ask support drone #3. (who directs me to #2, and that one to #8 who doesn't know, and that one to #12 who won't answer)
$work: Why can't I do K, Y, or S? You should be able to infer these from the mind of whoever wrote the ticket by its wording, despite no mention of them whatsoever.
$work: Are you done yet? It's a super simple ask!

Merry Christmas, all you beautiful people!

@Root has a code review.

CR comment: “Why would you do it this way? It’s awful. Clean it up!”

Totally fair. I had copied the legendary dev’s code, and it was ick. Cleaning it was easy and enjoyable. I cleaned the source, too.

CR comment: “Why would you touch this? It’s outside the scope of the ticket. You could get it working without changing all this.”

Revert…

CR comment: “The interfaces don’t match. Now it’s confusing, and that makes it harder to maintain.”

🤦🏻‍♀️

(Forgot to post this a few days ago. Was just too tired.)

Finally finished the code review from hell.

The patch on top of the PR is +1448 -1114, and nearly all of it is rearchitecting, not moving.

I think I spent six days on it, 4-5 productive hours a day? Seems like a lot. This codebase is a bitch to work in.

I’m spent.

Thanks, firefox.
There goes my rant.

ffs

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Starting my morning with some hard lemonade. It’s no single malt, but fucking hell do I need it.

Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…

TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.

Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!

Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!

Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.

Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.

Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.

Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)

001 REM Code review

010 PRINT "Nitpick nitpick nitpick nitpick nitpick"
011 GOSUB REFACTOR

020 PRINT "This function is too complicated, break it up"
021 GOSUB REFACTOR

030 PRINT "Why do you have three methods for this? Put all the logic in one method."
031 GOSUB REFACTOR

040 GOTO 020
041 REM ARGH

998 PRINT "Looks good."
999 STOP

Trash, trash, trash.
Who the fuck writes this shit?

Who the fuck lets these trash should-be-junior devs roll their own crypto? and then approves it?

The garbage heap of a feature (signing for all apis) doesn't follow Ruby standards, doesn't follow codebase conventions, has `// this is bridge` style comments (and no documentation), and it requires consumer devs to do unnecessary work to integrate it, and on top of all this: it leaks end-user data. on all apis. in plaintext.

Fucking hell.

Had QA call my "simple, quick" ticket a "monster ticket" in front of everyone. Hear it and weep, micromanager!

Also had them tell me i thought of everything, it was beautiful, and that i have a knack for frontend :)

Spent an hour and a half renaming a method everywhere in a project from `feature_name` to `feature_name!`. There are a lot of constants, symbols, and other methods that use "feature_name" as a prefix (plus comments and spec descriptions), so was a little more difficult than normal.

Should have taken like 5 minutes with a proper IDE refactor tool. but noo, it was too difficult for RubyMine. wah wah wah. Stupid thing. Not even the search tool was useful -- it's limited to 100 results, and there were around 250 for that substring.

I ended up having to run specs repeatedly to find all the remaining instances, which took freaking forever. blahhh

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.