Wtf Microsoft...

Found out the hard way that copying a line of code from Teams chat will sometimes convert the spaces into unrecognized ASCII char.

Spent a few hours yesterday to fix the bad chars.
🤡👍

Manager: Feature C doesn’t work

Dev: We never built feature C

Manager: Nonsense, I remember feature C clearly!

Dev: It’s still in the backlog

Manager: But we had many meetings about it

Dev: Never got put on the board

Manager: Feature C is very important!

Dev: It was never assigned to anyone

Manager: What could possibly be more important than Feature C?

Dev: All the other features you placed on the board and assigned up until now

Manager: Well I need Feature C done asap! It should be top priority!

Dev: Ok then next sprint add feature C to the board and assign it to someone

*Next planning session manager leaves feature C in backlog in favour of other tickets*

*2 days later*

Manager: What is the status of feature C?

Dev: You opted to leave it in the backlog

Manager: BUT IT SHOULD BE TOP PRIORITY!

Dev: …

Dev: *Recieves email from manager with several typos/grammar mistakes asking to open attachment with strange name and click on tinyurl style link*

Dev: *Flags as phishing*

Manager: Hey how come you didn’t action my email?

Dev: That was actually from you?

Manager: Yes.

Dev: …

Company: We were able to save a couple of dollars by purchasing an entire fleet of ipads instead of iphones through our supplier!

Dev: Our users walk around an industrial facility carrying things all day, how will they carry these devices now that they no longer fit in their pockets.

Company: We can get them backpacks!

Dev: …

Dev: did you at least buy protective cases for them?

Company: We have to save money! Don’t worry we told the users not to drop them. Plus none of the old iphones were ever broken so this is a non-issue.

Dev: The iPhones are in cases, they drop them quite a bit.

Company: Oh, well they shouldn’t be doing that!

** They proceeded to buy the cheapest knockoff cases I’ve ever seen. At least one ipad is smashed a week now, backpacks aren’t used because of lack on convenience. All this in the name of seeming to shave off a couple bucks for a one time purchase that didn’t even need to be made, iphones were working perfectly fine. Meanwhile there are glaring issues at the company getting ignored because they get themselves continually distracted by unhelpful pet projects that address things that are not broken and often make them worse.

Work, the haiku:
(Plus more Dilbert)

“Where are you on this?”
“I’m where JIRA says I am”
“Ok, but how far?”

Request from a senior backend dev in a previous company:

Talking to the team thats responsible for the auth API's is such a pain. For this new API can we just not add any auth to it? Its only going to return details about who the email address belongs too. Like name, address, date of birth, car registration etc. No one will care about that, and it will be easier for mobile to integrate right?

So this guy is supposed to do the frontend.
I do the backend.
I offer an endpoint.
He does his HTML+CSS magic.
Me: Cool but data is hardcoded. Could you get the data from the endpoint I sent you?
Him: "I'd prefer you do that, I can make a git repo so you download the front."

... So you don't do frontend, you just write pretty layouts. And I have to actually write the frontend logic? Go f yourself.

Job Ad: You will report to leadership stakeholders on key progress initiatives and collaborate on business value add action objectives.

Translation: Have boss. Do task.

Dev: Sam’s a little nervous about taking his paid leave. I guess it’s not common in Nigeria. He needs to hear from the company that taking time off like that is acceptable.

HR: THAT’S SO INAPPROPRIATE! YOU CAN’T ASSUME HE’S FRON NIGERIA JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK. BLACK PEOPLE HAVE A VERY RICH AND DIVERSE CULTURE, THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM NIGERIA!!!

Dev: Sam is from Nigeria. He told me so. He tells me a lot of stories from there.

HR: …

Dev: Can you tell me something about Sam besides his skin colour?

HR: …

Dev: …

HR: At company A where we are all about hiring top talent!

Dev: What does this position pay?

HR: Well we’ve done a market assessment of local wages and an happy to announce the VERY competitive offer of (insert 30% less than the median wage here).

Dev: …

HR: I assure you this is a very competitive. What we don’t offer in pay we more than make up for in culture. We are a family here!!

Dev: …

I feel a bit bad when I reject most people after interviews - they'll do alright, just don't have the knowledge we're looking for.

Other people who fail interviews just piss me off.

If you're applying for a *senior* position, yet you tell me a race hazard is "what happens when concurrent applications are working efficiently", a GET request is "only ever used in a REST API", a POST request is "when you use TCP directly" and you can't write a single line of code in a new project because "in the real world we always just modify what's there already", then please sod right off. There comes a point when you clearly know bugger all, have extensively lied on your CV, and you're just trying to con your way into a position while hoping no-one notices.

Argh.

Manager: I NEVER SAID THAT!!

Dev: *Brings up email where he said exactly that*

Manager: I DON’T REMEMBER ASSIGNING YOU A TICKET TO LOOK THAT UP. GET BACK TO WORK!!

Dev: …

Microsoft are making this target too easy

Management: This project isn’t moving along fast enough, you know what we need?

Dev: An additional dev?

Management: No! An additional manager! We’ll have a meeting about it later today.

Dev: …

Recently i had to interview a guy with 10 years of frontend experience for a react developer role

Me : Do you know what ecmascript is ?
Him : Yes
Me : Which version would you prefer to use and why ?
Him : I dont use it. I am more comfortable with JavaScript.
Me : (totally confused) 😶
Him : (trying to be oversmart) I know you young guys prefer to use these fancy frameworks because you dont know how powerful raw javascript is.
Me : (Trying hard to not "react") Ok.

How would you "react" to this ?

!rant

So this happened in the zoom meeting today. 2 colleagues were arguing on something.

A : "Do I look like f**king joke to you?"
B : " No, you don't look like a joke , your camera is off. But you sound like one. "
A : "I am so tired of you , f**k you man"
B: " Hey you can't f**k me without my consent, I said I am not interested."

Me : "Uhm guys this is scrum meeting."
B: "No shit captain obvious, we all know that. "

I am so speechless.....

Some recruiter just reached out on LinkedIn to talk about a job opportunity with me.

I suggested he give me an idea of the pay range before i proceed and talk to anyone in the company so we dont waste eachothers time.

He said they can realistically pay X/month.

I explained that X is less than half my current salary (Y) so i wont proceed with this.

He replied by saying "oh nice, thats a great salary for your experience"

WTF is that supposed mean? did the bitch say im underqualified to get paid my current salary?

Client: bug: downloading invoice pdf filename is F0000%20client%20project.pdf, fix this!

Dev: Safari browser has this problem since 2014, options are installing chrome on mac or saving file as F0000_client_project.pdf

Client: no, fix this!

Dev: 😫

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

!rant !devish
I'm not a developer by trade, (it's related but not my job title).

Still I just got a promotion which comes with better benefits, paid vacation and 20% raise! Plus, a huge amount of recognition that I really did earn it. Apparently even though I didn't come in with enough experience, the research and practice I did in our downtime was enough for me to get the position.

I was given a take-home assignment during the interview process of a startup.
They gave me a vague 24 hours to complete it and submit it the day after.
The instructions read like - most candidates don't complete the assignment, so if you finish 70%-80%, that's good enough.
I read the instructions; I was supposed to follow the "mock design" they sent me. It looked a tad bit ridiculous. But still, I thought I'd be able to finish most of it.

I worked on it for around 10-12hrs total (including procrastination because it was such a slog). I finished most of the "features" they mentioned, so about 70%-80% done.
I submitted it the next day. They got back to me saying they're not moving forward because they expected more features considering 24 hours.
🤨
They didn't expect me to spend 24hrs on it, did they?
I learned a few things, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time.

We have no more time for all this Agile stuff!

Half of our developers might have been injured when we built the Great Wall of China, but no worries, we've listened to your complaints about feeling overworked!

You can take 3 extra days off this year. Meanwhile, we're starting the next project.

We're building some pyramids.

What? You want Scrum and sprints? Sure, do sprints, whatever helps us build those pyramids!

Requirements? Refinements? What requirements are there to refine?

We require a giant pyramid.

For v1, you can build the foundation out of wet mud. It must be 500 meters. Wide, or high, we're not sure yet, we'll get back to you on that. It must have less than 4 sides, but certainly more than 3.

The Frontend team has already built a part of the entrance using 60 semi trucks filled with papier-mâché, pipe cleaners and glitter.

Now go build already!

Type letter "w" in wife's browser

"What is the ratio of open to closed doors in the world right now?"

"Why doesn't my baby molt her skin all at once while she grows?"

"Will Python help me to make a robot friend for my toddler daughter"

"Where do I buy tensors for building robot brains"

"Why don't we solve aging population and climate change by not vaccinating boomers"

Me: ... "Seriously, why can't you just watch hardcore porn, like a normal person"

If the requirements are spaghetti what hope does the code have?

Manager: The way you built this doesn’t accommodate any of my future plans!

Dev: What future plans?

Manager: I have a bunch of different ideas, I haven’t decided which ones to go with yet or how it will all work but you’re making it so we’re running out of room in the UI. It’s too busy, you need to clean it up so we can add more stuff!

Dev: …

Another day, another 3rd party module added to jira for management to count beans with.

Client: We are tired of having to go only to specific users to get things actioned, we need everyone to be given admin access so that we can get work done efficiently

Dev: Highly do not recommend that *outlines the likely consequences*.

Client: We don’t care, we DEMAND you do this. We’ll make sure everyone is careful.

Dev: Ok but I warned you. Please submit this request in writing.

Client: Ok, not sure why you would need that. I told you everything would be fine.

*Not even two days later*

Client: HELP!!! OUR DATA IS NOW COMPLETELY MESSED UP. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD HAVE CAUSED THIS IT’S AS IF EVERYONE IS RANDOMLY DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT HOWEVER THEY WANT IN ORDER TO SUITE THEIR OWN NEEDS. IT MAKES NO SENSE HOW THIS HAS OCCURRED. I TOLD EVERYONE SPECIFICALLY TO NOT CAUSE ISSUES!!! WE NEED THIS FIXED A.S.A.P!!!!!!

Dev: …

*While I was working from home this occurred*

New Accountant: How come Dev gets the nicest chair in the office?

IT: He brings his own chair because he doesn’t like the ones we have here.

New Accountant: How come I don’t get a nice chair?

IT: If you want a nicer chair either ask your department manager to buy one or if that doesn’t work you’re welcome to bring in your own

New Accountant: I shouldn’t have to bring in my chair from home! I want a nice chair like Dev has but I don’t want to spend the money to buy one as nice as his and my department manager said we don’t have the budget to buy one either!

IT: He buys them from a used office warehouse for pretty cheap actually, cheaper than what the company pays annually to rent these chairs from what I’ve heard. He has 3 more at home. You should ask him where he gets them from.

New Accountant: He should give me his chair! He mostly works remote anyway!

*This resulted in my being asked to come into the office to remove my chair because it was “upsetting people” in the office*

> 3 hour long mandatory online cybersecurity training
> Preaches that the company is very secure and the only risk of being “hacked” is if employees post company data on social media
> oksure.tar.gz
> Bored out of my mine
> Open dev console
> JSON continually getting sent to backend
> Simple structure and human readable fields including {complete: false}
> Open postman
> {complete: true}
> Send
> 200 response
> Refresh page
> Course complete
> :’ )

Muppets.

Isn’t it amazing how every company is ranked one of the best places to work? Amazing.