"When you have a problem you can't solve, just google it. If you don't find another person that has encountered the same problem/error as you, you're doing something wrong."

- Software Engineering teacher, 2016

"Ask a PM to exit vim"

Things I need for the office

Time for an actual rant:

During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.

When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.

Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.

And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.

And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.

*can't figure out why code doesn't work for hours*
ugh fuck this.
*angrily leaves for bathroom break*
*come running back*
I KNOW HOW TO FIX IT!!!!

Dev: we have two days until go live. We got 20 bugs, 5 stories and two people on holiday.

PM: ok so could we get these 3 stories squeezed in as well?

Does anyone else suddenly lose the ability to type properly as soon as someone is watching/pairing?