Management: "Let's make the office fuuuun :D"
Me: "Let's make my life less stressfuuuul"

Sometimes we are ping pong balls being smashed from one side to the other. This is me, I'm currently studying a technology. Oops! Change of assignments! Plz study new tech! Ok thanks for the constant context-switching.

Relatable devlife exclamation:
I'm sooooo tiiiiiiiiired...

https://youtube.com/watch/...

(my version)
[earlier...]
Follow the debug breakpoint...

Ctrl+x, Esc, Esc

<Neo> Do you ever have that feeling... where your eyes burn and feel tired out...?

<Choi> All the time. It's called rest. It's the only way to fly..

<DuJour> Come on, it'll be fun. I promise.

<Neo> Yeah, sure, I'll go.

Is it me or do you also get put on numerous projects simultaneously?

I don't know why companies do this. To save money, probably. What were they thinking? It's not efficient to put a developer on several different projects at once, much less projects that are not in their field.

What do you get when you put an employee on 5-10 different projects simultaneously? A nerve-wracked, stressed out, easily-burnt-out employee. I've seen it myself.

An important lesson I learned:

When upskilling yourself and taking notes, make sure you do it on your personal laptop because when the time of contract termination arises, you will have to sign a waiver that you can't keep any of the data you saved on company infrastructure (including cloud). And then you lose all your notes and possibly knowledge. lol.

I find this concept so annoying. Even in college they said that anything you write down is property of the university.

What do you do if you are untrained in thinking logically and you currently are naturally bad at thinking logically?

Lacking this skill brings many problems: bad at understanding logical models, data structures, databases, collections of data, solving bugs, etc. Pretty much all the real work in Software Development. I heard the solution is mathematics, e.g. approximation theory, graph theory, set theory, etc, that would help you get a better vision and grasp on these things.

Has anyone been in this situation? Everyone around you knows by nature how to 'see' solutions to problems in their head, but you on the other hand, don't.

I can't belieeeve that in some environments, developers are judged and rated by how they behave. I think they should be valued on skills, not on how 'cool' they project themselves as.

Something managers need to understand:

Developers are not a bag of M&M's to pick from and arrange them on the customer's table, neither are they LittleBits or LEGO pieces to click together for the customer to play with.

We can't possibly satisfy every client skill need. We need time to learn, and not by fudging around with the tech in production or similar.

The industry is so incredibly demanding beyond measure.

Please be proficient in:
- Java, C#, Python, TypeScript, ReactJS, AI, UX, COBOL, AWS, DevOps, security, SecOps, Linux, Unix, System Administration, Database Administration,...

Yeah? Give me six years then before you try to overload me with stress in having to deliver top quality code using these.

I actively try to diminish stress in my life and the major cause of stress is my job.

Nyeahhh____whats_up.doc

Stop calling non-engineers engineers.

Writing a quality codebase is difficult when the people in team lead roles are the people who don't give a **** and enjoy writing quick and dirty code, rendering the codebase into a perpetual disaster that constantly needs new devs to blow out fires.

I have this impression that non-devs have this idea that you can ask for a developer to learn and implement a new technology with the same ease as ordering a Happy Meal.

Oh, you want me to learn a completely new technology, write very high quality, bug-minimal code, test it, document it, in a matter of hours?! Maybe senior devs can do this, but for me, it's like asking me to build software for NASA and guaranteeing it will work wonderfully without being given the time to thoroughly test it, design it or even think about it. Wooh, just code this as fast as possible and to industry standards quality!

Anyway... just another frustration.

The default name for a developer's programming language should be called BrainFuck (as we know, it exists) because as a developer I often have lots of frustration and I would like to write the following program where asterisks represent cursewords:

******* ****, **** you, **** this ****,
stupid logic, spaghetti ****,
team politics ********,
**** **** ***** ****

In fact, using non-cursewords makes it too nice already.

All hail, king of the losers!
Ah, being rushed!
Don't point that thing at me!
Yes. No. Yes. I mean so. Commandament?
Start the game already!
It is good to be the king.
Hahaha..ha...ha!
Gold, please.
Wood, please.
Food, please.
Stone, please.

When someone interrupts me during concentrated work:

"Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!"

I don't like Agile so much. Things are always rushed and you rarely ever have 30 minutes to discuss something in depth, not even in the retrospective meeting. Team mates too busy to discuss concerns. Sigh.

head hurts, teeth hurt, eyes tired.

List<DevSymptom>

Oracle sucks. Try to do something quickly. 1000 restrictions.

What dev life feels like:
https://youtube.com/shorts/...

The industry should stop demanding too short time frames to learn new skills.

Sometimes it takes a full year of near-fulltime study to be strongly competent in it and it definitely doesn't take just a week.

In Software Development, if you have a problem to solve, you break it down into smaller, easier-to-solve problems.

Does this always hold true? I imagine there are situations where you can't do this. I would need to see different perspectives.

!rant O'Reilly has awesome content. EOF

A typical situation in some badly-configured projects...:

1) Having to restart an entire webserver every time you make any change to the code. Hot reload? Unheard of. lol. Then there's also no time to research things because it's push push push.

2) Other ugliness: frameworks so proprietary and locked that you can't hook into anything, so you have to debug using println() everywhere.

I don't suffer from 2) but sadly still from 1).

We live in a world where things are better than this. Come on.

Consulting is fucking burnout. 'Be better, faster, smarter'. Oh yeah? And a life, how about that?

I thought stepping into the Computer Science industry would be to create beautiful software with my passionate talents. All I've seen is: fix and maintain broken (badly designed)(legacy) shit. Yes, that's more of a backup role.

A good role is where you at least get to create a project from scratch that you own yourself.

Urgh.

Guess the app of this musical tone:

"tud-du, tu, tud-du, tudum-tum,.. tud-du, tu, tud-du, tu, tu, tododom, tom :)"

It's funny how beginner programmers think you can step into the industry and coast by on using established algorithms, thinking they will never need expert knowledge themselves.

A few years into the industry and I have realized that when it comes to highly customized requirements and you need to write and test complex algorithms yourself, that's when you better have your expert knowledge backing you up because aside from A.I. assistance, nothing is going to help you.

Oh, how complex it can get. I've had to think about rethinking entire architectures that gave me weeks of real headache, algorithms that required the deepest fine-tuning, tree traversion, generics, interfaces, extension methods, factory, singleton, decorator, facade, etc.

In short, you better know your way around the language you are programming in. You also need to know your algorithms and optimizations because when things are black box to you, that's not a good feeling.. especially not when people are relying on your expertise. The real world is complex and thus we model its complex models.

I really dislike it when non-devs ask devs: "I don't understand. What could be so hard about coding?".

Grumble. FredFlintStoneGrumble.