Goal for my dev career future?

I'll soon be 53, my career goal is to make it to retirement without fired for some random biz-talk excuse for being too old.

Employer: so why do you want to join this organization?

Engineer: well like i said in the first 4 interviews, I love desks. Sitting behind them. Standing behind them.

Employer: are you a standing or sitting man?

Engineer: i like to sit in the morning and then switch up to stand at lunch.

Employer: a man with a plan. Very good. Do you remember anything from school?

Engineer: not a goddamn thing.

Employer: perfect. You don't need math. Just emails. You like emails?

Engineer: love emails.

Employer: there's gonna be a lot of emails.

Engineer: can't get enough emails.

Employer: perfect. Do you like a clear separation between life and work?

Engineer: oh not at all. I like it to muddy together in a never ending hell.

Employer: alright and you're familiar with work culture?

Engineer: oh those hours i work for free?

Employer: yes.

Engineer: I love that bullshit.

Employer: alright terrific. And are you familiar with the hate hierarchy?

Engineer: yeah the tech's hate the engineers, the engineers hate the tech's and the managers hate everyb-

Employer: everybody. Perfect. Alright I- honestly I think we'd like to make an offer.

Engineer: well, first I gotta leverage that with my current employer for a raise. And if they don't budge, I'll jump shut.

Employer: no loyalty at all?

Engineer: not at all.

Employer: you're hired.

Manager: How come I go on vacation for 2 weeks and you are able to start, complete, and ship an entire sprint in that time where as when I'm around, the same amount of work takes months? I even got COMPLIMENTS from *the client* about how smoothly things went while I was gone...THIS IS COMPLETELY EMBARRASSING AND UNACCEPTABLE!

Dev: Well. I cancelled all of the status meetings, created tickets with clear expectations, didn't change those expectations, didn't add every idea that popped into the client's head during those two weeks to the current sprint, didn't pull anyone off their tickets to teach me to code, cut the budget for making degrading comments to zero, and incentivised everyone to work by allowing a half days on fridays to work on personal projects if we stayed on schedule.

Manager: THAT'S NOT YOUR JOB! I'M THE MANAGER AND ALL. OF. THOSE. THINGS. ARE. MY JOB! NOT YOURS!

Dev: ...I know.

People with programming languages named after them:

Haskell Curry
Ada Lovelace
Agner Erlang
Blaise Pascal
Taylor Swift

Things I've learned throughout my 5 - 6 years as a programmer.
- StackOverflow is full of assholes.
- CMS's are for weaklings.
- The best feeling about waking up in the morning is figuring out how to solve that error in your code.
- You no longer think about normal people things. Your mind is full of code.
- You're practically a computer.
- ALWAYS backup and save your stuff or you WILL regret it. Enable autosave if possible.
- RIP your social life (if your friends don't know squat about programming)
- Darkness is better.
- Being a programmer is amazing.

I put an Easter egg into a product, that if you enter the string "final countdown" into the stock code search field, it plays a YouTube vid of Europe's "The Final Countdown", in a hidden div. It's an in-joke for a few people in the company.

A well meaning maintainer with no sense of humour or judgement takes over and goes on the warpath against any hardcoded strings. The secret code gets moved into a config file.

A third developer changes the deployment script so that it clears any configs that aren't explicitly set in the deployment settings.

So the secret code is now "".

Literally every PC in the stock buying department is now blaring out "The Final Countdown" at top volume.

...Except none of them have speakers, so it remains this way for over a year and two more changes of maintainer.

I just noticed this afternoon and quietly re-hardcoded the string. The buying dept.'s PCs will silently sing no more.

Boss: “Do you think you can work on Saturday? We really need the help.”

Me: “Yes, of course.”

Boss: “Great, thank you.”

Me: “I’ll probably be late, though, as public transport is slow on the weekends.”

Boss: “Okay, when do you think you will be at the office?”

Me: “Monday”.

My girlfriend doesn't talk to me anymore after I said I helped the new girl to do some penetration testing.

Me: 1 is something, 0 is nothing, NULL is the absence of things
JuniorDev: wut
Me: You've got pizza in a box, that's 1. If there's no pizza in the box, that's 0. If there's no pizza and no box, that's NULL.
JuniorDev: OOH so there's no object to reference if I ask for a slice!
Me: *small tear*

Always explain things in terms of pizza. Always.

"Whenever I see a door that says push I pull first to prevent conflicts"

Yesterday, my employer promoted me to lead web developer.

I’m still the only web developer.

This guy at my last internship. A windows fanboy to the fucking max!

He was saying how he'd never use anything related to Linus Torvalds because he hated him for creating Linux.

Two seconds later I saw him initializing a new git repo.

I was standing there like:

*should I tell him?*

😅😆

I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.

Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!

Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.

Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode

"Are you familiar with uploading your code to Google Drive?"

I left the building at that exact moment.

- Knock, knock

- An async function

- Who's there?

What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

Today we interviewed a _very_ good Angular1 Dev, by chance we showed him the forked ngRouter module we use, after some debate he explained that we were using it incorrectly.. I asked if he'd used it before to which he responded:

"Yeah, I'm the guy who built it"

😅

I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.

8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.

Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.

No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.

Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.

I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).

When a hiring manager wants 5+ years experience in Swift.

Swift release date = June 2, 2014

😂👍🖕

My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object.

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!