TIL that ~50% of the population don't have an internal monologue. That voice inside your head that's reading this.

Mom come pick me up, I'm scared.

PTSD: Getting messages again at 9PM on a friday: "do you have time for a call?"

no dude, I DONT!

IF I DIDNT ANSWER YOU DURING THE DAY ON A WEDNESDAY, WHY IN GODS NAME DO YOU THINK I WOULD RESPOND AT 9 PM ON A FRIDAY

A client of ours renewed their SSL certificates without prior notice.
The app we developed for them uses SSL pinning.
The app does not include the new certificates.
The entire userbase is hereby locked out of the app.
Fun times ahead 🙃

Me: XYZ library just announced that they will stop support for their version 3. I will update our code to use the latest version. It'll probably take 10 hours because we use it pretty extensively.

Manager: Okay. While it's updating, could you work on the ABC feature?

Me: ... no, because I'll be working updating the library.

Manager: Oh so you gotta work on it? I thought it would get updated overnight like my iPhone.

"We offer competitive salaries!"

Competitive as compared to what? The bottom 10% of salaries in this field? The top 10%?

I could say that I'm a competitive chess player when I'm competing against somebody who's never played chess before.

As an interviewer, the toughest part is actually before the interviews, trying to convince recruiting teams that you are not looking for "anyone who works with computers".

Seriously, I've once heard a recruiter ask me "you want someone who knows the program language, right?", to what I answered "a couple, yes". The mouth breather looked at me astonished, askng "is there another?!?"
I'm not surprised that they shower me in piss-poor curriculums from anyone who had a Nintendo DS growing up.
Someone needs to come up with a way to hire more selective recruiters. But I guess we're back to square one when approaching this problem.

About being interviewed, the toughest part is when people do not know the salary that will be offered (usually those recruiter types) and evade the question as billionaires evade taxes.
I don't fucking care if your compensation "is so competitive it could have been an Olympian", I want to compare numbers. And if you do not have a number, I will assume the money is crap, period.

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?

Me during my last performance review: So I did this, and that, which has this impact, and that impact
Some dude from the higher echelon: what you achieved is nice, but you need to contribute outside of your team too. No promotion for you!

Me during this performance review: ok, so here's what I did and its impact, and also here's my contribution to the company outside of my team
Some dude from the higher echelon: wow why are you doing all that? You need to delegate more. No promotion for you!

I love corporate life!

*Me enjoying life*
Brain: You're wasting your potential. You should work more.

*Me on the job working*
Brain: You're wasting your youth. You should go out and enjoy life.

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT, BRAIN?
Brain: No productivity! Only Guilt!

Pubs are fucking brilliant. Walk in. Take a vacant seat. Order food and drinks for a good price. Live music. See all your local friends. Drink enough to barely make it home. Sorted

It today's team meeting my manager asked, "What is GitHub?"

Seven years leading the group. Hired with no dev knowledge. Can't be bothered to acquire any.

"The time spent on the assignment should not exceed 8 hours."

nice, so a full working day just for an interview take home task

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

I hate it when people don't understand that programmers are prone to depression just like anyone else in other professions.

And my blood literally boils when someone says "Stop overthinking". Like bro, overthinking is literally how I make a living.

If I stop thinking about how my code can fail, I no longer can make a living out of this. I'll be no better than a handicapped PTSD possessed war veteran.

Also, IMO, you're born with an overthinking mind. It's not learned or acquired from an influence. I wish I could stop overthinking, but I have to accept it's beyond my control and try to tame it best I can.

It just sucks. But it is what it is. I know my head is spitting words out at full capacity right now, which just leads to depressed thoughts, and it will calm itself right down after some time.

I received a ticket today that said

"The customer can access the app fine if they're at their home, but when they occasionally go to the desert they can't access the app"

You can't make this stuff up.

Someone please kill me.

Me: Hello, IT Support? I can't use your system because as I log in I can't bypass a form saying I must confirm my email. But I haven't received any confirmation email. Can you resend it?

Support: We can't resend it, you have to do that yourself. What's your email?

Me: it's <blahblah>.gmail.com

Support: have you checked Junk?

Me: I sure have!

Support: Then please restart your computer and the email should come

Me: ....................
Me: have a nice day

Great ... after management got our system destroyed by some external idiots, pledged to never do this again, they now hired externals again to do a whole project by themselves.

Last time we lost all but one senior dev (that would be me) ... this time they'll lose the last one as well. Don't care of this whole department goes tits up anymore, I'm out. If everything goes well, I'm signing a new contract in a few days, making me free in 3-4 months (yes, German labour laws have long periods when you quit ;) ).

Dear management, have fun managing a bunch of rookies with no contacts in the company.

"we don't offer remote"

"oh so then there's work on the floor and with other members of the company?"

"no its mostly typing on a keyboard"

"so why the fuck is it not remote?"

"we are a boomer EU country, sorry"

so exhausted already and its only like the 3rd week of looking 😩😩😩

Team Lead: "Today we're going to discuss how we can be more inclusive with getting people on board with XYZ organization. StackODev, what ideas do you have?"

Me: "Uh. Not really sure. I mean, it's not like we're being 'exclusive' in any way. People can join the XYZ organization without any restraint or discrimination. They just sign up on the website and they're done. There are no litmus tests of any aspect of their demographics or beliefs."

Team Lead: "Yeah, but how do we make sure we're getting more of Wanted Group A so that it's not as much of Less Wanted Group B?"

Me: "Well, that's a different question, isn't it? That would maybe meet the diversity and equity goal, but wouldn't that defeat the inclusion goal? Isn't it 'exclusive' to put more effort into attracting Wanted Group A people and less effort into attracting Less Wanted Group B people? And at what point do we draw the line between creating an enrollment system that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive and one that favors Group A over Group B explicitly?"

Team Lead: "Why don't you shut up now and we'll get ideas from some other team members."

I sometimes put "[Object object]" in input forms, in hopes of making the devs debugging it lose their freaking minds.

well folks

another classic case of teaching the interviewer something during the interview

and still not getting the job

that's enough, i've had it

the world is filled with fucking dumbass clowns

Do you ever just sit unable to start, hating yourself for it?

Ugh, I feel like I've been running on autopilot lately. I just can't get myself going. Down time doesn't feel like down time either

When life brings you down and you think it can't get any worse.
Be positive and tell yourself, of course it can.

For every verb you put in your 'REST' api url, a puppy dies

Bitches be saying they're using REST and don't have a fucking clue what it means or what the principles are

I have a serious issue with anxiety, i have an unhealthy way to cope with pressure and I don't know how much will affect me in the future.

Right now I'm your average developer, i write code, makes test, commit stuff and deploy ... and i'm happy.

But seems it's not enough ... you gotta be a speaker, a leader, make showcases to customers/stakeholders the more you go up the ladder.

I'm not that. Fuck. I guess this is the kind of skills part of the Senior Engineer package companies requires.

I just wanna write code, deals with other developers and fuck off the PR part.

<.<

Our most senior and most competent backend developer got fired, he got told he "wasn't committed enough". This dude did the most complex tasks really quickly (and competently), could configure the most boring stuff off the top of his mind, and brought great culture to the company from his previous 20+ years of experience. He was about to implement some cool automation stuff, and improved our processes a great deal.

Now he's being let go. I was fearing *I* would get fired because I'm much slower and less knowledgeable than this guy.

When I talked to him, he figured the so-called "lack of commitment" was because he had missed a few standups the last few days, and got late to today's standup.

Now the boss (who is a less experienced than this dev who was let go, but co-founder of the company) was changing the database credentials (which we somehow have access to) and had the product down for like half an hour because of it.

I don't think firing this developer was a wise decision at all, and that's putting it generously. What a shame. Now I'm also a bit scared because the responsibilities of this developer might likely fall upon me. But generally I think we're worse off without this guy, and getting someone as good as him will take time.

Why the fuck does every operations app do popouts now? I don't want a simple view of the data, I want all the data so I can compare it together.

It's not like you're saving any bandwidth! All the data is there, I can fucking see it 👀 in the dev tools!

I hate how every product now desperately tries to be like their competitor and everyone fails at it because everyone is copying everyone else.

What the fuck is wrong with web designers these days?

Every fucking web page is white with black text. It's 2022, let's stop this paper bullshit and change everything to use colors that make sense on screens.

For fuck sakes, even monokai.pro is black on white. You know monokai, that dark colorful color scheme that most editors support. With a black background and white text.

I'm nursing the worst migraine in the world right now and all I want to do is smash people's faces into these shitty white screens.

It wouldn't be so bad if these fuckers would have a dark mode, but 80% of the documentation that I have to read doesn't support dark mode. Yeah I know about the browser plugins that do it for you, but I honestly don't trust any of them since most of them have been found to be spyware.

I'm managed by idiots who don't fully realize the nightmare they're creating.

They're making small operational changes, but hundreds of them with zero evidence to back their claims up.

When I bring up how it actually works, and how operations actually work I'm told I don't use the tools as much as management does and that my feedback is limited to how I use the tool.

So now I'm just gambling that they won't fuck up too bad before I get that sweet sweet sellout money and just letting them fuck everything up they want without any warnings from me.

I'm quickly learning that the phrase of the year is, "Fuck em".

Dev: So how do you want this feature fixed?

Manager: It should work how it worked before.

Dev: I'm new to this feature, I don't know how it worked before or what is broken about it.

Manager: Well just make it work like it worked before.

Dev: I DONT KNOW HOW IT WORKED BEFORE THAT IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU. PLEASE TELL ME SO I CAN DO MY JOB.

Manager: Just how it worked before!

Dev: ...

Manager: ...

Dev: fuck you

Interviewer: "Using this 2D array and calculate.."
Me: "This input isn't a 2D array though. Do you want me to parse or construct a 2D array then.."
"It is a 2D array."
"Uh.. ok..and if it's not what if we.."
"Look my notes say you must use this input, and treat it as a 2D Array"
"What if I wrote a function for a 2D array similar to this input, but actually a 2D array"
"You must use only the input provided"
Me: does rain dance code for 20 minutes.
Interviewer: "hmm, maybe it wasn't a 2D Array. I like your efforts but that's all the time we have today."

I promise I can code, sometimes. It does help to have correct questions to give correct answers.