My Friend: Dude our Linux Server is not working anymore!

Me: What? What did you do?

My friend: Nothing I swear!

Me: But you were last on it?

My friend: Yes. I just wanted to run a bash file and needed to give it permissions.

Me : WHAT DID YOU ENTER???!

My Friend: Chill man, just this command I found on the internet
chmod -R 600 /
chown -R root:root /

Me: WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN ROOT AND GOD DAMMIT WHY ARE YOU EVEN USING SOME RANDOM COMMAND FROM THE INTERNET. YOU KNOW YOU SHOULD NOT DO THIS OR JUST ASK!

My friend: Ok I did something wrong, how can I fix it?

Me: Did you make a backup or rsync of the server?

My friend: No. I just wanted to run this file.

Me: You holocausted the server. FUCK MY LIFE

Happened a while ago but I still find it funny.

*phone rings*
Me: good morning sir, how can I help you?
Client: MY WEBSITE IS OFFLINE, FIX IT RIGHT NOW.
M: I'm going to take a look, what's the domain?
C: *gives domain*
M: I see, that domain expired already, it was cancelled through our customer portal by the client, you maybe or someone you know?
C: WHAT?! MY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DEPENDS ON THAT DOMAIN, I'D NEVER CANCEL IT, THIS IS BULLSHIT! I'F THE SITE GOES OFFLINE FOR A MONTH I'LL FUCKING GO BANKRUPT, YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS RIGHT NOW.
M: if I may ask, how is your business doing right now?
C: HOW IS THAT QUESTION RELEVANT RIGHT NOW?!
M: well, you said that if the site would go offline for a month, you'd go bankrupt. The domain registration ended about half a year ago so that's why I aske......

*beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep*

Well, okay then.

Client: Hey, you're the IT guy right?
Me: Hey, how can I help?
Client: Yeah for some reason I've lost power to my computer
Me: *Checks power, all computers are down due to a power cut*
Me: You'll have to contact your power supplier as you've lost power to all computers and lights.
Client: What, but the computers are not working right? - that's you're job not mine
Me: That's not how it works.
Client: Fix this or I'll bill you for the loss of money we've encountered during this and report this to your boss.
Me: How about I bill you for my time and advice and inform by boss that you tried to blame me for a power cut.
Client: You can try.
Me: *walks off and puts time in the ticket, requests purchasing to send an invoice*

2 Days later:
The client does not pay the invoice.
Me: (phone call) Hi, an invoice has been sent to you and we haven't received payment yet.
Client: were not paying that, you broke our power and made our computers break
Me: null

"Can you give me an estimate on how long it will take you to fix this bug?"

"That's like asking how long it will take to find my keys."

Fucking someone has to fix the recruiting process.

Fucking who gives a shit about your experience, and what you did so long.

Here take this fucking shitty problem that I googled, so that I can judge you by this one fucking problem.

Oh, youve worked on variety of technologies? Fuck you.

Fuck these interviews. Fml.

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.

[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.

[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?

[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.

[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.

(a few months later...)

[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.

Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.

[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.

(angry client calls immediately...)

(dev transfers to manager...)

(client transfers to client's boss...)

[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.

[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.

(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)

[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

"Jim, can you tell me why my e-mails aren't getting to clients?"

They're being marked as spam...

"oh damn, how can we fix that?"

You can't. You can change the structure of your e-mails to look less spammy, but it's on their end.

"This is a disaster, we can't have our marketing e-mails marked SPAM!!"

Have you tried not spamming people?

"WE'RE NOT SPAMMING PEOPLE, THEY EXPRESSED A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS INTEREST"

No, you bought a mailing list and put together an e-mail campaign.

"But we aren't spamming people!"

IT VS Marketing 100% of the time

Client: "This has been broken for weeks! Why is it still broken!?!?"

Me: "Did you tell anyone it was broken?"

Client: "Well...um...no..."

I may be good at my job, but I have not been able to (nor do I want to) develop mind-reading abilities. Now please fuck off (so that I can go fix it).

They asked for a web developer
Interviewer : can you fix this printer ?
Me: no
Interviewer : You're not for this job
Me: thanks God I'm not for that job

A former colleague made an online shopping app. Boss wanted to promote him to Senior Developer when he still working with us.

14 days ago another colleague checked the code and told the boss that it's ready for production. No one asked me because everyone in the company thinks am the stupid developer of them all.

So what happened?
Well the total value of the cart was being over to payment gateway using a hidden field. Well you know the rest of the story.

The client has sued our company for this issue and boss came running to me and asked me to check if it was our fault or something else.

I checked and found the hidden value where the total value of cart was being stored and send over to payment gateway. The following is the conversation between me and the colleague who checked the code:

Me: So you checked the code and everything was okay?
Him: Yes, all good.
Me: Did you see this hidden field where the total value of cart is being passed to the payment gateway?
Him: Yes
Me: Why didn't you fix this?
Him: What's there to fix?
Me: Well someone can temper the value and let it pass to the payment gateway.
Him: No, they can't we are using https
Me: I' am done with you

He has Masters in software engineering and has few security certificates.

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

-------------

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

*On a programming support forum*

Guy: My compiler keeps throwing null pointer exception at line 128.
Me: Ok. Can you post your code real quick so I could figure out what is null at line 128?
Guy: No I'm not going to show my code to someone on the internet. What if you want to steal my code?
My mind: "Dude wtf why would I steal someone's code on a support forum?"
Me: *Use the next 15 minutes explaining that showing the code is necessary so that others can actually help him, and that no one on a support forum is going to steal his code.*
Guy: "You know what I'm more convinced that you want to copy my code. I might as well just try to fix this on my own."

What?

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

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."

Had this recently with a client, mysql server of one of our shared hosting servers went down:

Senior engineer 1: heads up guys, mysql of {server name} is down, working on it! *calls second engineer in*
Support people: thanks for letting know! (in case clients call about it)

*triiiingggg*
Me: good afternoon, how can I help you?
Client: this site which we manage for a shared customer says it can't connect to the database...
M: is it hosted on {server name of mysql problems}
C: yes.
M: there's a mysql disruption there right now, we're working on it!
C: *starts guilt tripping me about thy they chose us for stability reasons and now this happens*
M: sir, I can't change this situation so you can go on and on about that but it's not going to help anyone.
C: okay, so what can I tell my client?
M: you can tell that we have a mysql server disruption right now and are working to fix it as soon as possible!
C: and what am I going to tell my client if they don't accept that answer?
M: you can tell that we are fixing this disruption as soon as possible.
C: yes you said that but what if they don't accept that answer, what am I going to tell them THEN?!
M: Listen, sir. We have a disruption right now. It's not fun but whether I tell this by writing it to you in a fairy tail or shout it at you, it's not going to make a difference.
We have a disruption and we are working on i....

*click*

Well, fuck you too.

Dad calls:
D: Hai, so, um, my pc's not booting up.
Me: So?
D: What do I do now?
M: You tried fixin' it?
D: That's why I'm calling you.
M: I'm 400km away from you. Does it do anything by pressing a power-on button?
D: No. But I touched it, it's really hot.
M: When was the last time you cleaned that shit up?
D: I have to clean it?
*PC is located at dusty environment at work. 5 years old and is being turned on 6 days a week*

Clean. Your. Pc.
Oh, and yeah, it overheated, burned the mbo, power suply, and cpu cooler stopped spinning.
It's like Satan threw a curse on a pc, and took a piss on it.
The best part? He's mad because I "never help him nor have time when he needs something to be fixed".
He can fix the PC in a pc shop that is across the street.

So, you doin' any better this week?

FOR FUCKS SAKE PEOPLE ! JS AND PYTHON ARE NOT THE BEST LANGUAGES NOR THE ONLY THING YOU SHOULD LEARN. THERE'S NO TOOL OUT THERE THAN CAN FIX EVERYTHING.

WTF HAPPENED TO THIS INDUSTRY IT'S AS IF JS AND PYTHON ARE ALL THEY TEACH THESE DAYS ...

ENOUGH ! BE A POLYGLOT OR GTFO (OR YOU CAN SPEAK ONLY 1 LANGUAGE AND STOP FORCING IT WHERE IT DOESN'T BELONG)

now that that's out of my system. bring it on

Sister: "Can you fix my computer?"

Me: "What's wrong?"

S: *explains the issue

Me: *types that into Google and shows her the search results

S: *gives me the look

M: "This is seriously what I do to fix a lot of my problems 🧚"

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

People will always ask us to fix their computer :/

Had a meeting with IT-director of our client.

Me: Yes, with our solution you will be sure that the details of all your 17.500 employees will be stored and accessible for all required third party systems. We will have a 6 month preliminary schedule and it will cost..

Random: Excuse me!

Random employee interrupts and has actually stepped into the meeting room.

Random: Can you take a look at my computer? Something is wrong.

IT-director: Is there noone else who can look at this?

Random: But it was working a minute ago. It probably will be a quick fix?

IT-director looks at me like "what even is this?"

IT-director: Go down to the 12th and talk to IT there, we're having a meeting here.

Random: I thought you guys who are so good with computers could fix this in a jiffy!

Me: Burning inside

IT-director: Just leave us, please.

Random leaves.
IT-director looks at me and I look knowingly back. We are both sad for a moment. Then we continue.

Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix

User: It’s still not working

Dev: Did you log out and in again?

User: No why would I want to do that?

Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue

User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?

Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version

User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.

Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though

Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!

Dev: …

Dev: What other bugs did you notice?

*no response for 2 weeks and then:

User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Dev: ….muppet.

Product: Hey, this screwdriver feature I never requested isn’t there. Why? Can you fix it? It’s kinda urgent.

Product: @Root please jump on the ticket above … fairly urgent.

Root: It’s Friday, I’m out next week, and I’m working on finishing <urgent comma ticket> right now.

Boss: Work on the screwdriver instead. But make sure you finish the comma ticket too!

Boss: By the way, I volunteered you for eight security reviews next month!

Security: You’re on call for AWS audits next month, too!

If the below is you, please stop. I'm starting a revolution called #AnswerTheQuestion

A: Hey, just checked your code, you have a huge security issue in XYZ, you should really address that.

B: Oh god I had no idea, how do I fix it?

A: Well it depends on how you *want* to fix it, no one solution is always the right one.

B: ... Ok, well could you give me some advice?

A: Well, there are many ways to approach this kind of work, but all I can say is that this way, is definitely not the correct one.

B: ... Ok, well how would you do it?

A: That would depend on the customer requirements.

B: ... the requirements is to have a website that isn't easily hackable, what do I do?

A: Nowadays, its pretty hard to make a website completely not hackable.

B: ALL THE SERVERS ARE SHOWING RED, PLEASE HELP ME!!!

A: ........ you really shouldn't prejudge colours. The colour red doesn't always mean danger, depends purely on the use case.

!!fml

"Root, go fix this bug. It'll take you two days."

The "bug" is a feature that was never implemented for one particular payment type.

The code in question is two years old, full of typos, smells, junior-isms, and is convoluted AF. The feature's commit touched 190 files and implemented many other features as well. Thus far, I have been unable to narrow down where this particular feature's code lives for the other payment types, nor which code or payment paths lead to it. Burned out, I can barely focus on the screen, let alone follow its many twisting and dynamically-inferred paths. I hint as to the ticket's scavenger hunt nature during standup.

"But I wrote comments on the ticket telling you exactly where to look to fix it," Thundercunt admonishes in front of the team.

"Sure, you did," Root replies. "You reworded what the original dev had said in the comments 20 minutes prior, and agreed with him. His comments were helpful, but it doesn't tell me how any of it works," she continues.

TC scoffs and closes the meeting.

Root stares blankly, seeing neither code nor screen, questions her life decisions, and recalls the previous tickets she has worked on: nearly every one of them busywork, fixing other people's bugs. Bugs she never could have gotten away with if she tried.

"Why do I put up with this?" She asks. "They don't care, and it's killing me."

But the bills remain, and so must she.

"Fuck my life" she finally decides.

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

"Can you work on this ticket? It's kind of urgent."

-- "OK"

"And could you please not refactor? Just get this done."

-- "Why? What's the issue?"

"The logic is complex. We should not break it."

-- "Erm, that's what the tests are for. So yes, if the need arises, I'll refactor. The tests are my guidelines if the logic breaks or not."

There's a reason we create tests. So let's not hinder code base improvements by some random fear that stuff might break.

If breaks due to refactoring, we'll fix it by adding a valid test case during and then fixing the bug.

If my refactoring does not break the tests, I'll assume the code base is stable.

If your code is untested, then we have a complete different problem.

Didn't want to post it as there's been already a lot of posts like this. But I just can't help myself to rant over this. This happened yesterday. I helped him earlier with his phone.

Friend of my dad: Hey, I need your help with my laptop I bought from eBay.

Me: *flashbacks of devRant posts*

Him: Everything works. It's just that nothing comes up in display.

Me: Okay, you need to take that to a repair shop. If at least something came up on screen I could help.

Him: Aren't you a computer engineer? I bought this because I knew you can fix it.

Me: *more flashbacks*

Him: You gotta help me with this. I can't lose money on this

Me: You didn't even ask me anything before buying. Ask your buyer if they have a 30 day return policy.

Him: Why are paying this much to study Computer Engineering? I'll talk to your dad.

This people man. I told my dad and he never received his call anymore

- "Finance are too busy to look at this"
- "Finance have too much to do"
- "We can't this sorted at the minute because finance are overloaded"

Finance just sent me a request for "detailed description" for each business trip i've made. Attached is a spreadsheet report with 122 columns detailing every facet of my travel expenses that they have recorded so far. Not even just one row per trip, but one row per item, like:

- Trip 1 - Airport parking: .....
- Trip 1 - Airfare Outbound: ....
- Trip 1 - Airfare Inbound: ....

This is way you are too busy, because this is fucking ridiculous. Fix your shitty process and stop bitching.

FYI, your "detailed descriptions" can be found in the contracts we've signed, which outline all the travel needs, which you've already reviewed and signed off on. Get your shit together and stop bugging me

Dear Apple,

We've sent you a new message regarding your app, Xcode. To view or reply to the message, go to the Resolution Centre.
----------------------------------
We noticed that your app did not fully meet the terms and conditions for reasonable fucking update size. Your latest app update requires over 40 GB of free fucking disk space. Please bear in mind that many of your own fucking laptops only have 120 GB of disk space. For optimum user experience, it would be best if the user didn't have to uninstall other apps from their system just to run your shitty update system.

Next Steps:

To resolve this problem, we recommend that you fix your shit. If you are unable to fix your shit, we recommend that you don't take 30% of all iOS developer's income so that you can make giant fucking glass donut buildings, and instead use that ridiculously disproportionate monopoly-abusing cut and invest that money in fixing your shit, to lighten the load of developers on whose backs you have become the most cash-rich company in human history.

Resources:

There are plenty of resources such as Stack Overflow to take advantage of, in order to learn how not to create a bloated piece of shit IDE.

Once you've completed all required changes, please upload a new binary to the App Store.

Just who the fuck from apple thought its a good idea to make the FUCKING SCROLL BAR overlap, the FUCKING PROPERTY ARROWS, everytime i accidentaly hover over it? I cant change shit! I have to wait few seconds every time i accidentaly hover over the scrollbar so i can be able to FUCKING CHANGE the value!

Dear Apple Inc,

Fix your shit! We're paying 100$ a year for what? More bugs and toruture? I didnt sign up for this bullshit! Give us back some real quality products, or just buy the company Jetbrains and let them build the IDE for you instead.

Pointy Haired Boss: "There's an issue with this simple bit of that service, could you take a look?"
Me: "Sure, give me a minute to investigate"
*A minute later*
Me: "No wonder there's a problem, this code is horrendous! What idiot wrote this unmaintainable crap?"
PHB: "Doesn't matter, just fix it, test it and release it."
Me: "I just want to check who did it, so they never touch our code again."
*Checks SVN log*
Me: "Well, I guess I can never touch our code again."

Boss: you must fix this bug asap
Dev: I need more time for a proper fix so I will just hack a workaround
Boss: yeah, whatever. You can find a proper fix after the release.

... this happend several years ago and the workaround is still in place...

My family: Can you repair the printer ?

Me: No ...

My family: can't send my emails, fix it !

Me: No ...

My family: why this people can share my photos on Facebook ? Stop it now !

Me: Then stop sharing all your god damn life each time you eat, fart or go to the bathroom !!!! For fucks sake !

Also me: why have I started computer science ?

I hate when this happens:

Me: "I'm a programmer."
Other Guy: "Seriously? Can you fix my printer?"

Manager: How come the push to prod didn’t happen?

Dev: We told you at the scrum yesterday. To reiterate, our dev environment was crashing so it’s not safe to push to prod until that is fixed.

Manager: Ok well lets set a goal to fix that and push to prod happens today so that it guaranteed happens.

Dev: That was our goal yesterday and it definitely didn’t happen.

Manager: I AM AWARE OF THAT. The corrective action is that this time compliance with the goal is 100% ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY!!

Dev: We’ll do our best, can’t guarantee anything until we figure out what the nature of what is occurring on dev though.

Manager: NO. I AM THE BOSS. YOU WILL 100% ABSOLUTELY COMPLY WITH THIS. THAT IS AN ORDER. YOU WILL SUCCESSFULLY GET THIS UPDATE OUT TO PROD TODAY. ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT SHALL BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION. I WANT STATUS UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES ON WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THIS.

Dev: …

Dev: Can I get you to send me that request in an email?

*Manager leaves the meeting*

// *****************************

Job search is ticking along. It’s tough going though because I currently make ~120k and the best offers I’ve received so far are all ~70k because “You only have 2 years experience so you couldn’t possibly have the skills to be worth 120k. You are are junior level developer and 70K is already overpaying for you. We can pay you more later™. No we will not give you that in writing”. Ah well, the hunt continues.

> Manager: Why does service X behaves Y way? It should do Z instead.
> Me: *explains why*
> Manager: I don't understand this...
> Me: *explains it in more simple terms and shorter sentences*
> Manager: I'm still not sure I get it.
> Me: It is like this because of a third party provider and we can't change anything for the same reason. Also it is working like this for half a decade now.
> Manager: Ok, I get it. So please fix the service, it should do Z instead of Y.
> Me: *facepalm* Sorry, I can't. Ask (frontend guy), maybe he can help you.
> Frontend guy a bit later: ┌П┐(ಠ_ಠ)

Teacher: hey, your good with computer programming, right?
(Thinking I finally have a chance to prove myself programming wise.)
Me: yeah, Sure
(Trying not to blow my own trumpet)
Teacher: great, can you fix this word document for me?
FML

Dev manager: Can you fix this issue?

Me: Yeah, but i cant reproduce it using the explanation given in the ticket. Can i get a step by step guide and a confirmation that the issue is reproducible.

Dev manager: you're the lead dev, you figure it out.

askdjasfkjksadjkasd!!
Do you want me to spend an hour not developing things trying to guess? because that is how you make me spend an hour not developing things

Hey man can you fix my tv, computer, toaster, phone, or hack this phone i found, can you hack me a wifi, can you make me a website/app i have a really good idea. (For free of course)
Hey man you only need a good idea for an app then become rich.
(Insert countless of other retarded requests here)

Someone kill me

Every time I do a dirty fix and someone in my MR comments "have you investigated the root cause" I wanna kill myself.

No bro, I havent investigated the root cause because this ticket is 3 months old and was passed around like a hot potato from team to team until it got assigned to me.

If you want I can add a comment to refactor this in the future. As far as Im concerned any refactors are out of scope, also I atleast came up with some kind of solution that noone else was able to in 3 months. So im not gonna waste my time on refactoring this piece of shit code under immense pressure from management who thinks it was me who dragged this ticket for 3 months.

Its working, it doesnt cause any side effects, we all gonna die soon and nothing really matters, so fuck off.

Me to a lead dev: hey, I noticed that junior guy pushed this bad code to prod that you approved.

Him: oh really that’s wrong? Ok we can fix it.

Me (cursing under my breath): no asshole, that’s not the fucking point. You should know enough to not approve such pull requests.

Application has had a suspected memory leak for years. Tech team got developers THE EXACT CODE that caused it. Few months of testing go by, telling us they're resolving their memory leak problem (finally).

Today: yeah, we still need restarts because we don't know if this new deployment will fix our memory leak, we don't know what the problem is.

WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING IN THE LOWER REGIONS FOR THREE FUCKING MONTHS?!?!?! HAVING A FUCKING ORGY???????????????

My friends took the time to find your damn problem for you AND YOU'RE GOING TO TELL ME YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS???

It was in lower regions for 3 MONTHS and you don't know how it's impacting memory usage?!?!?! DO YOU WANT TO STILL HAVE A JOB? BECAUSE IF NOT, I CAN TAKE CARE OF THAT FOR YOU. YOU DON'T DESERVE YOUR FUCKING JOB IF YOU CAN'T FUCKING FIX THIS.

Every time your app crashes, even though I don't need to get your highest level boss on anymore for approval to restart your server, I'M GOING TO FUCKING CALL HIM AND MAKE HIM SEE THAT YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT. Eventually, he'll get so annoyed with me, your shit will be fixed. AND I WON'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH YOUR USELESS ASS ANYMORE.

(Rant directed at project manager more than dev. Don't know which is to blame, so blaming PM)

Me: ooh my eyes hearts, I have to sleep now, I fix this tomorrow morning.

(go to sleep)

Inner Me: hey
Me: ...
Inner Me: pisst! wake up
Me: what?? leave me alone I'm tired
Inner Me: remember that issue you had?
Me: yes?
Inner Me: this is how you can solve it
Me: great thanks, I'll fix it later
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now
Me: I'm tired, I'll fix it first thing in the morning
Inner Me: no no you'll forgot it
Me: no I won't, let me sleep
Inner Me: no no you'll forget and I won't tell you again
Me: look I write it down in my phone now leave me alone
Inner Me: no no you have to fix it now.
Me: *crying* for God sake...

(gets out of bed and try to turn on PC and it's not starting, realizing that the power is out)

Me: you happy now, I fix it tomorrow.
Inner Me: no no stay awake till power is back on.
Me: SHUT THE FICN ON PICK OF CRAPE. Did SHDUHDBD DBDJDB

*production is down*
Ops: At 5pm? On a Friday? *checks deploy history* God! Who did the deploy
Dev: It was a small patch, a tiny patch. It shouldn't have....
Ops: Deploy on a Friday evening?
Colleague: I didn't think it would...

Ops (on the outside) : *takes a deep breath* Its okay Dev, we can fix this. Don't worry

Me(in my mind) : for fuck sakes! Are you fucking kidding me?*** **** *** god damn it! *****

Friend brings over a Windows 8 all in one laptop.
Friend: Can you fix my laptop
Me: I'm a programmer
Friend: I thought you worked with computers.
Me: I do... but I'm not tech support
Friend: Please?
Me: (reluctantly) Fine.
*many hours later after attempting to get the PC to boot from a USB. WHY DOES THIS PC NOT HAVE A KEY TO ENTER THE GOD DAMNED BOOT MENU AND HAS NO BOOT ORDER SELECTION?????!*
Friend: Have you fixed it?
Me: No
Friend: You suck at computers
Me: ....

Never spoke to him again.

My son loves...loves Star Wars, so when Star Wars Battlefront (on the PC) went on sale, he jumped on it.

To my shock (I'm not a big gamer), the game is filled with hackers/cheaters that are able to give themselves 'god' mode, so they can kill in one shot and take no damage.
My son (and others in the game) keeps 'reporting' them, but it looks like an issue EA is ignoring.
My son keeps asking me "You're a programmer, can't you fix the game so they can't do that?"

Good lord...I could care less about russians "hacking" our election (moronic press, doesn't even know what that means), but hacking my son's favorite game!...hmm..wonder how long it would take me to drive to EA headquarters and find that SOB dev manager in charge?
I get it, cheaters are gonna cheat, but fix your friggin' code! Aren't you embarrassed!?

Don't give me any of that "we don't know how they are doing it..." nonsense. This is devrant, not <insert media outlet you hate>.

A rant from the old box, with some minor edits because I don't remember the exact wording anymore.

So last time I had this window cleaner visit me, and he'd do his job while I was troubleshooting a broken tablet that my past home supervisor donated to me. After he was done he came to me, very impressed.

He then said: "Wow, you are disassembling this.. you must be very technical."
Me (kinda tired): "Thanks. And yeah pretty much."
He: "Does this mean that you can fix anything?"
Me: "Kind of. It depends. But I can't fix printers."
He: "Why is that? Are they so complicated?"
(the tablet I had disassembled is orders of magnitude more difficult than a printer)
Me: "Not really. It's just that that's often what users ask next."
He: …

The guy immediately left 🤣

I HOPED I WOULDN'T BE BALD AS MY DAD BUT AT THIS RATE I WILL BE HAIRLESS FROM TEARING IT OUT ON MY BLOODY OWN

I got hired for cleaning up a 2 year project of rushed spaghetti code , where they previously only had 1 programmer aND HE WROTE 37 THOUSAND LINES OF CODE!

OH WE NEED A NEW FEATURE?! LEMME JUST RESEARCH THIS COMMENT-LESS CRAP FOR MULTIPLE MILLENIA BEFORE I CAN GRASP WHAT THE FLYING FRICKIN FRIDGE CODE DOES

To top it off, I've about ONE MONTH LEFT BEFORE BETA RELEASE TO FIX THE CODE!

I'm super grateful for this job as it's my first programming job BUT I'M GONNA SET THE REPOSITORY ON FIRE SOON AAAAHHHHHH

HOW CAN YOU, THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER, WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WHERE MOSTLY ALL FILES ARE +2000 ROWS OF UNDOCUMENTED CODE

OH AND JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM THE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMER:
"You can just remove the unused code and refractor it some, izi"

IZI MY SHITTY POOP CAR
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

Now with that out of the way, how would you recommend handling a stressful release deadline?

Can you fix this?

*peacefully coding*
Family: can you help me connect to WiFi?
*5 mins later*
Friend: help, how do I download this program?
*5 mins later*
Family: fix my computer, it’s really slow!!

When did I go from programmer to IT help desk?

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

When you are given a task or bugs to fix and your boss will tell you everytime that, "this is so easy this will be done in just 3 seconds".

WTF! Then don't hire devs and do it yourself! And start fixing all the damn bugs in just 3 seconds yourself! There are 28800 seconds in whole fucking 8 hours, I guess if we divided it by 3 you can finish a task or fix a bug at approximately 9600! (Applause) Now we are silently calling him "The 3 seconds man'.

Me: I can fix that workflow in about five minutes, In fact I can do it right now as we are speaking on the phone.

Customer: okay well... let me contact the director and make sure it’s okay that you fix it.

Me: I won’t make any changes to how it functions I’m only going to make it work again as it used to

Customer: we might need to schedule a meeting to talk about this because I’m not sure that we should be changing the site without permission

Me on the inside: I literally have global admin rights, unlimited power in Sharepoint, am responsible for making sure this stuff works, and BUILT this fucking thing, so now that I’ve been alerted of an issue I’m going to fix it. You are welcome to blame me if your boss is upset about it but I’m not going to wait for a fucking meeting to make sure it’s okay that I update a god damn email address in a workflow.

Me IRL: okay sounds great let me know when it is :)

Client: Hey. So. LOVE your work. Got my computer repaired at your place a few weeks ago. And you guys did a GREAT job. But noooooow...my phone is acting up. Can you fix it?

Me: Why yes! We can! It will be ________! Keep in mind, the price includes all labor and comes with a three month warranty!

Client: But you said the last time I was there I had a warranty. Why isn't my phone covered under warranty?

Me: because the warranty only covers your computer issue that we fixed.

Client: BUT YOU SAID I HAD A WARRANTY!!!!!

It was at that moment I wanted nothing more than to sink into the wall behind me and wash my hands of this insanity.

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

I'm one of those people who have literally no value of education and skills between family members, yes as soon they hear I'm doing bachelors in computers they all come too me with *Can you please fix my phone*

But today a letter came it was from devRant and it had stickers for me, my uncle received the letter and you can't imagine how surprised he was and asked me who sent me letter from NY, I explained him that we are an awesome community and this letter is just a way to motivate us. It's the first time something come for me and even tho it's just some stickers but meant alot to me.

Thankyou devRant and the community for making me feel this awesome 😊

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

Me: well guys, after the 4th attempt and a week of waiting, I’ve gotten a response from the remote backend team about the errors affecting this release. Which are the same issues affecting the last release 2 months ago. The findings are: “there is in fact some issue with the API”.

I’d like to thank everyone who put in so much effort to get us to this momentous step forward. We can expect a fix any year now.

*equally sarcastic colleague on another team listening in*:
oh wow, this months long thing has just been “some issue” all this time? Well that’s fantastic. You should mark the ticket as “done” and reply “thank you” for all their hard work.

..... I laughed so hard at how ridiculous all this is and the joke, that I nearly did, hoping someone from product/business would have to review it

I coded for a whole day (uninterrupted, literally woke up, grabbed my laptop and headphones and started) and suddenly, let wild parent shows up.
"Aren't you going to go out? You need to see some friends"
My response: As stated before, I have no friends, now leave
**Leaves**
**Comes back 2 hours later**
"Hey can you help me with my computer?"
Me: you didn't state the issue, what computer, what os, what you have done to fix it, have you even tried rebooting?
"Don't talk like that to me! Now come and help me!"
Me: nope, hint, answer the questions about your issue
"You rude piece of..."
**Starts screaming bla bla bla**

Wow, it has happened before that I treat people wanting help like me trying to debug, but I usually correct myself. I took it way to fucking far this time...

Dude: Hey, can you help me with my website? It's for the final year project (IT and Hardware related degree).
Me: Sure, let me see.

Sends a .txt file with two <html> tags, not even closed.

Dude: Can you fix it so it appears with a menu on the top and news on the middle?

This guy got his degree and I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know how to enter to the BIOS of a computer.

He probably doesn't know what a BIOS is.

A person just bought a 3000€ workstation and asked me to install cracked versions of Office, AutoCAD, full Adobe suite and Rhino with plugins. And he's going to use them at work to make money.

So, since I have to, I installed 2-3 years old versions of each, in English (he only knows Italian) and blocked all the connections so he can't receive any update/fix or use web related functionalities. I also disabled all autostarting components and contextual menu / OS integrations (although this can be seen as a plus).

When he's calling me asking to "fix" things, I will simply say "sorry, it's the only way for the crack to work, if you want everything you'd better pay for a license or else go open source".

Why can't people understand the value of the complex software they use? Just because it's not a material thing doesn't mean it's not a steal

User: Bobby, please update this quality controlled document because I screwed it up.

Me: No there is a process for a reason, multiple people need to sign off on this. Also, we talked about this exact issue a year ago that you did not fix.

User: But its a minor change, several hyperlinks in the Word document need adjusted.

Me: Ok, you do it and submit it through the process again.

User: Can you make the changes to the document? It will take me forever and I'm very busy. I know you can do it much quicker than I can.

Me: I really don't want to edit this document myself. It doesn't apply to my job at all and I cannot verify any of the changes would be correct.

User: Oh it's fine. Make the changes and I'll look over it.

...

I hate my job sometimes.

Second day on the job, only one with no real degree in software development (did much stuff in free time, just finished school, got the job mainly because i knew people there)
So you can imagine that they were sceptic about me.

Chief executive whatever told me there is a problem with some JavaScript they can't fix cus there is no time and shit for that.
I was like ALL IN and said i could do this in a few mins.

Fixed it in 20 mins. Everyone was cheering. I was like "Well it was the right decision to not do my homework back in the days.." 😁

Client : hey why does your app minimize once I receive a call? Fix this ASAP! Also why does it show *that*? I have not turned anything on!

Me : Sorry, not possible (explains), you might want to contact Google (for the lolz). Also, the feature is shown by default, you can turn it off via Menu - Settings - Navigation - xxx.

Client : Can you make the incoming call popup smaller when using your app?

Me : Unfortunately no, that's not something I can do. Contact LG.

Client : I have been to Menu - Settings - Map - XXX and the feature is still shown, why does your software not work? Also *this and that* is not shown anymore!

Me : You turned off the wrong thing... *jumps out of the window* *contemplates life* *cries* *dies*

I am on holidays and because of devRant I found out about gitLab...
I am sweating and in panic but no one from work called me yet.
Then I realised, this is my first vacation without laptop and work phone in years.

I think I will get back to work 10 days from now and it will like: "Hey!! Can you sit and fix this? We've been waiting for 2 weeks"...

FUUUUUUU!!

So you think it's bad when your friends, family, strangers and others ask you to fix their phone or computer is bad when they hear you're a programmer, IT or good with computers?

You think it's bad when they ask you whether you're hacking when they see code or terminal on your screen?

You think it's bad when they ask you to fix a cracked phone screen because you work with computers?

Well, think again because today my teammate was asked to fix a vending machine by X from another department because, according to X the vending was not accepting X's other dollar bill. The first dollar bill was accepted so why wouldn't it accept the 2nd one? Because the 🤬 dollar bill is crumpled. That's it.

What wows me is what made X think this is an IT issue.

According to X.... "because it has power, lights and touch screen so IT can fix it That's what you guys do, right? You can fix anything".

Me: wait!?, what?, uhhh..., are you serious? Wtf? Why? Grrrr

Me passing time on the weekend

Random call from unknown number

Turns out it's the manager

M: hey , how is your weekend going ...

Me: nothing much ... Whatsup ?

M : yeah well , we wanted to push some minor adhoc fixes as some clients wanted it urgently

The Devops folks need developer support . Can you pitch in and monitor

Me : I'm not aware of what changes are going , i don't think i can provide support

M : don't worry it's minor changes , it's already tested in pre prod , you just need to be on call for 30 mins

Me : ugh okay .. guess 1 hr won't hurt

M: thanks 👍🏽

Me: *logs in

*Notices the last merged PR
+ 400 lines , implemented by junior dev and merged by manager

*Wait , how is this a *minor* release...

*Release got triggered already and the CI CD pipeline is in progress

*5 mins later

*Pipeline fails , devops sends email - test coverage below 50%

Manager immediately pitches in ...

M: hey , i see test coverage is down , can you increase it ?

Me: and how do u suppose I do that ?

M : well it's simple just write UTC for the missing lines ... Will it take time ?

Me : * ah shit here we go again

Yeah it will take time , there are around 400 lines , I am not aware of this component all together

Can you ask junior dev to pitch in and write the UTC for this

*Actually junior dev is out on a vacation with his girlfriend

M : well he's out for the weekend , but
as a senior dev , i expect you to have holistic understanding of the codebase and not give excuses ,
this is a priority fix which client are demanding we need this released ASAP

Me : * wait wat ?

---

I ended up being online for next 3 hours figuring out the code change and bumping up the UTC 🤦🏾

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* Hey I noticed a minor bug I think

Dev: Sigh…. So then create a ticket for it

Manager: Can’t you just fix it right now?

Dev: I can but I’m currently working on that other issue you told everyone was “top priority” at the morning status meeting. Should I switch to actioning this minor bug instead?

Manager: Don’t switch just multitask and work faster!

Dev: …

Customer: (calls emergency hotline) We have a really bad bug!
Rep: What seams to be the issue?
Customer: I need to talk to Sam, he knows what to do, tell him it's urgent.
Rep: can I tell Sam what the issue is?
Customer: Well, Sam built a newsletter program but I don't have a way to import mass amounts of emails addresses.
Rep: That sounds like a feature, not a problem.
Customer: why wouldn't it do that? Would you build a car without a steering wheel?
Rep: I am not sure that's relevant to the problem.
Customer: what do you mean?
Rep: I would say it is more like, "would you build a car without a pair of jet skis attached to the back." And we would respond with, "we would be happy to add Jet Skis, but it's going to cost you additional money."
Customer: So, how are we going to fix this bug in YOUR software?
Rep: :/

The year was 2021 and we have to implement X
Alice, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous company. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale
Alice: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Alice: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...

Then 2022 came, Alice was promoted thanks to the incredible leadership to deliver X, I joined a different project, a part of this project is to implement Y, similar to X.
Bob, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous project. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale, you can ask Alice if you want.
Bob: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Bob: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...

It's 2023 now, Bob got promoted thanks to the awesome leadership to roll out Y, I joined another project, which requires us to develop Z, similar to X and Y.
Chris, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: ah shit here we go again...

User gives me a Mac to work on, States that it “only needs Microsoft office Mac installed”

Okay.

Boot up the laptop....

**Mac OS X utilities**

Hmmm, odd. Reboot.

**Mac OS X utilities**

You’ve got to be shitting me. Call user —
Her - “NO! It was working when I gave it to you, you fix it. I’m not paying to get my laptop returned broken. It was working when I gave it to you!”

Me - “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t. I literally turned it on and this is what it stated * read her the message*

Her - “I don’t believe you, you did something to my computer.”

YOU FUCK! THE FUCK I DID! YOU LITERALLY JUST HANDED ME THE GOD DAMN THING! Can I PLEASE curb stomp this bitch, please....

Me to customer, several years ago:
Your server is over 10 years old, and the support for it will soon be gone together with the possibility to take backups. You should upgrade your website ASAP.

Customer said:
ok, we will look into it.

This day:
Customer:
Hi, our site is down and we need backups from yesterday. Can you please fix?

Me:
Sorry, no. *send copy of the email several years ago*

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

Currently i have a small web dev project and i set up a live preview website so he cant see it developing and This literally Just happened

Client : hey, are you currently working on my website?
Me : Yes on my computer and working on it, can i help you with something?
C: yeah just a little bit, that logo on the top left are just a bit squeezed in size and stay like that since 5 days ago and it's bothering me, can you fix it?
Me : nah, its just a simple thing. give me a sec and try reload--
C: why is your voice echoing? Don't tell me you are coding in the bathroom
Me: ummm.. No... I guess...? (I Am)
C: 🤣
Me: sorry 😅

Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.

Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*

Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.

I was mildly annoyed at that one.

Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.

Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

PM: Can we have it so the usernames are case-sensitive?

Me: uhh, sure I guess.. But thats like really pointless and adds no real usefulness.. In fact makes the whole logging in thing a tad more complicated for no reason..

PM: Well this one other product we have uses "Admin" for the login versus yours that used "admin" so it needs to be implemented.

(note that mine accepted "Admin" anyways...) *implemented it*

PM: So there's a problem with the username sort, it sorts by capitals then lowercase.. eg:
alpha
beta
Alpha

Me: Yeah, you asked for case-sensitive usernames..

PM: Well can you fix it?

Me: I could create a second field within the user data that is the username in all lowercase and sort by that. But that negates like all of the whole case-sensitive usernames thing.. OR I could drop all this actually important work I'm doing and do a whole bunch of work on a custom sort for this useless fucking feature you wanted me to put in..

*it's been 2 weeks and still no reply...*

Ops person: “Hey! Can you come fix this? I‘m trying to add a user and it keeps giving me an error saying that the phone number must be unique. What’s the ETA on a fix?”

Me: 😓

User: The app is crashing! Fix this immediately. We can’t do our jobs without it!!

Dev: Patch applied, can you confirm it is now working on your end?

User: EXCUSE ME?! THAT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY! WE ARE WAY TOO BUSY, ASK SOME OTHER DEPARTMENT TO DO THAT OR DO IT YOURSELF!

Dev: …

Today I noticed that my first name on my Apple Developer Account was totally wrong, even though the name on my Apple ID account was correct. Trying to fix the wrong name sent me to the Apple ID Account page with the already correct name. I contacted support.

It turns out the developer accounts pull info from your Apple ID at creation time, AND NEVER AGAIN. WTF? So you can not make changes to your dev account, because they are non-updateable..

The fix? Sending a copy of a photo ID to the supporter BY FAX?!?!? This is Apple we are talking about.. in 2017.. I don't know anything anymore

Client: I want to change the wording on the page. If I inspect element I find the word I want to change, but it won’t let me change it. How can I change it please? I am very disappointed this is not working. What is the point in you developing all this if I cannot save changes to my website. Please fix this ASAP.

MFW they think updating a website is just as simple as using element inspector in chrome because they have seen me use it to quickly mock up some css changes.

I just realized the most fucked up shit that leads me to wanna runaway from this job even more...

On the beginning (3 years ago) I used to be really thrilled , plan things really professionally, make models, uml, all the shit, try to fix things and everything you should expect from a great dev.

The problem is that in 3 years I had to "replan" so much things and so desperately quickly and have so many rework with such shitty projects that I kind of panic every time I have to plan something and I end up thinking I'm not capable of developing complex systems anymore.

All because these fucking managers that never make their mind, so my mind sees this:

"Fuck, 10 months for this shit that could have been done in 1 ? You suck dude."

Actually is management that sucks.
I've been doing some small projects on the side, just for the sake of it and boy, I'm rocking it.

My self esteem is coming back on tracks.

Fuck those fucker, they can die chocking on their own misery.

John: You know, I don't appreciate it when I run the application and it crashes on me. Especially when you say it's working. If you say you've debugged it and got it working, I shouldn't be able to break it in the first 2 minutes.

--------------------------
me: You know John, with all due respect, there are two ways that this can go. Either we can actually work on this project as a team and get something done, or I can leave and have you flounder on your own trying to complete the rest of this project for the next 4 months. Now, I know that you don't have a lot of experience in this framework, so that means you owe me the respect I deserve and not complain about the way things are getting done.
--------------------------

Me: Ok, John, I'll fix it.

How I feel when my family says "Sure you can fix the TV! if you can make a video game, this shouldn't be a problem."

so I have a junior who merged in a fix for an issue yesterday, and it was tested today and there was an issue with his "fix".

so he comes to me and says "hey this is an issue" and i'm like "yeah, remember i told you about that yesterday when i tested your changes? why did it get merged?"

so i tell him "its because of <reason> and that's why i specified the approach that i did in the ticket originally"

so he's like "ok i'll try that" and before doing that i leave him with "you will probably want to do <thing> because of <reason> with that approach"

so fast forward to like 10 mins ago. literally half the fucking day has gone by.

"hey, so i can't get this to work"

"yeah its because <reason> but what you /can/ do is <same fucking thing i told him to do this morning>"

"oh ok, ill give that a shot :thumbsup: "

and yet he's had this chip on his shoulder since reviews because he feels like he should have gotten a bigger raise and he's worth more than he's paid. and wonders why after 3 years he still hasn't been promoted from a junior.

and don't fucking say 'that's above my pay grade' all the time like you aren't fairly compensated, and then struggle to employ the same fucking patterns in a code base you've worked with for 3 years now.

PM: Can you fix this issue with the file upload?
me: Sure, give me the file that's having the issue so I can figure out why that specific one isn't working.
PM: Oh... it wasn't working so I deleted it.
Me: OK, are there any other files that cause this error.
PM: No... it was a single case. You can fix it anyway, right?

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

"Can you fix this bug real quick?"

Me : I found this code issue, I think we need to fix it
PO: does it affect the user?
Me: not really but we can make it better
PO: do you have a defect for it in *insert issue tracker here*
Me: no, I just noticed it
PO: is there an IM ticket for it?
Me: I don't think so
PO: is this issue already in production?
Me: possibly. Yes. That's why I was wondering if we should fix it.
PO: okay then we will fix it in the 3rd release from now if you still remember it by then.

I am so sick of the stupidity and illogical reasoning of clients.

Client: Descriptions are no longer syncing. Can you please fix.
Me: Problem fixed and deployed.

Client: All the descriptions got overwritten by the sync descriptions. Can you please have manual uploads overwrite the descriptions that sync (but basically auto guess what the client wants). We may need a toggle.

Me: Toggle added.

Client: Can you go through the 100+ sites backups and restore all the product descriptions?

It's like are you serious right now!!??

Back to the cheeseburger concept here...

Client: Can I have a cheeseburger (comes with pickles, onions, tomatoes, lettuce), no pickles. A Coke? Oh, but I would like pickles on my cheeseburger.

Tender: Here is your order.

Client: Why did you put pickles on this!!?? I asked for NO pickles!

Tender: You added pickles towards the end, so we put the pickles in.

Client: No! I thought you would have known based off of my original statement that I asked for a cheeseburger with no pickles. That is the override!

Narrator: See how illogical things can get. We can't just assume/guess based off of illogical reasoning.

My boss: "We need this feature by Friday"
Me: "I can make it work, but I need more time to do it properly"
Boss: "Just fix it by Friday, and you can make a proper implementation later, when there is time"

Like there will ever be time once it works...

If ever your code breaks, just utter these words and it will magically fix itself:

"Wtf. Hey [coworker name], Can you sanity check this code? I don't know why this segfaults! It looks fine but you just run it and it bre- oh wait... I swear it didn't work a minute ago."

Them: "What can we do to fix this?"

Me: Contact the vendor

Them: Ok, but from our side?

Me: Wait for the vendor to reply

Them: And what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Me: get better vendors, include I.T on the process when the org decides to purchase shitty third party software.

Them: Ok but besides that?

Me: Drink?

Seriously tho, tf you expect me to do?

Coworker: hey can you do this?

Me: sure *couple hours later* it's done.

Coworker several hours later: that thing you did completely changed. Can you update it?

*checks the platform we use so non devs can create web pages* All of my code was erased and I have to restart and add even more functionality. Why the actual fuck would you hire web developers if you're just going to have other employees use a poorly built tool to build pages. Every fucking time something breaks in the shitty fucking app, I have to fix it. Or if it doesn't do some crazy functionality, I have to hack code in there to do it in the ugliest way. Fuck tools like this. Fuck companies who make money off of these tools/use these tools. And fuck the developers who make these shitty tools that give real web developers so much frustration.

Mom: My printer won't start. Can you FIX it?
Me: Mom, I am a coder, I don't know jack about hardware.

A week later....

Mom: My printer won't start. Can you FIX it?
Me: This question is marked as duplicate and closed as off-topic. 🤖

Hangs up.

Client support ticket: we printed the ID cards without leading 0’s can you fix it with software?
Me: unfortunately we cannot because the ID number can be any length. ID 123, 0123 and 00123 can exist. What barcode would 123 go to?
Client: this is ridiculous we will cancel our contract.
Me: i’m sorry we can’t correct for a mistake on your end.
(Side note: I know allowing 0123 and 00123 is dumb but my team didn’t design the business logic)

i am fucking tired of companies that come to me expecting to magically fix their STEAMING PILE OF BULLSHIT AND TRASH CODE. how about when i ask "can i get a project brief", instead of saying "just fix it" or "it just needs to do this", GIVE ME A FUCKING COHERENT AND DESCRIPTIVE WRITEUP OF EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED. i can't read your minds, let alone read the code the previous cock sucking developer wrote, so guess what? i'm left with no other option but to completely rewrite it. to top it off, instead of giving me god damn excuses as to why you can't get me the api key for your order processing, MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT AND GET IT TO ME. how the fuck do you expect me to test an application when i don't even have access to the fucking api the whole shit pile is based around? i swear to god if these people expect me to have this done by the end of the week but want to be little cunt nuggets they can go eat shit. fuck you, fuck your "contract", fuck your company, FUCK EVERYTHING. greedy, shit faced bastards

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

I often get this question:
"I have this old computer. Can you fix it?"

My brother is a helicopter pilot, and he will probably never get this question:
"I have this old helicopter, that is literally falling apart. Will you fly it for me?"

God i love this site. Because its not a place to fix problems its not a place to share knowledge its not even just programmers hanging out and talking about their projects, no this site is as close as you can get to screaming into the void and still get sympathy

WTF!!!!! I officially have someone trying to extort me just had this in my email box this morning!

--------

Hello,

My name is [name removed], I'm an IT security expert and I found a security issue on your website.
This email is personal and in no way related to any of my employers.

I was able to access to a lot of files which contains sensitive data.
I attached a screenshot of the files I found to this email.

I would be happy to give you the method I used to access these files in order to let you fix it.
Would be a monetary compensation possible?

Please forward this email to the right person, if your are not responsible for the security of the website.

Best Regards,
[name removed]

---

He can basically see the contents of my wp-config.php. How has he managed this?

LPT: NEVER accept a freelance job without looking at the project's source first

Client: I have a project made by a company that is now abandoning it, I want you to fix some bugs

Me: Okay, can you:
1) Give me a build to test the current state of the game
2) Tell me what the bugs are
3) Show me the source
4) Tell me your budget

Client: *sends a list of 10 bugs* Here's the APK and to give you the project I'll need you to sign an NDA

Me: Sure...

*tests build*
*sees at least 20 bugs*
*still downloading source*
*bugs look quite easy to fix should be done under an hour*

Me: Okay, so, I can fix each bug for $10 and I can do 2 today

Client: Okay can you fix 8 bugs today for $40??

*sigh*

Me: No I cannot.

Client: okay then 2 today for $20 is fine, I want a refund if you can't fix them today

*sigh*

Me: Look dude, this isn't the first time I am doing this, aight? I'll fix the bugs today you can pay me after check they are done, savvy?

Client: okay

*source is downloaded*
*literal apes wrote the scripts, commented out code EVERYWHERE
Debug logs after every line printing every frame causing FPS drops, empty objects in the scene
multiple unused UI objects
everything is spaghetti*

*give up, after 2 hours of hell*
*tfw averted an order cancellation by not taking the order and telling client that they can pay me after I am done*

Attached is an image of a level object pool
It's an array with each element representing a level.
The numbers and "Final" are ids for objects in an object pool
The whole string is .Split(',') into an array (RIP MEMORY BTW) and then a loop goes through each element in the split array and instantiates the object from an object pool

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

Shit you can apply this to coding too.

"When you fix a bug in your code"
Red: Actually does what you want
Blue: Completely fucks your entire program up.

So this is what happened!
It was a rainy Friday, I was asked to add a quick bug fix to a js application, I spent my Friday coding, testing ..., baam the patch is ready ... I wrote a nice commit message explains the problem and the fix but I didn't push the code.

On Monday the fuckin code disappeared, no commit no code no nothing no trace ... To be honest I don't know what happened. I rewrote everything on that Money morning (you can only imagine how pest I was)

I use vim with tmux.
I have done everything I could to figure out what happened to that commit, I even doubted If had did wrote the fix that Friday, but it's not possible to forget few hours of a day
I checked my commit history on the different branches i did everything

No trace ...
Conclusion
My machine is hunted ...
Or I have multiple personalities and one of them is a programmer and he is fucking with me

Time to do a little bit of shaming:

I'm specialized in e-commerce applications, mostly based on Shopware, a german out-of-the-box online-shop. They essentially claim to be a better Magento. In December of last year I found a critical issue within the code. Products within the shop can be declared as digital wares. In that case the purchase of a product will unlock the possibility to download a designated file.

As a customer you can access your downloads within the account section. Now here's the problem: The query that fetches the unlocked downloads for a customer is hard-capped at 500 rows. So after your 500th purchase, you won't be able to access any further files you paid for. Essentially their developers thought that this limit would never be exceeded anyway and called it a day.

Personally I think this unacceptable. For the merchant this is a potential law-suit in the making. So I took the time to refactor the code and fix the issue. The corresponding pull-request was flagged as scheduled back in December. Since then there have been numerous releases and the issue is still present. Not only do I ask myself why I should ever put in time and effort to fix their code again, but I also can't believe that they just chose to ignore the issue completely. Also mind that this is not just a small or non-profit open-source project. The responsible company behind the software is a stock corporation that claims to be the market leader in Germany.

THE FUCK!!!!

Some stupid assholes on my company have adquired the idiotic habit to call me to supervise some videoconferences using Skype, Hangouts or other fucking systems that i never heard about. I hate it because is a big fat waste of time.You don't need a engineer to handle your stupid password mismatch, your "why this is so slow? can you fix the internet". Or why the sound is so crappy or why don't you have a better microphone. This are your fucking computers, and your fucking calls. what the next? sending your emails? Wipe your asses? is not my fucking role.

Next time I will put your notebooks inside your assholes. Your crap will be better transmitted for sure.

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

Today my grandmother called and told me she wasnt able to login to her account for her ISP. Alright, maybe shes confused about the passwords as we had to change it recently. No, turns out they still have this "oh sorry you typed your password incorrect three times, so we will lock your account and your granny have to do the 2 hour telephone queue"

You and your fucking outdated auth practise can go and kindly fuck yourself. Fix this shit before I get real mad.

Boss: "do you have a minute?"
Me: "sure"
Boss: "I have this problem, can you just stop doing whatever you are doing and fix it for me?"
Me internally: *no I don't, what I'm doing right now is fixing another one of your problems for which you've interrupted other work already"
Me: "Yeah sure, gimme some time"

Can't afford to fail my internship and I don't want a shitty work environment which I why I don't speak my mind...
But man this is tiring...

Boss - "Can you kindly just fix this for me?"

Me - "Can you kindly just F#CK OFF?! "

being a first year IT student:

- help, I can't check-in to my flight
- my computer is slow, I heard you can fix it (still runs xp)
- can you fix the printer?

- my laptop is broken (error message pops up with the actual solution) and there was an error
- did you read it?
- did I read what?

Is this gonna get better anytime soon?

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

You know the worst thing about being a freelancer? You're expected to wear every fucking hat and you don't get normal hours.

Over the past few days I have been working with a client of a client attampting to fix his server. He's running CentOS on VMWare and somehow ended up breaking the system.

Upon inspection there was no way to fix his system remotely. It wouldn't even boot in recovery mode. So we've been attempting to recover his data so that we can reinstall CentOS and not have to start completely from scratch.

So for the past 3 days straight I have been remotely logging in to a Debian Live CD and manually sending folders to a FTP server of his. He has somewhere close to 30 sites on this server, and upwards of 1 million files in total.

Yesterday either the system freaked out or he did something, but the entire fucking system stopped responding which forced me to reboot it, reinsert the live CD, reinstall evertything, and re-mount his broken systems drives.

Here we are 3 days in, we're still not done, and I'm getting slightly pissy because if you don't know Linux well enough to fix this shit yourself, you shouldn't be acting as your own sysadmin for 30+ sites.

Also, backups are a thing right? VMWare also has snapshots. I know the extra storage isn't cheap, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying soemone like me $35/hr to go and fix all of your shitty mistakes.

I had this weird dream(emphasis on dream)

I was in a resort in bali waiting for my drinks and this cute girl comes over to my table.

Me : omg finally i can get a girlfriend
Me : hello beautiful
Her : hey i have this problem with my website *shows the messed up site with no divisions/containers * "can you fix this?"
Me : okay ;_;

PS : i started learning css, html and 2 other web technologies a week ago, and this is already happening to me, should i quit?

It's sometimes good I work remotely from the rest of my team.... So other can't see how pissed I'm while chatting with them...

Just did an afternoon basically hand holding someone... And well this is the 3rd day... And the original instructions I gave them was: here's the problem, here the code fix, now you need to change it for the other 10 APIs it affects (OS migration).

I have another problem I need to figure out....

Yes I could do it all myself and it would be faster but I don't want to be the only person who can do this stuff either...

But can you just try to use your brain and figure things out before asking how to ....

I don't know am I that much more experienced than everyone else so I just know how to figure things out quickly, know to the learn efficiently? Ask the right questions to Google?

How hard is it to just learn to Google your problems... 80% of the questions u ask me I either tell you to Google it or actually end up googling the answer myself...

Ever open a mail with a body consisting only of "can you look into this?" before noticing a mail exchange is attached, and in it is a week long discussion about an issue new to you where someone has said on your behalf that it will be fixed by the end of the day?

If I'm lucky I might know if someone - and if so, who - is working (or has worked) on that aspect of the system by the end of the day.

There are no words in any language I know that will sufficiently describe how nonexistent the chances are in any of the infinite amount of parallel alternate universes where I implement and deploy a fix by the end of the day.

But sure, I'll look into it.

!rant

Just wanted to share this beautiful development miracle. Hello Games has proved to us that it's never the end, and you can always come back to fix your mistakes as long as you don't give up on yourself. Follow your dreams motherfuckers :D

Yesterday I was hanging with the guys from our Records dpt in the staff lounge. Their manager is a pretty nice talkative guy. Everything was going well until this happened..

Him: Hey you, I have an idea for an app. You can"definitely" help me, right? Or someone you know who also does the code thing..

Me: It depends. Just before you tell me about this idea, know that you'll be paying me or whoever will be doing this job unt..i..l *he interrupts

Him: Paying? I thought it was a one time or few hundreds of dollars. Why do I have to keep paying when you haven't finished the app?

Me: Did you finish your entire work this week?...but you're still getting paid next week, right?

Him: Oh crap, makes sense. Ok, how about I pay you the amount you charge then, that's it?

Me: See, you don't get it. I know once the app is done, you'll come back to me to fix and update things. When that time comes, you'll have to pay me again. And with the initial payment, don't just think you pay me and that's all... you'll...

Him: Crap, I have think more and come up with a plan for this.. nevermind, I'll keep you updated.

I think I made him sad knowing that, this sort of things doesn't happen easily.

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

Sometimes hardest part of being dev is staying calm and trying to explain someone why something is a BAD idea, than see being ignored and just silently prepare fix so when shit goes south you can quick fix shit the other dude/dudette fucked up regardless of number of warnings.

Sigh, another dumpsterfire of this variety incoming.

Extended family weekend getaway turned into an IT repair and troubleshooting session

"this office, that is located 2000 miles from here needs a network because of we decided to renovate the entire office starting today.
Can you fix no later than tomorrow?"

We were not notified about this before.
We did not have the equipment.
It is impossible to get an hotel room atleast two month in advance.

Yeah

So I had a guy in my team, all day shouted "shitty code this, shitty code that"...
Today I had to fix some things, seen some really crappy code, said to myself "I've got to check who's the author of this beauty"... It was him... How the fuck can you shout shitty code on other peoples work when yours ain't better?!?

This is the first time I have inherited a project. ever. I have always seen people on devrat ranting about inherited projects. Never had I experienced it.

Now, the design agency that hired me would outsource web projects to developers before hiring me. I was recommended to them.

Now then. Today I was tasked to fix a couple of issues a previous outsourced developer had abandoned. I had a look at the issues and started fixing them one after the other. Its a wordpress project. Coding for wordpress is super fucking easy by the way.

You create a default page by going to the admin dashboard.

You can create a custom page by creating a page-PageName.php file. and place all the bullshit you have for the custom page IN THAT FILE.

So this developer who i assumed claimed to be a professional. PASTED ALL THE FUCKING HTML IN THE WYSIWYG TEXTBOX. WHO THE FUCK EVEN DOES THAT?

THIS WAS A FUCKING SIMPLE TASK. THIS ASSHOLE CREATED A CUSTOM PAGE CALLED HOMEPAGE AND PASTED THE HTML IN THE TEXTBOX. WHY THE FUCK?! ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY DUDE? AND OH MY GOD DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE HTML WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THAT &QUOT CRAP. YOU MY FUCKING FRIEND IS THE FUCKING REASON THIS PLATFORM EXISTS. BE PROUD. YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE. YOU CAUSED A PLATFORM TO BE CREATED.

PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR AND NEVER FUCKING TOUCH A COMPUTER EVER AGAIN! YOU ARE NOT WORTH IT.

Parents had asked me to assemble some furniture, fix the pc and so some other "brain" work

Furniture
Me: *Stops to check something in the manual*
Parents: Are you stuck? Maybe try assembling the door upside down
Me: No, it is the right way
Parents: *Ramble, ramble*
Me: Just let me work, shut the hell up

PC
Me: *Checks cables, checks logs, ect*
Parents: Maybe it is the problem with (insert random tech word there)?
Me: No.
Parents: W h y?
Me: Let me finish, it isnt that, (tech word) isnt even correlated to that
Parents: But, but, you never talk to me... (ramble ramble)
Me: Get the hell outta the room
*Argumemt breaks out*
30min later

Me: *Finnaly manages to fix it after the heated argument*
Me: I finished, everything works
Parents: Great, but you are mean
Me: I managed to finish the work in 15 min, you dont even have enough strengh to call for a specialist, (but knowing me i wouldnt allow it anyway because a lot of them make a poor job), so in order to make it properly and to relieve you from learning how to fucking google i want you to stay out of this so i can just finish my job. Your interruptions waste time and i dont need your help at all. Everytime you tried to fix stuff you always managed to fuck shit up when you tried to do anything.
Parents: (ramble)
Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP, LEAVE MY ROOM
Parents:
Me:
Parents: *Leave the room*

1h later i get 25$ for the job perfectly done

Sometime i wish they were tech independent, so i can save my sanity and time but money is nice.

If anybody tries to argue that i should respect them:
I tried talking to them nicely countless times through years, but they always force themself to a project and they always fuck shit up because of it. I tried telling them about my problems and they tried helping me but after it didnt work they retured to the old: "it is the pc fault" and similar. Even if they couldnt help me i juat wanted them to understand my situation, but no that didnt happened.

First i fix my life then i will fix the relationship

But but greeeeeg, relationships should be cared for always!
Eat shit. There is time for family and there is time for me especialy when my life can suddenly colapse due to my problems.

I gave this so called web developer username and password to ssh into our server. This is his reply:

"Hey we tried to log into your server. We are getting permission error. Please fix that"

Me: Sure, can you tell me how are you trying to connect?

"We tried to ssh like this: ssh root@xxx.com"

Me (in my mind): WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU USING ROOT FOR!?!

You know that you made it as dev when you realize that your creation has ability to effect your life also the life of others

It came to me much earlier in life ( college final semester)
F: Hey there is this girl that i am trying to talk but she never replies me on Facebook i waste to much time looking for her online status , i wish if i can say hi as soon as she comes online
HF: (first reaction) leave her alone man , ( dev reaction) hmm fb probably be using jabber protocol like xmpp I could make xmpp client and sync online status. If status changes drop a notification also the asmack lib provides a way to send msg to user in your chat room sooo we good !!

At the time i was handling 3 android app , implemented this and called it FacebookStalker , you can select who you wanna stalk and what msg you wanna send them as soon as they come online

Google obviously didn’t liked it
for a long time i judged myself that How can i can make this creepy app
Later I realized that it was not the app i was suspended because i used a DRM marked image as icon

Google never tells you the actual reason why your app is suspended so you cannot fix it.

I learned to be mindfull of what i code cause it started having real impact. Loosing dev account was like loosing everything at that point. i had nothing else

Deep Thought Rant

It's funny how the world works these days...companies only looking for "senior *something*" developers to work...

Mentorship and internship also do matter. What's happening?...sure you can contribute to open source but having a mentor also helps. Working as an intern allows one to see not only tech bit but workplace environment. How to deal with deadlines, feeling good and wasted at the same time when one bug that took a 3 minutes to fix but 3 hours to find, presenting your work; well what's working only, being bashed when it's your fault or not (even though that sucks), learning from your mentor and so on

Are their companies that still do this?

Colleague while reviewing my latest commit.
Him: Hey, RemusWasTaken, why did you leave this debug log in here?
Me: That function won't work unless I leave that line exactly there.
Him: It can't stay, come here so we can fix it.

Three hours of debugging later, this Friday afternoon.

Him: Okay, I give up. Let's leave it there for now.
Me: I did the same thing yesterday. Time well spent.

Nodejs is weird sometimes, or we are incompetent devs.

Rapid firing some mini rants.

Fuck people that go on vacation and post 100 pictures of it. Chill out fam. I can guarantee you that 95% of your followers don't give a shit. Keep the posts minimal; 3-5 is ideal with 5-7 being acceptable.

People that post shit like r/whooosh in the comments on posts can suck a dick. That's not necessary asshats.

Why the fuck do the Android versions of every major app suck ass? Like c'mon man. It's the most widely used mobile OS. Take Apple's dick out your ass and fix this garbage. (I get that supporting the cheap ass devices that never get OS updates is one thing, but ffs im using a Pixel. Get your shit together.)

This TED talk was brought to you by Stuxnet. Thanks for coming.

I am working on a webservice that some other consultants upstairs are set to consume.

Last week, monday, the consultants send multiple emails and one of them comes downstairs to find out why the service isn't working correcrly. My manager tells them in email that it is still being developed and won't be ready for ten business days.

However in the meantime the service has some barebones functionality that they can try out.

And wouldn't you know it, I get emails and visits every other day along the way asking why the service is down or doesn't function.

When is the service going to be down? Why isn't this working? Hey you need to fix this

IT'S NOT DONE YET

Meanwhile at my place (Translation L-R):

"Wow! Are you good at hacking?"
"Please hack my neighbor's Wi-Fi"
"Download me some movies!"
"Are you good at math?"
"Please fix my phone!"
"Can you remove the virus on my computer?"
"How many hours do you sleep in one day?"
"Put some cheats on this game!"
"Please hack my boyfriend's Facebook account!"

Yep, my family and even the entire neighborhood are ignorant of what I do as a dev!

FFS I'M NOT A PC REPAIR MAN!!! 😤😤😤😠😡

Correct me if I'm wrong, Python is absolutely built on:
--Data encapsulation
--Dependency Hell
-- ambiguous object types
-- You BETTER hope that package has a function to turn that object into another HOPEFULLY SUPPORTED object (basically even more encapsulation)
--Oops this package doesn't support this other package, so you need to do another 20 lines of conversion
I really don't understand what makes Python so likable?? Am I just being stupid, or does exceptions like "This does not support multiclass" the worst fucking exception i've ever seen? Or "Shape (None,1) not compatible with (None,7)"? I get it that you can fix it if you've seen this issues multiple 100s of times, but for the first time, how the fuck am I supposed to debug this?

My colleague sends me an email saying “here’s a check not being performed which causes a bug can you fix this and push to production”
With a screenshot of the code and place it needs to happen underlined

ARE YOU kIDDING ME OH MY GOD

He doesn’t have time to write 10 characters but he has the time to make this work of art of an email and send it to me

Ticket: We were able to get the site launch, but we lost some functionality on x. Can you fix ASAP?

Not a single url, didn't even know they were going to launch, or where. There must be an achievement for this. 🤡

We have a badly out of shape but functional product , the result of a "if its not broke don't fix it" mentality. The only thing manangement cares is our next release and making meetings to plan other meetings...

Now comes the time of the security Audit (PCI)...

Manager : oh noooo the audit will fix this issue, quickkk fix it !

Us : welllll its a lengthy process but doable, we just gotta do a,b,c,d,e . Part a is essentially what we need the rest are refactoring bits of the system to support part a since the performance would be shit otherwise

Manager: can you do part a before the audit starts ?

Us: yep.

Manager: do it . Oh and pop those other issues on JIRA so we can track em

Audit completed....

Manager: so we got through ok?

Us : 👍 yep

Manager: okayy, take those other issues..... and stick em at the bottom of the back log...

Us : huh ? *suspicious faces*..... okay but performance is gonna be poor with the system as it is cuz of part A....

Manager: yeaaahhh * troll face* ....about that.... roll it back and stick that too at the bottom of the log. We got to focus our next release. Lemme schedule a meeting for that 😊

Us : faceplam

Refactoring! Refactoring! REFACTORING!

This is one of “those desk books” that you gotta have imo. Personally I love giving names to categories of things, helps us better recognize patterns if we can classify them.

Software can always be improved, this book give you a good majority of the most common refactorings it’s like a recipe book almost.. shows you the code smell... give you the detailed recipes to fix it. Great to have in code reviews.

Doesn’t matter that this book is in JavaScript the concepts and ideas are the big pictures in this book.

Classic “one of those” books.

>import ENi18n
>import ZHi18n

en = {…ENi18n, moreStuff}
zh = {…ZHi18n, moreStuffZH}
pt = {…ZHi18n, moreStuffPT}

“Hey man can you fix this? Seems like we are missing the Portuguese i18n. Check this file please (path)”
“I’m sorry I don’t understand, can you call me and explain?”

Why do I need to explain this? What is difficult to grasp here? How can it take more than 20 seconds to know what to do here? It’s not even a file I made, you made it and I just ran into it!

Fuck man, I’m going to blow my brains out.

Got a ticket saying we need our website's record creation wizard to have better validation. No worries, just some regex, right?

Sure, regex for name entry (with the usual white person assumptions about names), and fixing the fact that it's in-page popup doesn't close on save. Or save draft. Or delete.

And also you need to apply the name regex for the fields on this page to all the previous names that the user lists.

And there's that one issue where the address history message always shows no matter what.

Oh and make sure that if they choose to ignore those validation issues then the validation message is in the notes for the record.

And fix the thing where it saves as draft instead of as a normal record.

And and and and and...

Can we just talk about making it 1 problem per ticket? This sort of shit makes me look bad when it takes me a week to fix 1 ticket, when I'm usually a few-a-day kinda person