The moment an other team couldn't deliver for a deadline. CEO came to me, gave me 50 bucks told me to get a pizza and some hash and just work the night and deliver the damn app. So I did. Got a week holiday for free in return. One of the best guys I worked for.

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him

Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent

Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.

*2 weeks later and still no designs*

Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.

*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*

Boss: hurry up!

*1 week later*

Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol

Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it

*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.

* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*

*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol

*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*

*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*

New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(

Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...

*Silence*

Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested

*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*

Seems legit?

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

I was writing tests at work and rather enjoying myself.

Boss insisted we all go home early because "holiday halfsies," so I semi-unhappily pack up and go home. At home, I write tests for a personal project instead.

Dev life.

For April Fools at a school I worked for, I printed off one of those "Your printer has been upgraded to be voice activated" signs and put it on their fairly new printer, went into the room opposite and waited. I heard far far too many teachers saying "Copy!" repeatedly, getting more and more agitated before 'manually' copying their document. I had to come clean before I left at lunch time because one of the teachers got quite angry at the prospect of a voice activated photocopier and refused to use it that way. The following year April Fools was on a school holiday so I couldn't pull it in the school I was in that day but i fully expect it to work somewhere else.

Dev : Every user in your organisation requires their own username and password...

User: Why?

Dev: Because if everyone uses one account, every note, product, message etc made by all the user's will be saved to that one account and confuse the he'll out of everyone using it when they can't find their 'own' information they made/captured/downloaded.
We just need the user emails.

User:We can't give you all the user emails just use one account ....
(The reason for not providing us the emails is purely cause it would require user to do work and that's out of the question)

Dev: Uhm ok, but this is not what you want, and *interrupts*

User: It is what we want, do it like that everyone will understand and it will make the system easier.

*Two weeks later*

User: Why is there only one account? Why doesn't everybody have their own account? This is not what we wanted.

... The shit you have to deal with when you are on holiday ...

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

Coworker: "Hey I have the final logo for your software"

Me: "Awesome, only a few bugfixes after my holiday and we are good to go on production. 2 more hours to go until I am free for a week."

Coworker: "After your holiday? Boss said it goes on production tomorrow!"

Me: "You are kidding me, aren't you? There is no way I can do all the work today and push to production!"

Coworker: "Boss promised the client..."

How about boss can go an f himself? He knows I have some other project to finish today and that I am leaving. This is in our team cal for over a month now! Ahhh. My coworker now has to deal with it-.-

Finally finished all the current issues and tasks I had set out to accomplish before the holiday began.

Boss comes by - "you're doing some good work, do you have anything you're working on right now?"

"No, I actually just fin-"

"Good, I think now would be a good time for you to redesign our entire intranet."

"Haha. Yes."

Contrary to most people I really love to receive email related to jobs when I'm in holiday. I keep important alerts on.

It's like:
email: ***urgent, server down***
me (sipping mojito by the pool): fuck them. let's them deal with that
email: ***requirements all wrong, must develop the feature again***
me (enjoying a dinner): oh, I told them 100 times!, fuck all of them, work for me now, stupid moron.
email: I destroyed by mistake the db with an update..."
me (dancing like crazy): ahahaha I told you that support guys should not have access to production db, fuckfuck you, fix it yourself!!!

and so on..... I don't know, it just boost my pleasure during holiday.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

My government is FUCKING STUPIDLY JOKING. I can't confirm this but what i heard from friend of mine who works on that place. The server is turned off after work hours. And yes Holiday included. What the fuck? Are they even know the basics?

And yet today is not even a holiday. And i got this "Server Hangup" unhelpful Message.

This site is supposed to be the place to handle Online Taxation. And the deadline to report my company's earning is just tommorow, yet we can't do anything if the website IS NOT FUCKING ON!!!! I DON'T WANT TO PAY FINE CHARGES BECAUSE LATE REPORT SUBMISSION!!!! THIS IS GOVERNMENT FAULT NOT MINE!

I was a midweight dev acting as a lead dev on the frontend development of a project. I had already built most of it, it was all vanilla JavaScript, had no jQuery, the code was simple, fast, and small. Then I went on holiday and the company put a senior lead on the project to carry out remaining work while I was away.

When I came back, there was a bug in the age gate page and I started to investigate. I then noticed that the asshole added jQuery to the code just to select the country and date of birth input fields. That idiot, a senior lead dev earning more than twice what I earned, didn’t know how to select some elements on a page! I nearly lost my temper when I saw the added bloat.

*suddenly wakes up thinking I'm late for work*

*Realises it's a holiday*

*Goes back to sleep again*

PS: Sadly this happens every other day of week :/

PM: "Why are you absent on a regular holiday?"

FUCK, I JUST NEED THAT DAY TO GET PAID AND REST AND YOU WANT ME TO WORK FOR IT DURING HOLIDAYS?

Girlfriend tells me she probably saved a life at work in hospital the other day (she's a physiotherapist).

She asked me how my day was.

Most of it was hunting a typo - for a holiday booking website.

*Me, sittting in a sprint planning meeting*

PM: We are going to start a 2 weeks sprint and everyone is expected to meet the deadlines no matter the cost.

*Scrum master being an intern doesn't still know how to plan the sprint*

Me: we are having a week long holiday due to elections next week and how do you expect to finish within the deadline when office is closed.

PM: we are aware of that, but who is ready to take this as a challenge and be proactive in completing the tasks?

How many of you have faced this situation where the company expects you to work from home and get the tasks done even during the holidays. The company only values their work and not the employees. They want us to work as slaves without valuing us. They expect us to be loyal to the company through work but they aren't ready to be loyal to us through payments.

DONT DEVELOPERS HAVE THEIR HOLIDAYS TO SPEND TIME WITH THEIR LOVED ONES? ARE WE MACHINES?

it's not a happy new year when you realize:

You are becoming old

Another JavaScript frameworks is out and employers want 5 years experience in that.

You have to return to work from holiday in 2-3 days

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

A nice holiday just can't be complete without an email like this.

Well dear former employer thank you for everything. Thanks for taking me on as a junior and not providing any training at all. Thanks for changing my job role without consulting me whilst I was on holiday and again failing to train me for a job I had no idea about, but you apparently needed me to do for you. And finally thank you for letting me work nearly a full shift before telling me how much you like me, don't have a bad word to say about me, and you're really happy with all my work but the company and I "aren't a very good fit for each other anymore".

It's long, but trust me you won't get bored. So today, I went to work, even on a Sunday. My supervisor had given the task to finish off my custom module by this week.
There were only the 2 of us in the office. Everyone else enjoyed the holiday.
I got stuck somewhere in the code and approached his desk. We could never see what he was doing on his computer.
Suddenly, I could find him uneasy as I approached and he started jolting St those "ctrl+w" and "alt+f4s" and clutched his mouse to minimize. I said, "Uh sorry, sir but this taxonomy doesn't work in this code, help me out?"
He said, "Oh sure, sit. And he opened chrome trying to act cool. Guess what? Chrome played it like a boss, "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly. Restore the following pages.
[] Shocking! 99 year old couple have s3x
[] xxx tiny teen shows her.... (i don't remember exactly.)"
The quickest possible glance I ever had. And the most sweaty face I ever saw of his.
He granted me a leave today and extended my deadline for the next week as well. I thought I was screwed :P

Finaly! I dont work anymore!
Few days ago my contract had ended. I dont need to go to that stupid factory and process 400 to 800 gears a day! Finaly I wont be all dirty, oily and dusty constantly!

Three months ago I decided to earn a bit of money to not waste my holiday time. (I could do my projects but im a lazy fuck and i would propably end up playing pc games). It was worth it. I earned aproximatley 500 freedom cash per month. (Thats A LOT in my country). It wasnt plesant experience tho. Dust was everywere, i had been working at heat treatment section of that factory (but i was using grinding machine, so yeah perfect place for that) so temperatures were ranging from 40°C to 50°C. I had to wear protective equipment as well!
If you think 36°C is hell try working there!

Im currently at student integration camp for new students. I hope that im going to have great time! Also lectures start next month. Im going to study electronic and computer engieering in english (in poland).

When the school finaly starts Im going to join few student clubs and i hope they are going to help me with my computer and electronic projects.

Thats all! Time to get drunk!

Tomorrow Halloween is being celebrated in many nations as you might know. So we do in germany. Given that in Germany tomorrow is a national Holiday, the company skipped work today, with me being on call.
My On-Call time almost was over so I got ready to party (getting into my costume), not expecting any further calls.
I finished dressing up, still had some time, so I dug into coding a bit, as a costumer called. A customer from china. As I got told later on China does not celebrate Halloween in October and they do in another way.
So I set there, accepting the call, with my Camera set to autostart (Company policy).
Camera. On.
In. Costume.
As a monk.
With a bleach white face.
I was greeted by a man starring me "into the eyes". Took a good 1-3 secs til we bursted out in laugher. One of the funniest calls I had so far 😂 (and a short one, thanks China-Man)

Back to work from extended holiday and feels like I forgot how to code

Applied for a company and received a contract today. I can't believe what I'm looking at. (Graduate software engineer)

- £30k starting salary
- 28 days annual holiday
- no benefits whatsoever
- no work schemes
- reserve the right to tell you to work overtime without extra pay
- reserve the right to work you from home on weekends in emergencies
- you will only work on what they tell you to and nothing else

This company has awful reviews all over the internet which I didn't see until after applying.

Going into their offices for interviews, all I saw was a bunch of slaves on their screens, no one talking, no one smiling.

Spoke to the CTO whose words were, quote: "we only care about making money, we don't care what people are saying about us as long as they are using our service and paying us."

What the actual fuck?

I fucking hate holidays. Every goddamn time when it's a holiday, that's when I need to go to the store and get something, only to find out that they're closed. And what for.. holidays are - to me at least - no more than an excuse for people to not go to work for the day.

So, now I ran out of booze, and can't continue developing and testing my breathalyzer until Monday.

Then it hit me.. what if I take all my Arduino equipment (laptop, jumper wires, ...) to the café and deploy my build environment on a table there?

Eh, no no no. I don't want some idiot to come up to me saying "YOU EVIL HEKORMAN!!!" and have to explain that just like when you call a banker who's working with the money vaults a thief, it's wrong to call someone that's developing shit an evil hacker.. one should strive to not throw mindless accusations out of unknowingness. Not that I'm a good example of that though. But still.

It's probably that or some stupid bitch coming up to me asking to hack her boyfriend's Phasebuk.. that said, that could probably be an opportunity to get in her pants. But then, I don't wanna insert my meat in an idiot like that... ._.

So, no booze it is then? Thanks national holidays!

"Ok Google, remind me every day before a holiday because I really couldn't care less about them!!"

My apprentice quit!

Posted the other day about him quitting ...

He did ( he could of read the old post )

Just took him two days to do it

Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits

Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...

I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐

Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.

Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.

It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.

I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.

how to be a shitty client:
- have a legacy database where column names are misspelled and everything is nullable
- hire external help which instead of helping break the ui (bonus points for breaking the api too)
- demand a very much custom auth logic but decide to use aws cognito for shits and giggles
- demand 1hr daily meetings
- demand biometric auth with 0 knowledge of how biometric auth works (the previous devs just had a face id prompt which does nothing and retrieved email and password saved on the device???)
- message me at 2am because you don't understand how timezones work + demand a build while you're at it
- call me a "heretical pagan" because i took a day off on a holiday you don't celebrate (???)

i could go on but i think this is enough

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

The coolest project I was ever involved on, was when we signed a client in Namibia (we were a South African based company). So I was flown to Namibia for 2 weeks to train the clients etc. I spent about 4 days training the client and I had no more work to do. So the client took me out around town and we drank so much on his tab! He even gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, because he doesnt drink Whiskey! The best part of it, apart from exploring their awesome country and pubs, was Mad Max 4 was being filmed in my town, and my client took me to see the yard where all the vehicles and props were situated, because he owned that property! So all in all, it was more of a paid holiday than anything else!

Most awkward work event/parts story?

There was a girl who worked in customer service, very goth. Un-kept hair, baggy cloths, dark lipstick, etc..etc. At a company holiday party there were several+many people (mostly dudes) asking "Who is that! ... She's HOT!!" etc (you could hear it from various tables), and someone said "That's Stefanie.", then the "Noooo...OMG..."
Apparently she cleaned up nicely (dressed like she was going to a movie premier, very classy). She and a female friend (also attractive, dressed like a million bucks) were sitting close to each together and you could hear more (inappropriate) comments "OMG, are they together!?...that's fucking hot!....".
Mind you, this wasn't a very big venue (and before all of today's woke-ness), I could hear it a few tables away (again, all dudes, customer service and warehouse worker folks), I *know* they could hear it from their table.
It was so bad Stefanie's CS manager talked about in the break room the next day. She wasn't at the holiday party, but the rumors were going wild that day.
<she's in her 60's and I wouldn't want to be on her bad side>
D: "I can't believe they made such a scene. I would have smacked those young men in the face! Stefanie has a boyfriend and Laura is married. They have been best friends since kindergarten, its disgusting what went on. And another thing..."

It was talked about for many years afterward.

So everyone is complaining about working from home. Fuck it, I love it. My productivity was never higher than now.

I didn't have an office space before at home, so I created one. I spent money on it but that's good because this whole corona thing made me realize how much I don't miss:
- company politics, who said what said
- commute
- people bothering you in the middle of you doing something
- catching-up breaks with people I hardly care about asking about holiday I took last year but they "ahhh thought it was just last week! so did you eat anything nice?"
- answering forced "any plans for the weekend" questions
- participating in conversations about nothing

The worst thing is that I'm actually a very sociable person 😂 so working from home means I can go meet my friends at 1630 sharp instead of 19.

I just don't need those fake relationships at work I guess.

Im already discussing with my manager possibility to work from home most of the time and I think I'll soon start to search for something 100% remote.

Years ago I used to work a guvmant site. They had really strict security rules for internet and how you spent your time. Makes sense considering what that site did. I was a support engineer for some of their process control equipment.

I was approached by an operator supervisor to install dvd player software on a business machine (non process related). Basically just a general purpose PC with no function other than time cards and general office use. I was fine with the request, but the reason was for watching movies during a holiday period by the operators. Not for anything official. So I made some noise about my dislike of this request feigning moral superiority. But the supervisor swore up and down it was for "training" dvds.

So I wrote a simple windows script. The script basically popped up a window that said:
"Security has detected unauthorized media inserted into this machine. Please state the reason for this infraction." It provided a dialog to enter a justification. After you entered the justification it said: "Security has been contacted and your user logged. You will be contacted shortly."

This script was then attached to the supervisors Start folder so it ran when he, and only he logged in. We made sure the "training" video (some movie) was already inserted at this point.

He logged in. He just about shit his pants when reading this. He promptly logged and left the building to walk somewhere else in the site. We called him and let him know it was a gag. His response: That son of a bitch Demolishun!

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

About to send my entire department on Vacation Leave today for the next week. We have 3 days of work before we go on holiday leave (next week). And I want to give them a 3 day head start because fuck everyone else and I want me boys to enjoy shit beforehand.

Fuck you, managers do care.

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 🙄🙄

I'm so fucking sick of the lack of great modern open source DB tooling.

MySQL Workbench can go suck a big fat herpes-ridden cock, it's horrible.

Dbeaver is a clunky 90's tool, which charges two Netflixes (yes, that is a valid $/month monetary unit) just to connect to a NoSQL DB.

Datagrip is nice, but has the same outrageously expensive pricing. I paid for it, and couldn't use it for my local docker DB during my holiday because it couldn't connect to the license server. Fuck you, Jetbrains. Your software is nice, but your DRM makes me hate you.

And then ERD software... It's either some hard-to-use afterthought piece of crap bundled with the DB IDE, some generic diagramming tool which makes DB-specific work needlessly unergonomic, or some vendor-locked online tool.

Fuck this shit, I'm making my own DB admin tool. With blackjack. And hookers. 😡

Me and my manager throughout 2020

January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.

February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️

March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...

April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!

May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool

June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing

July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m

August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me

September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work

Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar

October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?

When your work alarm goes off on a Bank Holiday Monday because Apple still dont have a feature to disable alarms on Bank Holidays. Cheers Tim.

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

After 3 years finally taking an actual holiday... I don't have my computer with me, no access to work, no WiFi... Just my beautiful family, the beach and a beautiful resort to explore.

People around me be like "Why you never take a break?? I see you work all the time. Doesn't your company offer you a paid holiday??"

Yeah they do offer a paid holiday, but even on holiday I still have to work because I'm the IT manager, full stack developer, database admin, helpdesk and everything that is related to IT.
:(

Manager : This week Monday was national holiday, hence to cover up the delay we will have to work on coming Saturday.
Me : What's the use of having national holiday then?
Manager : It's for recreational purpose.
Me, in my head, WTF!!!

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

That monday at work after a holiday

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

That feeling when you about to leave at work and ready for the long holiday, and suddenly there's a 🔥. You need to investigate and fix the issue. What a day!

When your new team-members don't commit their code end of day Friday and you end up working the whole holiday weekend to fix their shitty work while they're away for the week....
Joys of being a team-lead..

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Holiday was gud 🤩 Now some rest and work tomorrow 😴 If anyone wants some good steaks for dinner, I could put my calves up on ebay for a nice price 🤣

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

when your work place is 3hrs away from home and you forgot your laptop's charger..

call it a holiday

According to my doctor and chiropracter I'm burned out right now.

But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. But my concentration and productivty have been gone for a few weeks now.

I mainly work alone and I'm currently trying to complete 4 projects. But I just can't seem to get it done anymore.

I know that when I'm in my peak I would only need 2 weeks for it. But I have been trying for 2.5 months know and getting nowhere.

Not really where the problem originated but probably with the ever changing specs and my main client that hasn't paid in 5 months. But he accounts for 80% of my profits, but the internal politics of the coperate stuff is making stuff hard.

Not really sure how to go from here yet, need to finish this but can't focus. Can't hire someone since my reseveres are gone and I can't take a holiday and relax because of the money and the voice in my head that says you have to get this done.

But the feeling of wanting to work but not getting anything done, like walking into a mental wall. Makes me wanne run into a real wall head first. Stupid body listen to reason so we can go on a holiday and relax!

Just because you have nowhere to go for a vacation right now, it does not mean there’s no point taking a holiday.

You’re still human and besides, now you’re working double hours - house work + office work + kids & family!

PS - You work to live not vice-versa :)

Not particularly dev related but I do need to rant.

Parents are here to visit, it's lovely to see them. Unfortunately I have a small ass 1 bed flat because rent and house prices are stupid high where I work. I'm sleeping in the living room on an air bed, the fridge/freezer is noisy and about 3 foot from my head so I've been turning it off over night. It didn't get plugged in this morning so shit's getting thrown out. I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at 1 too hot, 4 too cold then mother comes in at 6 with the dogs. 3rd night of this. I've taken holiday even though I don't have much to spare because there's no way in fuck I can work feeling like this, I'm a dev and need to be able to think and do intelligent things ffs.

It's nice to see family but it's nice to have my own space too.

Product Owner keeps demanding developers do items outside of Sprint, deleted story points to get extra items in, signs off holiday for my staff, even hired some unqualified developers, etc. for my team (I'm the Dev Manager). I'm blessed to report into the PMO who backs up the Product Owner, in front my own reports, meaning I have no authority. What would you do?

PMO has decided that if we drag items from Sprint to Backlog when they reach SIT, we have more space for Dev items in the Sprint :-| Though he expects developers to actually do the SIT work, including writing the SIT tests :-|

Seriously these assholes just gave me shit over half a day and made me use vacation time for a client holiday recently when I work so many hours that family and sleep are a fading fucking reminder of a different life....

Seriously....fuck you

suddenly remember have to pay rent. but it's holiday.
is there any job hunt site that pays $200 for 2 days web dev work? 😂

tl;dr
I am either the most responsible or the biggest idiot in the team

----------

TODAY.. oh boy.. fuck today. Like literally tuck this day and this shit. We ware doing releases for an integration we ware working on for ~1.5 months ... Aaand things went wrong - I guess we didn't make a sacrifice to the release gods - finally at around 8:30pm, being pretty much the last in the whole fucking office after a few last minute fixes I get my skinny ass on my way to grab a Corona and enjoy the public holiday tomorrow ...

Aaaaand I wish that was it, it turns out some things ware forgotten by.. well everyone aaaaand shit doesn't work (ofc ffs, why should it).. I see a slack notif and the feeling of dread gets me a couple of messages back I promise I'll be there in a couple of hours tops..and here I am ranting doing shit covering my desk with "food", hating my fucking self...

Me and the Head of Dev are literally the only ones working ATM...

When I was in college I was working on a game in Java using Slick2D. My folks were away on holiday so I had the ability to drink in the house (I was over 18). I worked on this coursework piece whilst drinking.

The next morning I went into college with my work and found that it had a massive memory leak that was included by the work that I’d done whilst under the influence.

The issue was fixed (quite easily tbh) but everyone in my class reminded me for the rest of the year...

Mandatory winter break means mandatory.

Getting PR requests from a team mate during company wide holiday PTO. Asked him wtf he was doing, manager told him he had to work.

NOT the managers call! This is going to HR on the 2nd

Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.

$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"

$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"

$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"

Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.

Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"

$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*

I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).

I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.

"Hmm"

Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.

"Hmm"

So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.

I hope the bug's priority was wrong.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Wow.. back from a two week holiday and feeling absolutely no drive to start work, no motivation to attack anything.

That's the effect of being surrounded by a couple of toxic colleagues for the past 9 months.

The moment you're required to work on a holiday

Just realized the only true holiday I've taken in the past 18 months was 3 days for Thanksgiving last year and 3 days for Thanksgiving this year.

I can't imagine why I'm so stressed and rage so much.

I'm my own 🤡

Office Ninja!

Today, my PM dropped by in the morning and mentioned she had some customer feedback on some item in a project where I'm the holiday replacement for someone else. I already had work to do, so that kind of interruption wasn't welcome.

"Well yeah, just forward it to me, I'll see what I can do", I told her. She agreed. Half an hour later, still no email from her. Hey, that looked promising!

For the rest of the day, I didn't talk to her, avoided speaking at all when she was near and even sneaked by her room (open doors) in silent mode lest I drew her attention and she might have remembered the email.

Until afternoon when I went home, still no email. Success! :-)

Was on a trip, a holiday of sorts but there was a conference. Turns out alcohol and no sleep turns me into not only a master of code but negotiations as well. Woke up to find all of my work (that I had been procrastinating for about a week) was all done, my contract was extended and I got accept for a higher hourly rate.

ps: I had to redo most of it. Drunk me is not someone you wanna pair program with.

First time back to work today after a month long break. It was soul crushing. I don’t know if I’m permanently burnt out or just seriously disenfranchised with the corporate world but I would have thought after a holiday I would be energised and ready to go. It turns out after coming back to work I feel exactly the fucking same! Tired, exhausted, discontent, irritable and most importantly BORED. I am bored spending 8+ hours a day at a computer chair responding to emails and teams messages! Has anyone felt like this before? Did you ever overcome it? I’m worried as I’m getting older I’m losing my love more and more for programming whilst simultaneously hating the concept of work more and more.

Been on winter holiday for 3 days. Went to log in to my work laptop to clear out email - took me 20 minutes to remember my domain password.

Getting old sucks, kids.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

when you plan to go on holiday to see the inlaws in thailand and you have to work - holiday office preped :)

Day one of holiday. Time work needed to call me for help - 9am.

Kiddin' me.

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

After spending my entire holiday vacation fucking around with the one language that really digs with my state of mind (Ruby) when developing and having to do some quick troubleshooting on 2 of our applications (Java and PHP respectively) I can honestly say: I legit don't want to go back to that ever again.

But money means more to me than my own personal biases. I have delved in some of the most HATED platforms that developers could normally ask for in terms of work. And have only done some very basic (fucking obnoxiously basic) consulting in terms of Rails, to the point that it might not be even worth putting on a cv. But fuck me man, if I could just fuck around building rails solutions for a living, from the frontend to the backend, I think I would for once be happy with the things that I work with with things more than monetary pleasure.

Y'all know your boy, I ain't no neckbeard, but I fuck with things that a lot of others don't, to me Lisp dialects and Smalltalk are gifts from dev heaven, and I have thrown out Clojure in production (my app is still chugging along just fine at work thank you very mucho) but in terms of pure web development, I have never been happier than when I generate a rails project and start tinkering around.

Sigh.......here is to hoping that maybe I will eventually open my own rails shop.

First day back from holiday: after 30 minutes of work (excludes start-up, catch-up etc.) The P.O. (product owner) comes to me

Telling me I needed to switch project, ok I thought at least they switched the project from what ever it was to a propper OTAP street while I was away

Few tickets later the P.O. asked me if tickets x could be deployed to our test servers as well as production.. (note the ticket was already merged with our develop branch and he wanted only that single ticket x to be deployed)

WTF is the point of a OTAP street if you're going to deploy it to every server type at once?

So day one after my holiday I already needed to fight the P.O. again

At least I wasn't disturbed during my vacation... Witch is a first.

Well I was laid off at my last company with 6 weeks paid holiday at the end of my employment - since one of my hobbies is volunteering at the red cross as paramedic / ambulance driver, I was on duty quite often in those 6 weeks but since this job does not pay well, I had to look for something different and so I did - after those 6 weeks.

I found one quite nice job posting online at 1 am in the morning, sent my application out at 2 am and went to bed as I had a 12 hours shift at that day. I didn't really think that I'd get a reply but at 6 pm I got a call, talked to the guy and he asked me if I could come in the next day and talk to him in person and show him some stuff I did lately. I didn't really have projects to show as most of my previous work was under a NDA and so I just developed a small blog engine to show off (the main thing he wanted to see was my coding style). So I went there at 7:15pm , talked to them and at 10pm I got the contract - I signed the contract about 48 hours after I applied to the job :)

Currently a lower manager (I lead a team but I report to a handful of uppers). In my line of work the holiday season means more work instead of vacation. My team consists of 4 other guys, 2 of which aren't worth their weight in shit, 1 guy who's leaving for the military soon, and 1 guy who's just okay. The first 2 are about to be fired for any number of reasons, and there's no plans to hire anyone else. The lady in charge of hiring is incompetent; should've been hiring anyways for the past several months and hasn't (not due to a lack of applicants either).

I consider myself the hardest worker of the team, and one of the best in the whole place. Well, instead of being rewarded with even so much as a peptalk, my superiors have seen fit to tell me that I'm not doing enough. Like holy shit really? Are they taking credit for my work or are they just retarded? Track record at this place isn't all that great to begin with. I'm not in a position to leave as I need the money to put myself through college, but I'm thinking about hopping on the minimum effort squad at this point.

First day back from holiday.
CEO announces everyone the pandemic is over and everyone has to return to the office.
Talked about how good it is to come and crack a joke with a colleague and that they care about our wellbeing.
I have barely been able to even focus on work because of all the chaos in the company since the beginning of the year (many interviews for hiring new devs, company events, meet etc.)
Colleagues talking about the fact that nobody can work from the office given all the chaos in the projects and nobody will come because they can't fire us all.
I have to answer to an outsourcing company today for a new fully remote full stack .NET developer position for the same pay, but might be risky in terms of what I can actually deliver in terms of code.
What advice can you give me? Jump the boat or not?

Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)

I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.

I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.

I'm new to Australia and trying to get a job here. The visa process is sorta complicated, but let me say that you usually start with a Working Holiday Visa (6 months work) and go on from there.

Had an interview the other day. First smalltalk, then coding questions, then hands-on exercises, then I was talking to 3 different people about their experiences in the company. Overall 2 hours plus 3 hours train. The same day I get a email with a positive response and I should send in my papers (passport, Visa etc.) for the contact. I stopped sending out applications at this point.

5 days later (!) I get an email telling me they won't hire me on that visa.

Crushed my motivation for rest of the week 💀

I got back from my holiday, back to work, and have spent 20 minutes of every hour at work waiting for my laptop to build while I navigate this “codebase” to put a teeny feature change in. A one liner.

Honestly everything about this makes me want to cry.

Just wanted to share about what just happened today.

So I graduated with a CS degree 2 years in EU and since then worked in two companies for a year in each of them, where I was paid 18k EUR gross salary in both of my jobs.

Just today I accepted an offer in Sweden for 48K eur/year and they will help be with relocation!

I am extremely happy and starting my new position in 6 weeks. Going to exercise, try to loose some weight and get better clothes, just to look sharp! Also going to sharpen up my skills as well as have 2 weeks holiday before I start.

Morever I will maintain my current job as a contractor where they will pay me 27EUR/hour so every month I will get 50-100 hours of extra work. I just hope that I will be able to balance main job+contractor job+side projects. I know it wont be easy but I wont be in a relationship so it should be manageable!

You know you’re fucking lonely when you’re half way through your holidays (which you HAD to take) and you’re happy to get a text that you’re needed tomorrow.
At least some calls and human interaction.
Just have to make sure to get the wine and whiskey out of my system by then 😅

I work remotely from the rest of my team and I just came back from a 1 week vacation. Logged in this morning and no one else was online...

My first thought was WTF happened... did something blow up do bad they all gelot fired???

Turns out today is a holiday for them. So now I've a whole day of peace and quiet to figure out what the hell in supposed to be doing again.

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

Spend all week waiting on my VM to be setup so I can actually work and get caught up... Crash it in 5 minutes... On a holiday weekend 😓

after few months of working in the company, I was offered to trade off my weekends in exchange for increase of salary. I said hell no, I would go crazy.

winter holidays we had removed... thankfully for money increase.

all next holidays were often just removed... without money increase.

next week is going to be official week of holidays. all in our country are going to have paid days off / vacation. It was declared by our president. 2 days of holidays were extended to 5 due to COVID break.

I wonder, how hard it would be for us to get those days as vacation %
we would have to ask for VACATION days in OFFICIAL HOLIDAY DAYS!. Hell, we had never had real vacation yet, and we are just wishing to have official holiday days remaining being holidays.

Urgh. I understand that I get pretty good salary for my first work, but still wishing quite a lot for holidays, should I press for it? *sigh*

on another hand I don't really want salary decrease, which can come if I would press for it *sad face*.

Going to work after a short holiday is like trying to start your old PC.
It refuse to start > starts slow > needs updates.

I opened my laptop every day this holiday, always with the intention of learning something, contributing somewhere, doing something. I think the closest I got was to start a VM and open my editor and read some comments (I opened and closed some files too!).

I have done nothing the holiday except bing Netflix and put another 100 or so hours on Steam. Oh and Christmas dinner sandwiches, which as I right this reminds me the oh thing was worth it just for those...

Long and short of it is I think I'm in a slump, my output over the last couple months started dwindling and I thought a couple of weeks (16 days to be more accurate) would help, but it didn't. I'm back at work tomorrow and I'm just not feeling it.

I don't think there is anyone answer but has anyone got any experience of getting out of this feeling of "being done"? I already tried watching Rocky... Just made me see Dulph Lundgren every time my screen wakes up! Wallpaper of the dude probably doesn't help...

Can someone kick some fcking concentration and motivation into me.

I havent been able to work for 3 weeks and I missed 2 deadlines. I got tension headaches and everytime I try to work I'm hitting a mental block. Get your shit together so I can take a holiday. Thank you brain.

Just imagination but, if infinite money and resource was present (and if this was hypothetically possible)...

A machine that is able to replicate ONLY one portion of the brain thinking activity and produce a version of a robot with that thinking capacity. This would be unique per person, and licensed in a way so that the owner of the robot is only able to use and control it. (I'm saying only one thinking capability should be allowed as a robot should never replace a person ideally.)

This would mean that the person is able to increase efficiency as the robot could be set to resume activities in the period that the person can't (i.e. sleeping).

One example of using this scenario could be that the person chooses to create a robot by replicating their coding thinking capabilities. This would mean the robot doesn't do much but has the same thinking ability to code as the owner. The robot could be used when the owner is sleeping or on holiday. As the thinking capacity is the same, the code logic would be the same as when the owner would have wrote it.

This would be a DREAM project to work on.

But alas... This isn't happening anytime soon in my lifetime (or ever realistically).

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

Through my previous employer's complete incompetence and lack of a spine I had to work two days during my last holiday. He'd managed to approve time off for all three of the remaining staff at the same time, so as a compromise, our six day work week was covered by all of us for two days a piece. Sooo maybe not technically not coding on holiday?

The business could just about scrape by on one staff member, so the boss should've allowed the holidays to those who requested it first (myself and one other), but that would've caused problems with the third person who he just so happened to be related to.

I was made redundant a few months later. The company is in the a lot of trouble and on its last legs, but the one member of staff who kept their job was the least capable and, surprise surprise, the relative.

I used to be at a company where it was kind of expected that you worked long days, which made it quite difficult to balance work and private life. It got so out of control that I was even called to work while I was on my holiday. At first I started with shutting off my phone after work hours, but the real solution I found was moving away from that company.

Pretty much everyone at my new company just stops working when the clock hits 4 or 5 pm unless there is something critical that needs to be done. Seeing that also discourages me (and everyone else) from working long days. We are also quite open about our workload so if anyone thinks they’re overwhelmed they can find a relevant person to talk to and eventually a solution is found. The salary isn’t incredible, but the work/life balance and the benefits I get are just way better than getting paid more and living to work.

I think a lot of people go for the high salaries, most of the time disregarding the other part of the equation. If the company has a meh work culture with low regard to employees’ work/life balance, there isn’t much the employee can do besides finding a place to work with better wlb. I’d pick a great work/life balance and peace of mind to a high salary any day.

Returning at work after holiday and have to relocate again! This is the 3rd time in two months... Feeling like a nomad..!

As if I took a break, and I am not working.
Now I work on the weekdays, work on the weekends.. and I am not allowed to give myself a week’s holiday.
What’s going on!?

On Holiday break from work, and get a morning email to do some freelancing. Yeah, sure i !will do it today.

I think, sometimes, I just love working. Even if it's a holiday.
It's like a refreshment.

**Working from Resort at Tiger Reserve**

Disclaimer: top is running in the terminal. Not revealing the actual work going on the terminal.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

Hi my named bluescreen and I'm addicted to coding ....

Feel like I should be at some kind of Coders AA meeting .....

I'm having a few days off work, this is my 3rd day and I'm already twitching because I've not got my daily fix of coding (wife won't let me near a computer when I'm on holiday)

I've never had any kind of addiction except coding. I feel really uncomfortable not doing anything, coding is my job and hobby.

I normally come on here to rant / read posts but today I'm browsing just on the off chance that I see some code ....

I need help ......

So worried people will fuck things up in work when I'm not there. It's causing such tiredness and such long days. 🙇I think it's caught up with with today. No holiday leave taken for 9 months and not a day off sick. 🏳

On holiday skiing in France and all I can hear as I come down the mountain is the ring tone I assign all work related contacts.

Get to lunch and see 10 missed calls ... I will be saying "I had no signal on the mountain" a lot when I get back

I'm getting more frustrated every day. In the past 2 months the requirements have changed dozen of times, which resulted in so many unnecessary delay.

The date for the soft launch has changed multiple times as well. One moment there is going to be a soft launch, the next week they decide to launch earlier without a soft launch.

On top of all the annoying IT related issues, our CEO is on holiday. The only person left in the company remotely capable to replace him for a few weeks is me. So beside changing requirements and deadlines, I have to deal with a lot of other shit as well.

To make things even harder, most coworkers from our support department are on holiday. Just one person is left and his wife will be getting a baby very, very soon. Ofcourse, I'm happy for him, but taking over our support department as well is not what I'm looking forward to.

The soft launch is schedule for next Monday. I'm so tired and I'm distracted every day by non IT issues. The most important things work, but there is still so much to do and I can hardly concentrate. The two other parties who are involved are far from ready either and I have to find shortcuts for their problems every morning, because they can't fix it for themselves.

Well, at least writing it down here helped my stress a little bit :)

Jesus christ I need my VP and CIO to get their hands out of Azure and GCP and just let me work.

Yes, governance and security and IAM are big deals. That's why you have infraops people like me to deal with that.

I'm literally working with one hand tied behind my back because just about every button press or CLI command I need to do my damn job as a professional cloud fluffer requires me to go bother an executive and ask permission to pretty please can I deploy a new container, can you go press the shiny button? No not that one, move your mouse up...up..now UP..ok over lef-no..can I have mouse control? Sigh fine, do you see where it says "Approvers", no that says "Release Pipeline"

Look I actually kinda like this job, I do, in as much as when I have something to do I get left the fuck alone to do it. Meetings are minimal, aside from the odd days when one of our app services decides to yeet itself into the river Styx, there's little distractions.

Yeah, developers do dumb shit but that's probably best left to the notion of job security and never talked about again less they go to HR and complain that the ops guy was very stern and direct and made the developer take some accountability for their work product.

AND YET

It's so intergalactically stupid that I have to go ask permission just to do ops tasks by the same people barging down my goddamn door asking why the ops task isn't done yet.

"Because you won't give me permissions in GCP to actually DO anything".

Okay. Rant over. Time for lunch. Good meeting, see you all at the holiday party.

Started vacation today and arrived at our glorious holiday lodge. It is lovely. All very modern and funky. And it has a lovely cooker hob with touch controls... ooooo!!

And I swear I've never seen anything as complicated and confusing in all my life. It's a fucking cooker!! But it has no knobs you turn to set how hot a fucking cooking ring is. This thing has 2 pages of instructions to fucking turn it on - and they don't bloody help!! Want a ring on at heat 6? That's 9 fucking touches - but not like a smartphone touch, each a fucking 1sec+ touch!!

UX is about conventions and thinking of your users. The people who designed this obviously think they're visionaries and pioneers when everyone who actually uses their gear just curses them up and down for being stupid. Cookers are cookers and everybody knows how they work and how they use them?!?!

Holy shit designers, stop being too fucking clever for yours and everyone else's good!!

You can tell how nice and relaxed I am having started my vacation today... and read the rest of my rants to see how little I swear. But, by God, this thing is ridiculous. I blame the influence of @Letmecode for my reaction!! 😂

I hate these Mondays. You start really motivated after a nice weekend of seeing lots of old friends, but instead of your own work, you have to pick up the mess a coworker left for you while fleeing into holiday and because that's not frustrating enough, you try to review code from that new senior developer and get confronted with the probably most awful commit history someone ever managed to create.

Of course he also needed handholding and multiple trys to stop breaking like every coding convention we have for branch management...

I am still a junior and I feel pretty disappointed when being confronted with people being so..confused with stuff like git even though they have like 10 years of experience.

While I was still studying, I somehow imagined this industry to be much more...sophisticated?

My boss tried to make me work at holiday (there's no work till 5th of Jan). I laughed at the proposal more than I should, then he understood what I meant and didn't say anything 😄

After a 3 weeks break from work and programming, the hardest thing is going back on track. It's day 4 that I have started 'working' and I barely finished any tasks. I keep thinking of the great time I spent on 3 weeks holiday. ;'(

While everyone celebrating week end is coming meanwhile i work friday to sunday, and holiday for the rest of the week

Today I have fixed an issue in 300k usd servers that have been sitting there for almost 6 months... Even the vendor (which is a major company) did not wanna touch them. Nobody knows about it yet but I'm proud of myself but at the same time I feel a big resentment because despite my hard work I will not get to spend the next holiday which is a month from now with my family because all coworker went behind my back to the manager and took a vacation and manager will not even allow a work from home day... 1 single day. That's the only working day that week. But without it I can't go back home because home is 20 hours away... More if I take a connecting flight

Meh. FFS. Thats how this shit starts.

Get a call to say 2018 Bank Holidays not showing on legacy web calendar.

/me looks for bank holiday code in PHP file ..... no dice.

/me finds a dBase table that holds all Bank Holiday info. Not ideal, but I can work with that.

Enter all Bank Holidaya into dBase. Sit back, relax, wait for page to reload to show me Banks .... no dice.

Huh??

Read code more closely ......

Included file (inline, half way through PROCEDURAL FILE FFS) and notice that the linked file has all Banks hand formatted into Calendar events, and minified.

If I ever meet the old dev in the street, so help me god. 🤬

Friday, forced deploy day for last & current months work. Been stockpiled due to holiday.

Yesterday boss demoed the product to clients so they expect to test today.

Early o'fuck this morning, a coworker managed to drop all secrets and env vars from CI pipelines and trigger a deploy leaving production broken...

It's gonna be a long and busy Friday...

So I've been back to work for 2 weeks after going on a holiday. Getting back into the flow of things was easy, but seeing the status of the project that I am a part of, and seeing the kind of implementation work that my co-workers has done, it's kind of a no surprise.

So the past 2 weeks I've been completing features that I left my co-workers to finish, but didn't. And rewriting other features that they worked on, but does not meet the specifications.

Will I ever be able to work with reliable/competent developers?

Holiday in 6 days, wohoo. 3weeks in Thailand. So ready for it.

Currently working on a huge real estate website. Design got approved yesterday, yesterday I finally got partial access to the clients real estate data. Where the data is uploaded to our server as zip files containing a xml file and files attached to it.
Deadline is tomorrow, but has been pushed back 2-3 weeks, which sucks as I probably have to work whilst on vacation

Enjoying my holiday but still can't wait to get back to work in a few weeks. Am I crazy?

How it feels to work a holiday

On the way back to work after my week holiday. :(

Anyone else going back to work tomorrow and feeling like they can’t remember how to do their job?

I fucking can't keep this to myself so I am writing this piece of shit...

People are now working from home as much as they can and some non-remote companies here are now considering allowing their employees to work from home.

"That's great", you would say.
No, it fucking isn't.

I am working from home full-time.
"Great, so you have nothing to be worried about!"
I wish.

My brother still has to go to school. They fucking allowed everyone who just arrived from holiday 10 days ago, mostly in Italy to stay. If you ask someone nicely, almost nobody will listen. And that's exactly what happened.

"Why won't your brother just stay at home?"
Well, because my mom is one of those "Fuck it" people, who will not do a single thing to fight something she is not dying from (and maybe even if she was). She is very strong believer and she says every time I want to talk to her about almost anything serious "What is to happen, will happen". And that's fucking it. With this approach the phrase "What is to happen, will happen" is going to turn into "What is to not happen, will find it's way to you anyway".

Fortunately, my country doesn't have many infected. Yet. But it won't last long. Sick people are already here and we only know they are here, because they are responsible. People who don't care, or weren't tested after coming from abroad, deserves to be burned alive.

I just hope, we won't end like Italy and people coming from foreign countries will take the 14-day home quarantine seriously now when our government is going to fine people who don't give a fuck.

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

I know I shouldn't do this, but I'm so frickin bored I end up resuming tasks from work here at my parents' house, in my old bedroom.

Anyway, merry christmas and happy holidays!

Narrator(me): currently on keeping up with the clientele

Client: sooo-- go live in 2 days lol?

Me: im still waitin for finalised content from you and your designers

Client: oh , can you work the public holiday tomorrow , in anticipation for perhaps the of chance we will have sent xyz content

Me: hm tomorrows a public holiday.. but sure

Them: oh im in another timezone so its really 2 days - 12 hours

Narrator(me): thats when the boy realised not to let his guard down

The company I'm contracted to have just realised they're a tad behind with product delivery after the Development Manager and his second in command left. Leaving two contractors and one junior member of staff to deal with the backlash of "wtf is going on with x product why is it not delivered?".

Company: "Ok we're going to need to do overtime, you guys will be willing to work overtime on weekend and nights, right?"
Me: "What's the rate?"
Company: "It's day rate is that going to be an issue?"
Me: *mutes phone to pmsl*
Company: "We're all up against it so we all have to help out"
Me: "Not interested in a day rate for overtime, thanks"
Company: "Your holiday you have booked in two weeks time, can it be moved?"
Me: *laughs* "No I won't be cancelling my holiday to work"
Company: *salty as fuck now* "Well the question needed to be asked"
Me: "I'm not cancelling a holiday I have paid for to make up for a lack of planning"

I come in the office today and Mr Company has fucked off on a three week holiday!

When the client gets pissed that it looks like there is no progress on their site but everything has been back-end work and front-end is only 20%.

Then they demand a refund on a holiday... in 2014... and their domain is STILL a parked page even though they were 5 days from completion in 2014.

So I went into work yesterday on my day off right? (Mardi Gras) to finish up a pretty significant addition to our application. I only had 2 days to work on it before we were to show it off to potential buyers today, so I came in to get it to at least a working state that we can improve later...

Well, that wasn't good enough. First thing my boss said when he saw it was, "this isn't what we had talked about". No dip-shit, this is what you get when you have 1 programmer working on their holiday. Like, I know we talked about this massive content update, but we talked about LITERALLY LESS THAN A WEEK AGO. I really don't know what you expect, but I made it very clear that all I could get done was a prototype at best. Not to mention that this whole app is a hard-coded "fake-prototype" that was never supposed to make it this far....

A peace of work to be done within 2 weeks for 3 devs
1 dev gets pulled off the team, the other decides now is a good time to take a 2 week holiday
So am the only one left and because the designs weren't even ready for the first week i only had a week to do it, i managed to finish it with some defect obviously, and testing oh yes the testing non, non whatsoever. Only test i had were snapshots. Other than that, nothing. So the demo seemed to please everyone and the whole team got praised for some gr8 work, work that was estimated for 3 but done by one and hah no testing...yet

Am i the only one having a strong tendency for afternoon sleep?

It's 5.12 in the morning now, and i am still awake because of this stupid , holiday routine that unknowingly happens on every damn holiday.

I wake up with a sound 10-12 hours sleep at 12 noon or 1 pm, eat some breakfast (or "brunch" , you say) , turn on some youtube or web series, watch it till 2/3pm, then try to study/ code , and then... Zzzz am asleep..

Usually am on my bed full time: eating there , studying there, watching movies there... so maybe that's the reason, but i sincerely don't understand where this sleep comes from?

And then i wake up at 9 or 10pm, eat some more on the bed, back to binge watch till 12 or 1 in night , then eat some more, then binge watching some more , and then when my mind seems to drift back to sleep, i realize i haven't studied anything and then i start at 4 or 5am..(that is , now)

Every fucking holiday ever. maybe these web series and other diversions that messes my brain, but even if am not watching any web series, i am in front of youtube tutorials , stack overflow, twitter , my IDEs,... for almost an equal time.. and the sulking extra sleep routine still happens.

I am starting to think that its somewhat related to being in front of laptop for full day than what am watching on it. whatever this is , I only want to be able to work on my usual holiday afternoon, like i would do, when am in college or some coaching centre

My previous employer was an e-commerce company. Most of our customers had use it or lose it funds that had to be spent by December 31 each year. So every year, the devs had to stay online until midnight on New Year’s Eve just in case there was a website issue. I didn’t witness any issue during my time there, or at least I was never contacted for support when I was on NYE duty.

They compensated by giving an extra PTO day for future use. Pre 2020, they’d allow us to leave work two hours early on NYE since the office was in NYC and getting home would be a nightmare. But you’d have to work from home to work the NYE support.

It was “optional”, but we know as a dev it’s not really optional unless you have a life and death reason not to. My first few weeks working there, my grandma had passed away. The funeral was NYE weekend so I was excused from doing the NYE support my first year because I was on bereavement leave.

The last two weeks of December were considered blackout dates for PTO, so everyone (including non devs) was not allowed to take any vacation time during those two weeks. Some people might have a problem with that if they’re into holiday celebrations and family and friend get togethers. They did observe Christmas, so that was the only day off most folks got during those two weeks. Though, the period from Thanksgiving through the end of December was stressful.

I'm so down that i didn't see the red circle with the cross to add a rant...

Why is that? Because several month ago i began a job with all my motivation & optimistic mood.

I was so glad that a compagny payed attention to my profil that it was the best day of my life. I wanted to improve myself and learn!

At this point i did'nt know yet that i will began to work with assholes.

In this fantastic world, designers are kings and you have to do magic to adapt one of their stupid static design on web.
Because the suprem king is the client and designs are validated.
And don't even ask for an fonctionel analysis they will laught at you!

I did everything that i could do to make things work, fast and good. One time i managed the end of a project all by my self (like said once Celine Dion). I maked the work of my colegue who was on holiday because she left with unfinished work. She said to me "it's easy". She liked to say that i maked lost her time because of my questions and that i need to search the answer by myself & work more and more and more. So i worked, day & night because i didn't have enough time. And other thing is that some persons loved to say "if you don't do that someone will need to do that for you"!

I'm a junior developer and i had acces to staging and prod environements and crashed it both several time... I needed to develope in one year the experience of a senior developer.
Every thing is my fault because i need to pay attention to things that i ignore.

Today i'm not glad, i learned a few things but can't remembered it because things went o fast for me and i can't memorized everithing. All i know is that i'm just happy to still be able to get out from bed.

New Holiday idea: Bring your console to work day.

To show what your doing in the time you are not playing with them.

PS. Not sexist, your game PC can also come.

Today is bank holiday in the UK. Fucking boss slacked me to say he needs graphql n mongodb wired up by tomorrow. I almost tell him to fuck off, today is not work, bitch

Little calculation:
you have probably around 20 days holiday per year.
After 60 year old everything is more or less a gift, so I wouldn't count on it.

Let's say you are going to work 30 years. That is 600 days to do whatever you want.
It's less than 2 years.

Shit.

Try to count how many days left of freedom.

Shit.

Suddenly all the things I have to work on today have lost all priority

Get told a colleague finished work on a new web service thing on Friday.

So I fire up SOAP UI. Get an error due to problems with a sql statement. Look through code, issues already fixed so I build the project ct add the new dll to the app, another error, this time a column included in a select statement that doesn’t exist in the table being queried.

Colleague is on holiday, there are no comments in the code and there’s no source control.

Boss wants to know if the column needs to be added, or whether colleague added it and then decided not to use it.

I think I have an idea what it is meant to happen, but my only exposure to this project is as a 30 minute intro, and we didn’t look at any of these parts.

And sadly I left my crystal ball at home today fml

Oh my... I'm so exhausted and tired of everything. First I got really sick for two weeks and couldn't work. I also collapsed on the floor one night and hurt myself. Well what happens yesterday? You guessed it - I fell down the stairs and hurt exactly the same spots as two weeks ago... (no I was not drunk).

And then I have to work on a holiday today (yes, still with that same fucking shitty shopware project) because I have to attend an appointment in a different country on Thursday (I need Thursday off, but I don't have any vacation left).

So here I'm sitting almost crying in pain because of this FUCKING project, everything hurts, I still can't think straight and shopware is denying my refresh tokens. FUCK THIS JOB. Seriously. Fuck it. I have had the chance to look into a lot of companies and do different things, but this is the worst.

Nobody fucking cared about the project for nearly 8 months, and now that I'm close to leaving the company they begin to act like "oh well it must be done by then". ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! I told them a million times I need help and that I won't be able to finish it in time. That's what happens when nobody plans a project, but accepts it anyways because "it brings in money".

Seriously?! This project has been a waste of money and my energy and nerves. We're already 100% over the budget and will never ever see one cent coming from this shitty project. WHY FOR FUCKS SAKE IS IT THAT THOSE PEOPLE JUST DONT SEE IT WHEN A PROJECT IS GOING DOWN THE FUCKING DRAIN?!

Goverment just confirmed 2nd January as National holiday (work free day)...scheduled Nationwide production on 1st January, 2nd January for bug fixes (no holiday for me)

FML!

Ied mubarak holiday for a week ends today, tommorow i must go to work 😭

Finally nearly finished work today, time for a weeks holiday.
And even better I don't have to think about shitty old red hat 6.2 or Oracle 8i all week!

That feeling when your clients are very well aware that you're away on holiday but they still try to contact you to work on some last minute edits on a project.

Hey all!

What are some good tech books to purchase for a holiday read?

Currently work as an SRE engineer if anyone has specific books relating to that topic however doesnt need to be SRE specific.

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

So, I have been working for a company XYZ for about 2 years now and for this 2 years, we are just two engineers handling everything. The job is becoming super stressful and time consuming, the founders dictates how the engineering team operate, ranging from choosing a third party service we are to integrate into the platform without letting us know and also study the api to see if it will be the most viable one to use.

Imagine using a third party service that you can't get through to when something is unclear?

I and my team mate has asked the founders to hire engineers so the work load on us will reduce, they said it's on their mind ( this request was made months ago), fast forward last week, we were told to start interviewing interns ( I don't have problem with interns working with us ), but what we asked for was experience engineers working with us but the founders did entire 180 degree of what we asked.

We have been asking for a QA Engineer for months and months now, all we get is we will hire one, and till now nothing is been done.

Following good software practice has been a problem in company XYZ, we have been finding it difficult to write test and documentation (this shit makes me seriously sick and hate myt po self).

On top of all this, the salary is shitty, there are no benefits, we are coerced into working during weekends (most times), and we are also told to work during our holiday, no single health insurance.

I think I have come to that point where I will have to say good bye ( but I am finding it difficult to do this).

Any suggestions ? Should I wait until I get another job and then I resign from company XYZ or just resign.

3 work weeks later and my PTO is not yet approved nor declined.

I have 1 week left of my statutory leave. I have gotten the comment from my manager that I have taken off too many days already which is less than the legal minimum :))))

I have so little hopes of my holiday being approved.

HR declared day as holiday.
You Resume work next day and Git commits channel had 400 unread messages,
Silently telling at you like - hmm lazy lots get back to work!
To the hard workers You could’ve waited to push your commits the next day brother, we know you don’t like holidays like we do.

So I opened devRant to find the new *bling* expressions feature added to the avatars.

So I set my expression to happy because nowadays, for some reason, even though work has been tough, I've liked it. And things have been good. Mostly because my lead is on holiday and the acting lead is a hundred times better than him in all aspects (micro management and as a Dev).

Cut to the evening when I'm walking home, the lead calls me up to inform me on a production bug that had to be taken up (acting lead had already asked me to look into it, we had an agreement). And I *HATE* the way he assigns tasks and acts like I'm a wee baby who can't even find his mother's tit.

Anyhoo, ended up changing my avatar expression to majorly fucking frustrated because of the Damn phone call.

So kudos to @dfox and @trogus to adding these little features which make people a bit more expressive!

Apart from the fact that I arrived at a good framework at work to play in problem space than in solution space, this post is more about self realisation and a slight progress in my happiness levels.

Monsoons started in India. The vibe somehow had always been melancholic for me triggering SAD (aka seasonal depression).

However, this year I find it cosier than ever. Hot showers, lazing around on a holiday when it's pouring outside, watching my favourite show/movie. I feel very relaxed in the moment, even when work and life is not as expected/under control.

What I realised is that my problem can be solved. I need a bigger house. That would give me privacy, some personal space for hobbies, and put a barrier between me and parents easing the tension and clashes. I could then get married, and with all the money I will save (from not buying a house myself), can be used to pursue hobbies like music, art, travel, etc.

Whenever I relax, my sleep pattern changes where I have longer duration of deep sleep with many dreams (perhaps processing everything). Does anyone else experience such a phenomenon?

Anyway, life doesn't get easy or hard, we just learn to put up with shit.

Back to my parent's home for the holiday, I need to work remotely. And holy Fuck wtf is this connection. I juste spent four jour straight installing Android studio and cloning a github repo. Fuck countryside let go back to the city with all the horrible building and a good internet connection

hey guys i need advise.
I currently got a job that i love with a lot of freedom. but the payment is not good and i am concerned that the company won't be there in the next 5 to 10 years.

I am a 25 years old, self taught programmer and my current employer is the only one I ever worked for. Recently I browsed xing and found a company which searches an employee with exactly my skillset (they need someone for a specific ERP system in which I am damn good at). The company is half an our away - my current job 20 minutes away. Also I think because the person they are looking for is rare because you need technical knowledge of windows and doors and you need to know how to administrate this erp system plus knowing some programming stuff.
There is also a very big company 10 minutes (walking) from home where I could apply. I think at this company i would start lower but could maybe study and working for them with higher expectations in long term (just google Hettich in germany here in the village this is big)

The problem I currently have is the following. If the company I work for is closing in lets say ten years, then I am 35 without a degree. I have a girlfriend - want to marry her and getting a child.

I have holiday now and i will apply for both companies. I feel very uncomfortable doing this because the company I work for is the company of my granddad. I don't have the balls to tell him that even if i get a raise that does not solve the 35 years issue.

Well, first of all I will just apply. Lets see how much value I have.

But I thought that asking you all may give me some other input to take into account. What are your thoughts on this?

PS: just a formal "sorry for my english" and thanks for reading

Does not get paid enough to have my holiday ruined on the first fucking day off, how about setting things up the same way as the ones that work so I don’t have to give up my evening an clear up your fucking mess, again!!

I have a burnout but I’m just back from a long (national) holiday, so I’m insure of asking to take days off, nor if it will work, since I’m supposed to be rested.

On the other hand I was sick almost all days so idk if those days off count as holidays.

I feel tired. Really not feeling like working on.. work.. much rather be working on personal things. Lazy times. I need me a get rich quick scheme that works. I need a holiday that never ends.

Finally got some time on my holiday to do some side project work! Turns out it was a looong time since I started this computer.
So what I believed to be one lovely night of coding turned out to be one looong night of software updating...

I'm soon off to bed. Fingers crossed that I'll get some more time to do actual coding soon.

Today is the last day of my Lunar New Year holidays, which lasts over a week from last friday, the exact amount of time I haven’t been coding.
I have to return to work on tomorrow 🤦🏻‍♂️
Tell me how you guys get back your performance after a long holiday?

I didn't thought my supervisors face palm'd me due to being absent on a regular holiday.

I just want to take a break and rest. Waking up at 4am and work for 9.5 hours is tiring AF

Holiday (Labor Day) == Personal Work/Clear ToDos Day

I think I got 10% of what I had planned to get done done... :(

I'm also planning to take a week off soon though not really going anywhere... It's supposed to be a Workation but...

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

Ok, you've got some free time and a folder full of bookmarks to get through the subjects you need for that cert....

....but it has been busy these past few months. One day out of your holiday just to chill and do nothing, then you can get to work....

....you have 9 days. 2 out of the 9 is ok just to relax, it is a holiday after all....

....ok, your going back to work in 2 days and the most you've done is read some semi-related articles that were shared on Twitter. Sort it out....

....24 hours to go, you've essentially done nothing productive. I guess I'll go back to fitting it in at work or convincing myself I'll do it when I get home after a long day.

Anyone else struggle with this? Not just for certs in particular, but just learning in general.

Back to work from a week on holiday. Find out that both mine and my girlfriends companies have announced redundancies on the same day (completely unrelated companies in different fields). We've both made it through the first round ok (which is more than some so massively grateful) but we are still at risk of loosing our jobs. We have some savings to fall back on but that will only cover rent for so long. Never underestimate how quickly things can go to shit.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.

Back from a 2 week holiday, inbox says 100+ messages

What is your back 2 work routine to get the current project status?

rantHeader = "Merry Christmas to me!"
subHeader = "How a phone survied a three stories fall but dropping it from 1 meter high shattered its glass"

And it's Christmas with my direct manager on holiday till Februrary the 33th 2085 meaning I will get a new phone in 1/2 years if all goes well...

Well at least I have a good excuse not to connect to work during my holidays as MFA app is on this phone...

Have been on holiday for 2 weeks now, starting to get to the point where I can’t even sleep anymore because all I can think about is projects I want to start or other things I want/need to do. To the point where I’m typing this at 3 in the morning instead of sleeping.

Even starting to get anxious to get back to work...

Feel like such a workaholic right now.

I've spent two days of holiday to setup CircleCI. And I can't **believe** how hard they make such an essential service. I've uploaded 16 commits to Github just to fix the configuration. And what's the best part? It still doesn't work! The configuration reference is useless.
*looks at CircleCI*
Oh what's that? They're having a system slowdown? well, GOOD FOR ME... /s

Really don't want to work tomorrow. I have this PM who just constantly over burdens me. I'm in a tiny team of me and one other dev. Need a holiday soon! (Been 2 years) Currently doing the dev on 4 sites at once on my own.