long rant = this;

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.

First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.

Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.

Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??

Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.

Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.

Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?

Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.

Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.

Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?

I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.

I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

Leaving a legacy...

I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.

Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:

[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.

The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?

You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!

You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.

Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.

Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

Ok, so one of the oldest guy is leaving from my company (on a good note) and he was involved in multiple things in our organization. From having access to almost everything (AWS, Github and owning multiple projects and our legacy code). I am supposed to take KTof one project and man THE CODE IS MESS. YOU DONT PUT A RANDOM NUMBER WHILE CALLING A FUNCTION. You are supposed to define a constant and use that. I've told my manager that I need at least 1 week just to improve logging.

Legacy code huh?
Well i'd say it would be when i was workng on an old java app that was apparently written by a retard.

He had used strings to represent booleans for no apparent reason. As if that wasn't bad enough he would use different strings too:
Y N true false 1 0

He used them randomly too , y and 0
N and true
😡

I sense it was done on purpose
Perhaps he knew he was leaving soon

You know what is a nice phrase to write in your documentation right before you leave the job?

"I leave this to the evaluation and practice of the reader."

Such a delight to write that down.

So we had this legacy Objective-C codebase for a mobile app that was actually pretty good: I'd inherited the codebase and spent the past several years gradually improving it and I was actually quite proud of the work I put into it. So of course management decides to scrap it (with NO consultation from the engineers) and outsource a complete rewrite of the app in C# for Windows Universal.

Let me tell you. That code was without a doubt and without exaggeration the *worst* code I've seen in my close to 30 years of experience as a developer. I mean they broke every rule in the book, I'm talking rookie mistakes. Copypasta everywhere, no consistent separation of concerns, and yet way too many layers. Unnecessary layers. Layers for the sake of layers. There was en entire abstraction layer complete with a replicated version of every single data class *just* to map properties in pascal case to the same property in camel case. Adding a new field to a payload in the API amounted to hours of work and about eight different files that needed to be modified. It was a complete nightmare. This was supposed to be a thin client, yet it had a complete client-side Sqlite database with its own custom schema (oh and of course a layer for that!) completely unrelated to the serverside schema, just for kicks. The project was broken up into about eight or nine different subprojects, each having their own specific dependencies on various of the other subprojects in such a tightly-knit way that it made gradual refactoring almost impossible. This architecture was so impressively bad, it was actually self-preserving!

Suffice it to say it was a complete nightmare, and was one of the main reasons I ended up leaving that company. So just sayin', legacy code isn't always bad. :)

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

- Favourite pastime while waiting for your code to compile
- Most heroic/ingenuous bug fix
- Hardest to track down bug
- Worst legacy code you wrote and left behind leaving a job
- Weirdest project
- Last side project you actually finished
- Explain your job like I'm five/the way you do it for non-tech people
- That time your past self (almost) got you in trouble
- Software pet peeves
- Story about how you freaked someone out
- Feature that most certainly was a bug once
- Post something for your favourite previous weekly tag!

So I started my current job 7 months ago

I like the company and feel like I fit in with the people. The work though....

So the project I'm on has an Apache Wicket front end.... Pretty sure this thing was written around the same time I was learning to wipe my own ass. The senior dev is unreliable af and even when he is here, he sounds like a dial up connection.

Today is my last day with this turd. He's leaving at the end of the month and I'm on leave the coming week. So I'll be coming back to having this project basically to myself... Mixed feelings... One the one hand, I'm glad to be rid of this guy... On the other, this is a legacy project and I still don't know the half of it

So I've had a few rants now about this dumbass legacy Apache Wicket project I'm on.... Latest was that the guy who kind of knew what was going on but was impossible to communicate with is was leaving which meant I'd be inheriting this shit show. I was on leave his last week and he had the task of onboard the new senior.

I get here this morning and meet this guy. Seems a nice enough champ, well spoken (praise be.) First thing the man says to me is that this code is a mess and he doesn't really understand the IP... Yea me too, buddy, me too

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.