Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

** Non Dev Rant **

I just need to rant about this because I'm furious.

Last night I had a house warming party. It was mostly, if not all, of my girlfriend's friends. I'm a cranky old developer so I don't have friends.

Everyone was nice and dressed nice and brought us gifts.. all of the gifts were pretty much specifically for my girlfriend.

So this one girl came... she's younger.. around 25. She came with no gift (I wasn't expecting gifts I just need to mention it for the plot), and was dressed in sweat pants. Alright, no problem.. I really don't care at least she's here.

So as more guests arrive I finally get a gift. Someone brought me a case of beer and a couple of yummy cookies. I had to put it down on the kitchen counter for a bit because I needed to grab more chairs.

The basement door where the chairs are is 10 feet away from where I left my present..

I come back from upstairs.. not even 5 minutes later and I see sweat pant girl stuffing one cookie in her fucking mouth and the other in her pants...

Are you fucking kidding me!? I bought desserts and snacks and all the alcohol you can think of and you steal MY fucking present. Not just one of them... but BOTH.

She saw the other guests give me it.. say "here buddy this is for you"... followed me in the kitchen and STOLE my fucking cookies.

I was going to eat them this morning with my coffee and I realized I couldn't because this fucking ass hole took my fucking cookies!!!!

I hosted this party for my girlfriend's SJW ass hole fucked up friends... put a smile on my face... pretended to like people... and for once didn't yell at someone... and the fucking thanks I get is 2 stolen fucking cookies.

Fuck her.

Wholesome anti-rant.

There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.

However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.

She has grown so much as a dev.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF BUSINESS MOTHERFUCKERS USING TECHNICAL FUCKING BUZZWORDS LIKE THEY KNOW SHIT ABOUT TECH! THEY TRY TO BE FUCKING SMARTASSES AND ARGUE WITH DEVELOPERS LIKE GOD KNOWS WHY THIS FUCKING DOUCHE IS NOT THROWN IN /dev/null YET!

Ugh. He try to sound smart and argued with a unity game developer why the dev is not using "react" and "redux" in his game, purely because "since its the hype in 2016"... I was like really nigga?? FOR FUCKS SAKE Do some research before you say! Then he argued with a senior full-stack web developer on why they're using ES6 and not ES7, purely because he heard that ES7 is newer. When we try to explain we're not using decorator syntaxes since we use pure functions in our codebase, or how we haven't installed any ES7 babel plugins to transpile our code, he kept saying ES7 is newer and cooler and we must use it somehow... More to rant but i am fucking tired right now...

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

Senior development manager in my org posted a rant in slack about how all our issues with app development are from

“Constantly moving goalposts from version to version of Xcode”

It took me a few minutes to calm myself down and not reply. So I’ll vent here to myself as a form of therapy instead.

Reality Check:
- You frequently discuss the fact that you don’t like following any of apples standards or app development guidelines. Bit rich to say the goalposts are moving when you have your back to them.

- We have a custom everything (navigation stack handler, table view like control etc). There’s nothing in these that can’t be done with the native ones. All that wasted dev time is on you guys.

- Last week a guy held a session about all the memory leaks he found in these custom libraries/controls. Again, your teams don’t know the basic fundamentals of the language or programming in general really. Not sure how that’s apples fault.

- Your “great emphasis on unit testing” has gotten us 21% coverage on iOS and an Android team recently said to us “yeah looks like the tests won’t compile. Well we haven’t touched them in like a year. Just ignore them”. Stability of the app is definitely on you and the team.

- Having half the app in react-native and half in native (split between objective-c and swift) is making nobodies life easier.

- The company forces us to use a custom built CI/CD solution that regularly runs out of memory, reports false negatives and has no specific mobile features built in. Did apple force this on us too?

- Shut the fuck up

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

Long rant ahead.

Holy shit is this hard.

I'm not a dev, but I'm working really hard to become one. I come home from work every day at 7:00pm and study between 3 and 5 hours of coding, and finally I'm starting to make decent responsive web pages. I got excited, finally the studies are paying off and I guess I got carried away and told a "friend" about it.

"What?, But making web pages its fucking easy anybody can do web pages! I did mine with dreamwiever, is that even considered development"

And there goes my self steem holy shit..I know, I know its not development, Im not a programmer neither do I pretend to be one but holy shit.

I guess I wish some people would anderstand the amount of effort that can go into an app or web..

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

So, Today was the last day of my internship.
and it was a great last day but everything was fine until.

I started my computer and for some reason it got caught up in boot. It didnt start Nautilus.

So i asked a Senior Dev for help. Nice as these Devs are, he helped me look for reasons. And we found them. My ubuntu hadnt had enough disk space to start. (On a side note there is nothing but Atom Firefox and a few files on there.) So we looked for the biggest files in the system and found them. Syslog was 40 Gb big. And if you think that is shocking behold. Because Syslog.1 was 290Gb big.

Not really a rant but a Story.

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).

When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).

I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

I hereby salute every JS-wanking web dev who uses a pop-up type of dialog *and* display yet hugging blur the actual hugging content behind it, only to become completely visible when you allow JavaScript and allow those hugging cookies.

With my middle finger I salute you, motherhuggers. You filthy hugging pieces of hugging shit.

7 hugs so far, oh wait 8! Will this rant defeat my current record on amount of hugs given that apparently stands at 18 (which is hugging incredible, if I may say so myself)? Not that that's really the hugging point though, the hugging GDPR that's responded at by those motherhugging hugwads is. I hugging salute you, hugging pieces of hugging shit!!!

HUG!!!

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life

> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.

!rant, just wanted to express my excitement to someone

Not sure if this counts but technically I got my first freelance dev job designing an app for a club/small business at school. I have a lot to learn still but I'm really happy about the opportunity

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

!rant

Many dev ranting that apple is reached $1T by selling stupid connector's...... and other shit.

I am not apple product owner.

But Today I want to salute steve jobs.
A person without college degree,drug addiction,guilt of adopted son,financial issue's without any god father........................

Created one company.

Kicked out from own company.

Joinned again.

developed such policy in company that every one should follow.

took retirement due to cancer and all right's transfer to A Gay CEO.

and
now that company reached $1T.

Really fucking motivational thing.
Nothing is impossible.

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

!rant && rant

I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.

I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).

About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).

For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.

A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.

I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.

I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.

Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)

First rant (hello everyone), just wanted to share my experience of my recent job search.
I had worked about 2 years for one of the bigger companies in my country when I decided I had enough with their bs (I have some decent rants from that company if someone's interested) and I wanted to move back to my hometown. I applied for a few jobs in smaller companies , one which I personally knew the lead programmer of, and he really wanted me to work there. One other company responded quickly and after a couple of interviews I got an offer from them. By that time I haven't heard anything from the first company, so I called them. The CEO was in a meeting but would call me when he was done about am hour later. Didn't hear from him. So I called them again, this time he answered. He seemed really interested and said they were just working some things out, so I said that I needed an offer soon since I already got an offer from another company. His response (without me telling anything about the other company):
"We're not going to be able to match the salary so if you only care about money you should take that. We want you to work for us because you want to, not because of the money"
Well that doesn't pay the bills, so I simply stated:
"I appreciate your honesty and good luck finding anyone"
I hadn't really understood just how bad that was until I told my wife and she pointed it out. The thing is, the company that gave the offer first was really for a junior role, but they increased the proposed salary when they saw my CV. The shitty company was looking for a senior dev. Yeah, good luck finding a senior dev wanting to work without getting properly paid.
Anyway, took the first offer and haven't been happier!

I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.

I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.

Feels like I found value of "NAN"
i.e, finding non-ranter dev @ devrant!
"Write no rant
Comment no rant
++(view) all rant "
@Ghored
I guess he should be given a badge or something!
Never able to achieve that stage of satisfaction,
Bsod in windows,
Grub rescue for Linux,
Gradle build problem for android,
404 errors,
What not ?
Yet I really feel like today , I met a ironical legend of dev community!
A full bow to you my friend

!dev

So, I've been talking to this girl for a couple weeks now, and she fucking makes me happy guys. I kinda mentioned her once or twice on here, but I didn't really want to say much cause I wasn't sure how stuff was gonna go with her.

But basically now, we're just "talking" if that makes any sense to any of the younger, more social audiences here. For those who may not get what I mean, it's like we're not really looking for anyone else, but we're not really official or anything. Just somewhere in between like friends and dating (she confirmed this for me cause I've made assumptions before and got hurt so I wanted everything to be crystal clear)

I actually met her because she has a class with one of my friends. I mentioned their class in my contribution to the weekly rant this week, where the graphic design class was doing some basic webdev. I skipped my anatomy class to go there one day, started talking to her (actually the day of my rant where I said I'd been up for like ~30 hours or however many it was. LIKE EVERYTHING I POST ENDS UP REFERENCED IN ANOTHER POST), and just kept skipping mainly to see her. Then my friend gave me her Discord and we started actually talking to each other.

Within like 2 hours of us first messaging we had one of those like cute couple arguments. It was over who had prettier eyes, cause I have blue eyes (that people usually say are beautiful, I posted a couple pictures here once), and she has really pretty green eyes. I said that hers looked better, but she said that mine do....She won the argument.

Since then, it's just been fun and cute and I fucking love it. SHE EVEN SAID A PICKUP LINE TO ME A FEW NIGHTS AGO THAT I JUST LOVED. It was "your eyes are more gorgeous than any source code I have ever seen". She found it online, but like at the time, that really touched me.

I'm just so excited about all this guys. She's adorable and I love talking to her. The one thing that's KINDA weird is that she has the same name as my younger sister, but we call my sister a shortened version of the name, so it's not THAT weird.

And I'm just rambling at this point, like I generally do with my rants. She actually knows my profile name and everything (but she isn't on here, she does art, not computers), so she could possibly see this, but I'll likely end up sending it to her at some point anyways.

!dev && rant

What's people's problem with Wikipedia.

Earlier this week I told my cleaning lady about how Black Friday was so pointless this year, and apparently it's the first thing she heard about Black Friday (she's in her late 30's and a mother of 2, go figure). Not only that but she believed that it occurred every end of the month because someone else told her so. She said it would make sense because it's close to everyone's payday.

So I go and look up some information about Black Friday for her. All the DDG results somehow shit or cluttered by marketing wank.. your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, appended Wikipedia to get some reasonably good information quick. And that looked for all the world like that was the case. Apparently it's got to do with American Thanksgiving.. who knew?

She still didn't believe it. "But that's Wikipedia..." So she looked it up on her own phone on some random local site.. it confirmed that indeed it occurs once a year. Well, confirmed to the extent that there was "2017", "2018" and "2019" on the page... Yeah.

Finally she believed it. At least she didn't double down on it anymore. But seriously.. you're gonna take the words of one random person over a medium that's constantly being improved under the many eyes principle?

"People can edit Wikipedia so therefore it's bad"

I really don't get people...

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Some of y'all post some retarded quotes man no lie.

"A programmer does not fix computers" ~Some Indian dude

Really??!!

Does that need to be made into a quote? And do you honestly believe something soooo mundane should be attributed to one person only?

"Drink a glass of water every morning, best way to start your day" ~ Alecx(read with Indian accent even though I am Mexican American)

"Sleeping in your own bed is always the best" ~ Alecx

See how stupid that shit is? Quoting shit that is sooooo fucking generic and that literally anyone can think off?

I dunno why it pisses me off soooo fucking much. Ffs. The same thing about "dev jokes" do you have any idea how fucking cringey that shit is? And half the fucking time y'all post that shit in some of the most broken ass English I've ever seen man wtf.

The quality of rants has been going down in spirals and with a dogon YEEEE HAW and darling trust this motherfucker....I know a lil something about yeee haws.....this is a prime example.

Look, people can rant and post whatever the fuck they want. I ain't gonna hold you back on it. Just know that a lot of us think you are a moron.

A cringey moron at that.

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

!dev && rant

There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.

Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.

Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"

OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!

It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"

Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!

Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"

Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?

Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?

No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!

In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)

But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.

Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.

P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)

!dev

Whoever the fuck wit coded the entire system for the university/college application information portal over here in my country needs to be hung, shot, hung again and shot.

It's **ABSOLUTE FUCKING GARBAGE** on the design. First we have the search box. It literally takes a good 20 seconds to query 1000 entries at low traffic and 3 MINUTES at high traffic. Bad enough? Because it would also take that long to give you a table of search result which is, I shit you not, identical to the drop-down results you get while typing except rendered inside a <table></table> with some overlay!

Oh, did I mention it didn't have partial match? Yea, IT DIDN'T. For example, "John Hurr Doe City" would not match "John Hurr Doe city" just to piss you off. And then we have the fuckers that do this:
- University A John Hurr Doe city
- University B JHD City
- University C JHD city
That and no partial match. Yea. It's BS.

Also. if you wanna search again after view a school, you have to press "Back", the physical "Back" of the browser. Fair, it's good, but if you press anything other than that button, welll, you're fucked although lightly.

The cherry on top of the rant cone? The whole thing is made by the studentfucking Ministry of Education and Training, the mother of overlord of students. Yea. The fucking Ministry itself. Really. You wanna go "catch up with the world and master the 4.0 Industrial Revolution" and yet you can't fucking code the site properly. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck your horse you're riding and probably fuck you as well.

Sorry for getting slightly political at the end, the damn page is getting on my nerve.

My most personal rant to date...

The company I work for operates in an industry that might experience the next Kodak moment. The industry is really feeling the knife against it's throat at the moment. The company I work for is a dinosaur, so to say. And almost everyone within fight to continue staying as a dinosaur.

I am the sole dev of said company, and I am so alone. Not just literally, but also in thought and action.

I've been flagging the possibilities and dangers of the digitizing aspect we're experiencing for the last six or eight years (yep, I've been around for quite some time), but I feel that I'm not heard. I am that grumpy, sour manifestation of everything digital that they hate so much. At least that's what it feels like.

I am so fed up with this situation. But my options are limited. There aren't many dev jobs around, and those who've tried to hire me offered a salary reduction of about $12K, which is quite a lot. I've been offered jobs in other parts of the country, but I have family matters to tend to, so I can't move at the moment. I've looked for companies offering a job where I'm not required to work from the office, but in my country these seem to be far apart. I could go freelance, but I am too scared to do so. A stable income is neccessary to put food on the table for my family.

Sigh,

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

== Internship Interview Rant ==

This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"

He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?

So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !

Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.

And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.

Hey guys it's not a rant, but i feel this place might help...
I am a 20 yr old, second year guy ...have got some experience in core Java and after that, i have been doing android for 8months... Yeah , i coded some basic apps got my hands dirty on firebase, sql libraries and some connectivity...
Even got landed in an internship.

Today i feel myself to be an intermediate android dev , nd i know their are many things that can be learnt in android that i don't know..
But what after that?development as a carrier interests me, but i fear for a job security ... I could learn more of Android,maybe learn ios after that but their are always articles coming out that react is future, webapps will replace android and stuff like that...
I Have also heard stuff like companies today want to squeeze more out of their techs, so they want less and complete developers having experience in both web and mobile app designing and other stuff like that
Are you freakin kidding me? Android and ios alone are like drinking Pacific and indian ocean and to add web developing, its like drinking out every drop of ocean in the world.
I guess their are guys which exist with knowledge of all three, maybe I can cover them all too(someday) but that would take my whole clg life of 4 years..(I guess)
And no ,I don't have problems with that too.. I actually like developing but again i hear big words like cloud computing, AR,VR AI, data sciences, automation, graphics designing, game dev, and many more...

Basically i hear too much and i fear too much 😅 and i don't think closing my ears would be a good choice...
So, which ocean of carrier should i aim to go for?nd are my fears real? Do companies really prefer some web guy designing Amazon like apps over android-only guys like me?is automation nd templates really gonna take all we, developers jobs?should i look into ai/data sciences?

Well , i am a simple guy, who got his first pc at 17 so naturally, i am fascinated even by the working of a calculator app and anything relates to tech so am open to pursue my interests in any fields

Let me tell you why I feel like a shit right now. I work as sw dev in a country worse than Germany and company I interviewed is located in Germany. So this is kinda big deal for me.

I interviewed with the company last year, interview went really well. They told me during interview that they would return in 2 weeks tops. It took 2 months for them tor return. For some reason, I was not hired for that position. Later I learned that the division i was gonna work defunded/separated. After learning that the guy I interviewed really tried hard to give me good news but failed-therefore had to delay bad news, I was not sad for not being able to be accepted for that position or delayed response.

Fast forward to this year, I interviewed with the same company for a position as subcontractor employee on another company. Interview took just before Coronavirus situation started to blow up(mid March), I had to return to my home country when the borders were closed asap, 2 day after interview. Fast forward to May I got the job offer and contract with a good salary, July as starting date. But I have no Visa and you apply for visa with a valid contract. German embassies work at minimum capacity, no new applications for any type of visa including work/residence visa. After my serious research I found a crack, emailed the embassy and they finally agreed to give me a special appointment on the start of July. The company I interviewed sent me new contract(August starting date) automatically.

On mid July, I told the company that visa might not come soon enough, I might not make it to August to start to job. We both agreed to replan starting date once i got the Visa.

On August 6, my visa came. I informed them asap, and they told me the other company will return in 3 weeks with new starting date. I was like WTF we were waiting for this visa for months, why do you need 3 weeks. Anyways, 3 weeks past and the other company still did not give any new starting date. I really feel like shit right now. Last week I asked to the "my" company if there is a problem with my employment(the other company might change plans after all) and they said only starting date is the problem, don't worry. On 3 occasions, they reassured me there was no problem(no, I was not asking them like paranoiac obsessive person, they were preemptively saying it in some cases). They say other company employees were really asking about when I was coming frequently.

What should one do in such situation. Do I even have legal rights? Maybe I will look back at this post and laugh at my paranoia, but I would you random internet citizens' ideas on this situation. They say lightning does not strike twice to same point but living same disappointment with the same company would really hurt. rant over, mamba out.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

!rant

Coworker: I've been working on this computer for an entire day now and it's still having issues

Boss: Well, we can give the client an option to get another SSD and clone to it before reinstalling the OS.

Coworker: But he doens't have an SSD...

Boss: Yes he does

Coworker: *opens computer* let's see, two 1TB hard drives... but no SSD... Oh, there it is. It's hidden. But it's booting too slow to be....

*epiphany*

Coworker: Oh my god. I've been telling the computer to boot to the wrong hard drive. That explains everything!

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

!Dev

Sitting in a bus on 19 hour ride with my class to England a few things to rant about came to my mind:

Why the fuck do you have to blast shitty german rap music out of your fucking JBL boxes and why do you have to turn up the volume so much that I can still hear it although I am wearing headphones, listening to music and sitting 5 fucking rows in front of you.

Also why the fuck do clocks in buses never display the right time? How hard can it be to make the clock display the right fucking time?

Another thing: why does this bus which is especially made for long rides not have a fucking trash can?! Seriously wtf?

Rants aside I am really looking forward to staying in England for a week although I won't have a computer for the next week :(

Another thing: why the fuck is the coffee you get at pull-ins so fucking disgusting ?
Like srsly, it is made by a machine and still tastes like thrown-up.

And why the fuck does everyone look weirdly at you when you buy a can of red bull but everything is fine when someone my age drinks 3+ liters of beer and then throws up? What the fuck? People look at me weirdly when I tell them that I don't drink any alcohol, heck I am actually not even allowed to do so because I am 15 and not 16 (beer is allowed in Germany if you are 16+ but nobody really cares about that). Heck where I am from they even encourage you to drink beer? What the fuck??!!

Anyway looking forward to England and also sorry about the long non-dev related rant. Just had to rant about some people and society.

P.S. do you know any (preferably free) Android apps / games where you have to code or just solve problems with logic?

First rant from my new job.
I got a position as backend-dev in a startup and for now i'm learning angular. Yes, you read that correctly, because the frontend-team is short-staffed i decided to switch teams. We are 3 people and neither one has sufficient angular-experience (the framework was a management decision).
First of all i got confused because we use slack and trello but the frontend-lead decided to do some stuff via google-spreadsheet too. Then we didn't have any code in our repository until yesterday. I tried to check out the repository after that, did an npm-install but when running ng serve i got an error "css-file not found". It turns out you had to download some files from the official website and put them in the unversioned node_modules directory. It was the teamlead's decision to do so and me and my coworker got really annoyed when we tried to set up everything on our end. But that's not all, yesterday the other dev's merged their first versions of the project. But not via git, that is way to mainstream. The coworker had to upload his code into the cloud and the teamlead copied the files into the project folder.
Aside from that the code already isn't the best, some things should be done differently imo and we have credentials in the code (not in some separate files, but in an if-else-clause that checks node.env.production).

We'll have a discussion about this tomorrow, let's hope things can be straightened out.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

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!

!rant

I know it's not that impressive in the dev world, but I'm finally making six figures (the lowest six figure value possible but STILL) and I can't really brag to my friends about dollar amounts so HURRAH. Accepted the offer yesterday, and I'm quite pleased about it.

Annoyed that it took so long (I'm 29), but I did have a two year long career break for a family medical issue/travel/quarter life crisis, so so it goes.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

Back on dev rant, been a while. Been two Jobs later...
Was extremely underpaid at the previous job.
Started a new venture two weeks ago. Long story short this company outsources their developers to other companies. The job I applied for is 'Junior Developer'. JUNIOR DEVELOPER!!!
Yet I'm being outsourced as an 'Intermediate Developer'.
Honestly I like the challenge, but businesses need to treat their employee's properly and not manipulate their young developers so they can get more money for cheap.
Really now, I've been dealing with this everywhere I go and it pisses me off.
On top of that I have no Senior Developer. I am the only developer. The other six, including my boss, are DBA's and don't know C#

!rant
today at work i (frontend dev) had an argument about some scss mixins issues, with my boss (senior dev). Not going into detail, I really thought that my method was a lot more efficient and defended my argument strongly until the end. In the end of discussion I saw/accepted that boss' method was better and he said he's nevertheless proud of me for defending what I believed was right. (it's been 2 years since I moved into this country and its language is my 5th one, so I'm only level B2, most of the time I back up from having a deep discussion knowing that my language skill won't take me that far) I really appreciated that feedback from him and it truly made my day. Thank you boss! You're cool!

Long time ago i ranted here, but i have to write this off my chest.

I'm , as some of you know, a "DevOps" guy, but mainly system infrastructure. I'm responsible for deploying a shitload of applications in regular intervals (2 weeks) manually through the pipeline. No CI/CD yet for the vast majority of applications (only 2 applications actually have CI/CD directly into production)

Today, was such a deployment day. We must ensure things like dns and load balancer configurations and tomcat setups and many many things that have to be "standard". And that last word (standard) is where it goes horribly wrong

Every webapp "should" have a decent health , info and status page according to an agreed format.. NOPE, some dev's just do their thing. When bringing the issue up to said dev the (surprisingly standard) answer is "it's always been like that, i'm not going to change". This is a problem for YEARS and nobody, especially "managers" don't take action whatsoever. This makes verification really troublesome.

But that is not the worst part, no no no.

the worst is THIS:

"git push -a origin master"

Oh yes, this is EVERYWHERE, up to the point that, when i said "enough" and protected the master branch of hieradata (puppet CfgMgmt, is a ENC) people lots their shits... Proper gitflow however is apparently something otherworldly.

After reading this back myself there is in fact a LOT more to tell but i already had enough. I'm gonna close down this rant and see what next week comes in.

There is a positive thing though. After next week, the new quarter starts, and i have the authority to change certain aspects... And then, heads WILL roll on the floor.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

Oh man, its been forever since I've had an actual rant.

so my work ethic is to the point where it's all last minute. My eduction is all last minute. Personal problem, and don't know how to fix that. but it's just getting out of hand.

tbh, I'm at the point of considering dropping uni like this is no joke. maybe transfer to a cheaper because the financials are no good either.

I also need a new job because the place I'm at is no good. here a few things about it:
1) Its Industrial, not really tech related
2) the dudes expect ME to GO TO THEM and ask for help. Not how I roll
3) not the best atmosphere -- I don't really like the 4 total employees, including myself
4) nearly minimum wage

the pros?
1) I learn about my car
2) I can use the shop to fix my car
3) Free stuff (for example, a projector and lunch everyday
4) We're getting a server (soon?)
5) I buy computers for them, they pay me

But seriously, my grades in school are slipping (nowhere dangerous yet) and I am too stressed. At least I'll be getting in more dev work

Moreover, I want to get in some actual learning with Swift, but I can never manage to make time. Plus, games are a thing that I do, also family and friends, also religion is a thing, also work and school, also sleep. No time? Me neither.

Like the organization of this rant? Me too.

Not really a rant about coding itself, but it's a rent, I'm a dev, so here ya go:

I have a German citizenship, but am living in Hungary temporarily. Also, I need internet. So I go to the website of UPC, register, order a package, etc. Just as I would do anywhere else....... Except for the fact , that they just called me that I should send them my passport, because they neither accept my German ID, my Hungarian registration card or anything else. I DON'T HAVE A PASSPORT YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! I LIVE IN THE EU, I DON'T NEED A PASSPORT!!

But the best part was when they told me I should just ask my mother to make the contract for me, because she does have a Hungarian citizenship. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??!

!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev

Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃

I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.

Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..

My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)

i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..

i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..

i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..

i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

(not really dev related, but a rant nonetheless)

I just got a new 3D printer, and all of a sudden, people are giving me print requests. I don't think that they realize that I don't just tell the printer that I want whatever, but that I have to either find the model online or design it myself.

Also, I have more friends now. Yay?

(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)

honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:

- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)

- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.

- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.

- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.

- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.

I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

not dev.

A follow up on my HSBC credit increase rejection rant from last month. So they ended up saying "we chose not to give you an increase even though your account is very good. Feel free to try again in 3-6 months but I can't guarantee your request will be approved."

I let it be.

Today I got an email saying that following a recent review of my account, they'd like to offer me an increase. The same increase I asked for last month and got rejected, and then had my credit score ruined over. Bitch what.

I am petty af, tomorrow I'll call them and tell them that "after having reviewed their services, I choose not to give them consent to increase my credit limit. I understand this isn't the outcome they were hoping for, but that is my decision. Feel free to reach out again in 3-6 months but I can't guarantee that I'll change my mind. "

Yes I know the rep on the other end of the line wouldn't give a f*ck, I just want that recorded. I don't really need the increase, just wanted to lower my utilisation. They can suck it.

If anyone here remembers the first 2 part rant story I posted then you will know that I got unceremoniously laid off by a company that tried to blame me for their bad decissions at one point

Well, a couple of days ago I found out that the senior dev and the owner took a trip to San antonio tx in order to try and look for growth opportunities and more developers. The thing is, being a Mexican company they thought they could go away with half assed solutions and mexican pay charts (to them it is completely reasonable to pay a dev with a degree and experience close to 13.99 an hour) just to find out that shit like that does not fly with American professionals. After I left, no one would monitor their .net implementations , the lead developer being a new php developer himself and not knowing much about .net had to take care of much of the things they had to work with, their API made no sense and it was damn near impossible to connect their services to a mobile platform unless you had ninja like skills and ingenuity.

I hold no grudges and really wish them the best, but it pleases me to know that they know now that their way of doing things is not standard in the U.S. now that makes me happy.

Junior dev here. Finishing a boot camp, actively going through a few job application processes.
One of the companies has given me a tech assignment (for a Graduate Junior position, mind you) that was titled Full Stack Mid Level Challenge. It took me a week to build an app they asked and do analitycs and refactoring of the second part of the task (I only had late evenings free to dedicate to that), it was my first time doing back-end in Node (my boot camp teaches PHP) so I basically learned to do it while doing this challenge.
They asked testing and clean architecture.
I submitted the assignment (I thought I would die while doing it, exhausted, I think I was brain dead for a short perio of time, but I submitted it on time).
They got back to me and we had already have a tech interview with the Leads that had live coding at the end. Don't have feedback yet, really won't be surprised for whatever comes, it was literarly my first interview, treating it like a valuable learning experience.

But. This rant is not about this. Thsi is just to put you in my mood.

This is the !rant:

My classmate from the bootcamp is probably already hired, or will be one of these days. As a tech challenge she was asked to do FizzBuzz kata. I repeat, FizzBuzz bloody kata!
Now, I am very happy for this person, the situation is complicated and this job is extremely needed.

But, please, explain to me, HOW??? How is it possible that selection criterias vary that much?

End of rant. Thank you very much.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

Context: New to typescript. Writing a thing, doing it for work, good opportunity to stretch my dev legs. Using a propriety lib, alternatives not an option.

Rant begin:
SOOOO, who the fuck thought THIS was a good idea:
1. Lib has minified react in dev (because closed source) meaning no downstream errors AND the entire premise of the lib is that a widget is a react component, so I'm writing typescript react the entire time without downstream errors
2. SHIT docs. By that, I mean there's an API reference page that's so sparse there's literally a set of CRUCIAL interfaces that only say the word 'Interface' on them. That's it. that's what i get. It's an interface. NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK, what the fuck is it though? What's its purpose? Is it an interface for a dog? A dog that has a 'shit' property? or a cat? or a cat eating dog shit? Nobody fucking knows - the docs sure as fuck don't care.
3. No syntax highlighting - editors, IDEs (i've tried a few) can't even find the lib inside this environment, so Code and everything else thinks I'm importing shit that doesn't even exist - so no error prediction, code completion based on syntax of the library, none of that.
4. There are some EXTREMELY basic samples - these samples exclusively use React classes - no function components, no hooks, nada - just classes and even perfect replicas of the sample code display erratic behavior like errors about missing props, so that's mostly FUCKING USELESS
5. And this... this is where the straw breaks the fucking camel's back... there's no... there's no hot reloading... Do you know what that (in conjunction with the previous 4 fuckups) means?

When I write anything or I fuck up (which of course I'm doing every time I write half a line because how the fuck?) I have to restart the client and server EVERY FUCKING TIME and manually test to see if the error (THAT ONLY GETS REPORTED IN THE LOCAL UI) is gone or different.
Then, once I see the error, it isn't an error: it's the minified React error-decoder link and guess what? It isn't really clickable a link OR copyable, meaning that every FUCKING time I get a new error, I have to MANUALLY TYPE A FUCKING 50 CHAR URL TO FIND OUT A GENERIC REACT ERROR MESSAGE WITHOUT A LINE NUMBER OR ANY FUCKING CONTEXT. I HAVE TO DO THIS CONSTANTLY TO SEE IF ANYTHING I'M DOING EVEN WORKS.

6. There's no github to complain to the maintainers or search for issues because it's NOT FUCKING OPEN SOURCE so there is literally nothing to be fucking done about it.

This is due in a week and a half, found out about it last Friday. How's your day going?

PS: good to be back after a long respite from dev ranting.

OMG. Just had the worst convo with my supervisor. She's a dev and she does not understand why scalability is important.

We have a really bad client who has a fucking insane amount of pages and they want to change some stuff on a few and my supervisor just said manually add it in with if satements.

I replied saying this client will want more things changed let me take the extra hlaf hour to make it scalable.

She responded no just do manually.

I wanted to get in to rant about how scalability is important but it was the end of the day and I was to tired.

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

I'll post a rant (will be long) soon-ish on the root of the asinine problem...

TL;DR
Anyone got a better suggestion of killing a WLAN router signal than a Faraday Cage?
-----------------------
As to the point as I can manage atm...
My ISP forces a proprietary router/modem for them to script my static IPv4 block (/28, aka 13 usable). Modifying this equipment in any way or using the vast majority of tactics to modify its behaviour = Federal Felony... with my history, it couldn't be construed as mistake/ignorance of this fact, so I'd likely end up working for some branch of the gov to mitigate the costs of standard prison (on both ends... handicapped af = expensive af to comply with base human rights laws... plus I'd be a dangerous prisoner from what I've been told).

I NEED the ipv6 functionality TOTALLY off... I've written this into every kernel and every container config at kernel level.

The issue is, I don't trust their shit device (which "should" also be set to no ipv6 via gui... non-GUI = fed felony).

This horrid device, they apparently made them for home use initially (to be fair it has decent specs and tolerable RAM), so included WiFi... that comes on by itself.
Disable the WiFi!... except I cant (at least not without 'tampering').
Why? Well acc to the GUI it's not enabled in the first place. Acc to the 'tech support' it's apparently a paid feature (yes, nonsense) that I have not paid for (nor would I), meaning on their end's GUI and DBs I also don't have WiFi ability from that dev.

So... Not trusting the other settings and the dev, being something im not allowed to directly config outside of their GUI that doesn't realise it's putting out a usable signal despite registering DHCP on behalf of that non-existent signal. I NEED to kill those signals.

I realise it likely sounds extreme to make and use a Faraday Cage for a router/modem (secondary modem, it parses the initial modem's output, via script, to allow the static block to be accessed). I really dont know any other way that's legal to restrict it.

Oh, in case unclear, I have tried so many ways to get them to just allow me to use any device (pref. mine, but even their's) that i can simply script myself... it's a no-go.

!rant

Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.

So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.

So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.

And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.

Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.

After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.

On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.

I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.

I am still finishing the app, though :)

Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.

I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.

Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.

Peace out folks. Good night...

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.

oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔

We are cord cutters. This is what we have to do to watch the super bowl.

AND WE LIVE IN HOUSTON!

!dev

So last week I sort of unfriended a friend from college that i guess is more like a "chat buddy". After college we've never hung out. Part of it maybe because I'm deaf so there's a communication barrier, I lost most college "friends" after that... but then are they really friends?

The reason was though, he talks to me every night (usually 1-2 hrs online chatting on and off), we do have some laughs but recently he's been complaining about his year end bonus, how it's not enough. And also about how he deserves to match with better girls than the ones he's getting now. He's on those online dating sites and went out with a few. And he's been on a few dates but with my looks and health issues, online dating is pretty much useless. He was the only reason I even tried

He makes twice as much as me already but "he comes from a poor background" so he needs more. Honestly I make enough, but the job isn''t great (not really learning anything new, lot's of things that could be better... obviously) but it's very flexible and near where I now live... should I even choose to go into the office (I sort of work remotely from the rest of the team).

I probably haven't spoken too him for a week now and I don't feel problems, frees up more time but wondering if I sort of withdrawing/unanchored from reality and ignoring problems, settling for less.

Nowadays it really feels like, when I'm in my own apartment or just alone, I'm in my own world, I can do whatever I want... thought most of the time is spent with my devices... so I'm not sure though if that's good or not... Am I a Bachelor or a hermit?

Now i've been rambling for the last 1hr and have no idea what I wanted to say.... guess I just needed to rant...

Ah I remember now sorta... Is this relationship worth keeping or should I find new friends that are more similar to me?

Maybe I've been moving in the wrong direction in life... I shouldn't do things the normal way... Think about what's actually important to me/people like me... not what what everyone normally does...

!dev !rant

Not working at McDonalds, I got hired to do factory work for a company i've known about for a while. Loving it way more!

side news: I'm getting into OOP with python, i definitely like the organization and ease and sense in that all. Recently learned how function definition works, so I can really get this ball rolling now!

!rant

So as my recent rants might have conveyed, my job has been pretty shitty lately. So as we do I started looking around for other openings. Not that I would take them right away, but I want to know. This led to a realization that I'm literally at the best paying, top rated, firm doing the best work in nearly a nearly 100 mile radius of my home. There's a few government jobs that want top secret and 10 years experience, but for anything less than that my current position is literally the best. This is not what I expected the top to be like. And the fact that it took me over a year to realize that I'm actually at the top and have been is super weird.

Thing is I don't know what I expected the top to be like nor did I expect to be here so quickly after finishing school.

I know this is dev rant not dev ramble but this was one of those formative moments where I just really don't know how to process this info.

Anybody had similar feelings? Like looking for someone to help and realizing, not in a egotistical way, just in a sobering way, that you are literally the best and most qualified person out there.

Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.

I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.

WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.

I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.

Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.

I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,

Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.

I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.

Not really Dev rant but bought 2 google homes. Set them up all nice and dandy and then boom.

Me: Hey google, set a reminder to buy batteries.
Home: I am sorry, I can't do that yet.

WTF ok.

Me: hey google, set a calendar reminder to buy batteries tomorrow.
Home: I am sorry, I can't add calendar events yet.

And the list goes on. WTF google. Why my phones Google assistant can do all of the above and a home assistant cannot even though they are the same thing...

Guess who is browsing actions api to implement missing functionality that should be in a freaking core...

Talking about buying voice controlled music box...

Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius

He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.

So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.

I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.

!rant (kinda)

So I'm currently working on a personal project, where the concept is something, that if I wanted to, I could probably make a decent penny off of it.

The plan is to make it open source, and not charge anything for it, and when I tell this to non-dev people, they're almost shocked! Why would I not take an opportunity to make a lot of money!?

Well basically I think it's awesome to have open-source software, and I really want to "contribute to the society". And only after like 10 minutes, people start understanding my point, to just help people make something new, instead of being a greedy person, and keep it private, making it unavailable for a lot of people.

Hopefully I'm not the only one with this mindset?

We often give access to a product owner from the customer on our Jira to keep up a good communication and everyone stays up to date as everything is on the board and not hidden in emails or paper notes on the desk of the guy that is on vacation.

So far, so good

Our customers really like this as they can comment on tickets and they are integrated in the workflow because they can push into the backlog and can review finished tasks.

It is just getting better for everyone so where is the rant?

One project is just a dump of shitty mixed content tickets. But how? They look really neat. There are tickets like "fixes from meeting 20th of may" which are initially well structured with approximately 4 subtle changes to the UI and some explanation and screenshots.

PM says: Good ticket. There you go ticket, into the customer review loop of doom.

20 comments and 13 status changes later. Point 43 from comment 17 is referenced in comment 20 to keep on hold as a third party needs to give feedback, point 7 is still not solved correctly as dev 2 was not aware that it was already discussed and changed in the ticket "Call from 25th of may" where in addition the resolution of points 5-12 were requested with an additional excel file to import.

By now we have the 8th of august and literally 17 of these kind of tickets.

I guess we need to improve the workflow and request a new product owner. But this far I just table flip everytime I get one of these tickets assigned.

!Rant

I will have you know that being part of the mobile solutions team is pretty sweet when you have nothing to do but keep a few databases clean and up to date, test which iPad is best suited for the sales people and buy 20 cases to test them for sturdiness.
Seriously without dumb idiots arguing about roaming costs and demanding help with the most basic shit this would be heaven.
I mean it's apple but still having every color of the 9.7 iPad and of the 12,9 pro stacked up on your desk is pretty cool.

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

RANT! Clown VISA developer (you know, the one with ”extensive experience”) has still not finished his task which he was assigned after failing the last one which was easier. I wrote that they would fail and they have not even deployed anything to any environment. Not even dev. They just fuck around on their machines and this VISA guy says some nonsense shit on daily standups using mother fucking big words like it is really some difficult task they are doing. NOTHING has been done. It’s such a moral sink for the team.

When I asked nicely and asked if they have automated test they responded with a yes. So, I just dive into the repo and… no. There is no tests at all.

It is almost like they _think_ that tests automatically ate induced by osmosis or quantum mechanics or something. There is no tests. None. Zero. Why the ”yes”? 🤔

I looked at the commits and I can see no actual brain activity.

It will take a miracle. A miracle I say, to get any productive work out of this guy. What should he do? I mean, what should he actually get paid for? I do not understand. And he walks around in these $400 dollar jackets and coats and shit like he knows stuff.

I am having a really hard time accepting that he actually get paid at all.

Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?

Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.

Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.

They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.

Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.

Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.

Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.

So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.

Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

!rant: I need a little advice from fellow devs. I've come to the conclusion that development is not the right career path for me, but how to advance from here?

I've worked a little over a year as dev/scrum master and lately I've been assigned small project management tasks. I really liked the project management stuff, and I like talking to stakeholders and converting their ideas into well described requirements and development tasks.

But who will hire a junior level engineer with no formal project manager training or certifications?

What kind of jobs could I apply for?

Not really a dev related rant but a rant nonetheless
Why is auto renewal forced now on subscription services now? I don't want to have to cancel my service by jumping through hoops and explaining why I want to cancel it before finally cancelling it. I've had to help my parents unsubscribe from a few services because it was too confusing for them to do themselves and they've just let them suck from their wallets for half a year.
I am even angrier at long "free trials" that you are REQUIRED to enter payment information for so that they can charge you once it's over if you don't remember to cancel it after a month and a half. Can't we just go back to auto renewal being an option, please?

Not really a dev rant, more of a "home tech support" kind of rant but I guess a lot of devs will relate...

So I was looking at building myself a little storage server, mostly for backups and stuff. This led to the fail of this rant: I thought it would be a good idea to convince my father to switch from using a ton of USB HDDs to get himself a NAS.

This is where I didn't think things through...

The only place he was able to set up the NAS is in the living room. Now I have to use my noise cancelling headphones all day just to not have to hear those HDDs rumbling around in there🤦

(also, I specifically got some super quiet fans for my gaming PC in the living room, but now I realize I could have saved some money and gotten some louder ones, since that NAS is so much louder...)

Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.

I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.

I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.

I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

Bruh, tbh, this is kind of going to be a sad rant.

tl;dr: LEETCODE THE FUCK UP AND GET INTO FANG.

For all the people out there, just stop fucking around with small companies/startups early in your career. Leetcode up and get into FANG. Once you have that validation, these startups will be much easier to get into.
I have gone through this first hand.

After amazing on-sites with multiple startups, where everyone said that I'm the kind of person they're looking for (background wise: CS grad, startup experience, 2+ YOE as a fullstack Dev using Java, py, js and all the famous frameworks you could name), they rejected me.

Heck, a company flew me out to SF from Seattle where I think I had had my best on-site ever. They rejected me today. The sad part is that I actually for once really believed in the mission of the company.

At this point, I have wasted so much time reading about the xyz startup that's about to disrupt pqr industry (to prepare for behavioral/cultural interview), practiced for such shitty interviews like pair programming etc., worked on numerous take home projects (completing all those "bonus" parts) and deploying it and spending money out of my own pocket for that.

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

I have given mock interviews with ex bosses and friends and they told me that I'm good. Heck, I even solved a LC medium in 20 minutes (optimal solution) but still got rejected.

I'm kind of writing this for myself and people who are on the same boat as I am:
Get into FANG and then think about other shit. STOP looking for smaller companies and being scared of getting your ass kicked by a Leetcode interview. Any company who would not take LC interviews will prefer someone from FANG unless you're lucky as fuck. You don't want your career to be based on luck, man. That shit's not gonna take you anywhere.

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

This is more of a rant with a question within:

It's International Women's Day and I did not see this hitting me like it is lol, but I have a question for my fellow devs all over:

Do you actually like the system of developers making up fake doctors appointments (or whatever) to go interview with the competitor because they don't feel appreciated at their current company?
Do people actually like sneaking around and telling lies and constantly having to prove yourself to new people instead of just having a process in place to rectify the situation where you work?

And do you actually like having to spend so much time and energy negotiating pay so you don't get ripped off?

I know this happens to all of us, regardless of how we identify. But I once had a recruiter call me the day after she talked to my best friend, a male dev (same experience level), and using his same techniques that we practiced together, she offered me almost $100k less for the same title she offered him the day before, despite the strongest negotiating of my life. She insisted the company simply could not go higher. This affected my friend almost as much as it affected me-- this really does happen. We're not making it up. Sometimes not even the best advice can change the reality.

Shit like that is just depressing, and reminds me that it probably wouldn't be that different if I went somewhere else anyway. But I'm wondering if you like that hustle, or if you too wish it wasn't needed.

Well here I go my first rant.

A little bit of background:
So I started working my first job a little over a month ago. found devrant about a week in. I was lucky that at a very young age I found programming and liked it (about 6 or 7). I went to college just to get a degree (bachelors of game development).

The job that was a "Great" opportunity that would be bad to let slip by (not a game dev job sadly). Well during the interview they asked me simple thing like what programming languages I know and some simple stuff like that, they never did ask me to demonstrate my knowledge though. Then they went to the weirder questions.
Do you know SQL? yeah at a very base level.
Do you know Excel? I mean I used is a bit, but not very much.
Etc.
A few of the questions felt a little out of place for the field, But it was the only "programming job" that would hire an experienced junior developer, so I took it. Guess I should have asked more questions.
Now I'm here at a job to help replace someone who is retiring. He wasn't a programmer really, but he wrote some code out of necessity well his platform of choice was VBA in Excel. Oh, and that's not the best part, he also dealt with mistakes that happen in the lab (electronics shit). So when ever there is a fuck up I have to go figure out how to search a poorly designed database (that is constantly changing), and today is the day he leaves, so no more help after today. My biggest fear currently is that I wont be able to fill a request that someone makes and I'll be the reason the company is losing money. And with all the stress/burn out that's building up I haven't been working on personal projects, which being my main source of entertainment might be making me depressed. Even when I do work up the effort to work on my projects I don't get very much entertainment. (If anyone has a suggestion for this that would be helpful.)

TIL: Even if the job is a great opportunity don't stop searching and ask a lot of questions.

It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

I been looking over my profile and god it's been a while, programming as still been going on in the background but more for game mods and alikes, kind of been lazy but same time dealing with life.

I really had forgotten my passion for tech and programming it's just become a tool I know and use and I kind of feel bad for doing that. I got in to computers when I was 6 years old built my own PC our of random spare parts at 7, was teaching family members how to repair there own pcs by 9 at the age of 11 was helping with the schools computer department repair and fixing networking problems and my ideas and comments mattered.

Now I am an adult ... Sadly it seems the enjoyment of any idea is shot down with some rude remarks from another Dev, but isn't the point we all see a problem different so we all can contribute?

Like I said I never worked away from computers or programming but now I more like your little side computer repair shop I can do it, I get the job done but the passion isn't there and the end result reflects it.

I believe it's the human part what put me off not just others but myself, I used to put my heart in to my projects and when someone comes alone and rips them apart for let's say a spelling mistake what I state everywhere I am dyslexic but seems to be over looks alot. I became more stale in what I was willing to take on. My own websites now reflect this I am using crappy reinstalled software over me doing it myself.

But the passion for the idea what tech and programming never left I just hope one day soon I am enjoy it again, the wow factor is still there, god there is some talent out there and some of them people I meet before they became big but my aim was never to be come big I would be happy to be on a small project what only as a few eyes on it as long as it makes a difference and that's my problem tech like everything as become so commercial.

Even small projects are ran like a company and the wow factor is gone or the risk factor of trying a unknown way is dismissed for trying to keep face.

If I was born 20 years before right now I would be glad to slow down but I am 30+ and seen the world change so much in this last 10 years where I can do it but .... Why would I do it, when most cases it goes out of my moral ideals

I still mess around with teck, I still have Pi's kicking about and you bet your bottom Dollar I will be trying to get a Pi 5 lol

The love of tech hasn't gone but the communities I enjoyed have, I know this is a me not adapting but I don't need to adapted, I want what we do to matter to someone to make a difference, and I mean with there life's and wellbeing not there bottom line.

If you have any communities to look in to please comment below and of you was able to read this then OMG I am so sorry, I didn't proof read this or anything it was just a little rant about how I become disconnected from the world I have always found enjoyment.

I slipped away to game at late but this last few months I seen myself wanting to be apart of a project or community for tech/programming and even just be a voice helping even someone else get the answer.

I do still have hope for the geeky nerds of yester years even if we are now just a relic of the past lol

Well sorry to put anyone's eyes though this lol enjoy your rants guys and keep up what ever projects your working on.

!rant or at least not dev related

I work at a school. Sometimes we get some weird training and shit we have to attend to. This time it had to do with what to do in the event of an active shooter.

Because you know. The U.S IS full of angry white kids with guns that if fucked up enough will just take fire on people.

Well, as a military veteran. I feel pretty confident in knowing what to do when some asshole is trying to get his expert marksman badge on me. So i requested not to waste my valuable time on such bs. I was promptly denied and encouraged to attend the bs training.

The first dumbshit thing they tell you to do is to turn the lights off and hide(if you decide to not fight) for which I mentioned that it would not work.

You see. Our entire buildings have motion sensors on each room which would TURN the fucking lights on if you move........ and even though you can turn the switch on..some offices would still work through the motion sensor....exhibit A: my office.

Fuck this. Couldn't i just keep one of my guns with me?? It would just take about 2 shoots really....and I promise they would stay in.

This sucks man. I need to move to Canadia. I don't want my kids having to hear about "mandatory active shooter training"

That fucking bullshit should never be a norm.

10 bucks and a life says i have better aim than some crazy kid.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

Junior Dev about 18months in my current job and I've got a problem

Started to feel not wanting to code at work, despite working on a greenfield project thats critical and using new tech. I get a little defensive about PR's over stupid small things (PR was once rejected due to auto indentation "not to standard").

Talked with boss (who I get on well with and like) and thinks my problem is I've lost confidence coding. Trys to get more senior Dev to on side to help me out more.

Same senior Dev is really close with other junior on my team - pair on alot of stuff all the time, have lunch and spend free time together, and will work way past working hours just to try and finish something that day (even though it's not due that day).
(Probs working ~60h weeks, where as I'm ~42h and contracted for 37h. I'll work on if I need to but tries to have balance)

Senior and other junior tend to ignore tickets on the board, do the work and then when I pick it up they say "I did that last night". No docs, no PR for me to ask about how it was done (as they merged it themselves). (They have previously completely refactored my branch in the past overnight then not told me atall)

I'm not saying its favouritism here, but I'm not happy with the situation. I feel I can't ask questions as they are always together or they discuss the problem themselves and just give me the answer (not really acknowledging my points). I dont tend to ask for help from this senior Dev now as I don't feel it's worthwhile learning wise for me.

Other people in the team are great but working on other aspects so not a direct one-to-one alignment (others are DB Dev & principal senior dev)

Furthermore I'm wanting to possibly work on full stack web or more architecture stuff, both which are not in my current teams remit (backend up to API).

So - what do I do? Try and remedy the situation in the current team as best as or look for a new teams as cut my losses.

I'm torn between the 2 and I'm unsure how to get out this rut. I feel I need to find a solution to this soon though

(Sorry for the long rant folks)

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore

I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing

(not really a *dev* rant)

I hate it when I get an email with the following sentence:
"We appreciate your patience and kind understanding regarding this matter."

When did I freaking imply that I'm patient?! You just decided that I am and sent this... 😡

So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.

He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.

Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.

Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.

I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized.

!dev

Personal rant, but as one shouldn't bottle up emotions, probably not so bad idea....

Started with diet and exercise in the vacation, as finally a certain thing starting with C calmed down...

Its maddening how fucked up the world is. Now as a lil private info (that might not be so unknown, shared multiple times here) - my body is a train wreck.

Lungs are fucked, muscle distrophy, some other things are fucked.

I'm the kind of thing every gym trainer dreads - the client that needs not only a lot of ass whooping, but also has a lot of problems that need to be taken care of.

Which is why I rather do exercise at home, cause... My experiences with humans in gyms are bad. Most trainers behave like fucking chimpanzees screaming commands while not listening what one tells them...

First challenge: Find a low impact cardio training.

What one mostly finds is a female chick (which is sad cause I like men more for obvious reasons), that should gain some weight, screaming at ya how great sport is while jumping around like a bunny on ecstasy.
Low impact isn't really low impact when you jump around, lil bunny... And it isn't low impact when you just let yourself fall to the floor and start doing push ups.

If an obese person like me did that, it would end in pain, frustration and an empty fridge TM.

So one has to painfully look and skip through 20 min vids of "Non low impact low impact YouTube / ... vids" to find one that is doable without wrecking the body even further... Yaaaay. That makes one totally not feel depressed :-)

The other thing that I always hate is dieting. Note that I don't have to change much - I'm basically on a diet since years, holding weight the whole time.

The jolly fun is that I can't take off with just an diet. If you never heard that such thing is possible, a lil advice: It is possible. Nothing hurts more than being told that eating less solves all problems magically - cause it doesn't.

What I usually need is added protein, as I suffer from muscle dystrophy in my left side. (hence the low impact vids).

If you go to a grocery store, you most likely find *tons* of protein stuff.

The fun thing is that roughly 80 % of that are - like all things in a supermarket - completely bullshit.

I know one could avoid using protein powder / ... - but that makes dieting a very very very hard task, as one has to not only do a lot of planning, but cooking and eating becomes a depression palooza... It just doesn't make fun when you have to scale components for every meal or force yourself to eat e.g. 250 g of low fat curd cheese to gain the necessary proteins.

Why is supermarket stuff so shitty....

Added sugar / saccharides . When one has been dieting for long for health reasons, one finds out pretty quick that most products (especially those labeled as healthy / fat reduced / "weight loss") are perfectly made to lead to a sugar crisis and binge eating.

I've found protein drinks containing up to 25 g of sugar per drink (330 ml).

A coke has 27 g of sugar per 250 ml...

:) Now isn't that jolly...

I've found my stuff of joy not so long ago (not advertising here, but depending on flavor it has only up to 3 g (!)) of sugar per drink)...

It just annoys me and pisses me off how much money is made - in my opinion deliberately - on the suffering of other people...

Most laws by the way end up being blocked by lobbyists - most nutrient scores etc are just "wrong" or better to unspecific... Making exploitation pretty easy.

It's funny how everyone has an opinion on obese people, everybody is pointing fingers and explaining how stupidly easy it is to take off... And at the same time no one gives a damn about shit like that.

That's all folks. Feeling better now.

By the way, I'm doing fine. I lost 7 kg already, though the train wreck of body was pretty pissed the last two weeks as everything hurts.

Another reason why motivational speeches are dumb in videos: Pain isn't fun. :)

My first rant. Which isn't really a rant but it is kind of...

Took a new job supposedly as a software developer. Ends up being CTO position. Now responsible for understanding the code of 6 people in a different country so as to move code dev to the country we're in...(not retaining the 6 after 2.0 release) Been 3 months.. Too much data. Cannot compute. Had to learn too many new things and the fuckers switched the front-end midway from Vue to React. First weeks essentially wasted. Now at the end and I'm supposed to know everything.

Also, I hate Symfony with a passion now. Loved it when it was hidden under Laravel.

!rant
Started my first internship a couple of days ago as a front-end dev.

Not particularly interested in the position, but also I don't really mind it either; not to mention I needed a job for this semester and this was my only option. The place is quite interesting -- they know the basics of what they're doing, but when it comes to more "advanced" features like version control, it's well, nonexistent. We all just send the files to each other over the server drive.

Stuff like that gets pretty frustrating but I'm not really gonna complain. Everyone including the manager is super nice and it's a really laid back atmosphere. Dunno if all front-end development is relatively laid back, but just thought it was interesting.

!rant
I have my 121 in a few days with my new manager and am trying to get a raise either through moving from junior to mid level dev or being given a significant raise , am being paid a tad below the London market rate's lower range for my skill level.

Any advice on how to approach the topic?

Some bits of my background:

I got almost 4 years of exp :
almost 2 working there...
6 months short term contract as a ruby sql dev another company...
1.5 years worked for an abusive joke of a company who took advantage of my naivety since i was fresh out of uni ( did stuff like pressured me to add more features to a pojo system i made for them) barely learned anything there since i was the only IT person there developing solo, the project lasted 1.5 years and was a total mess to finish, so am not too sure of factoring it into my years of exp.

My Qualifications are:
bsc in information systems
Msc in enterprise sw engineering

My "new" Manager is seeking to retire real soon.

The company isn't doing too well but we just landed 2 big customers who are buying the product my team is working on

I Am one of two last devs on my team and we are barely holding on with the load, can't afford the time to train a newbie to join us

my department is soon to be sold (soon according to what mgr says). They have been saying so for 10 months now.

Last year , since the acquisition Is taking so long and funds were running out We were hit by a wave of redundancies which slashed our workforce in august/ july, told we could last till march this year on our funds . Even senior staff were on a reduced work week...but since we Got new customers then money should be coming in again , this should mean thats no longer the case. Even the senior staff have returned to 5 day work weeks.

Am being given only JavaScript work to do despite being hired as a junior java dev, my more senior colleagues dont wanna even touch js with a long stick

Spoke to 3 recruiters , said they got open roles in the junior- mid level range that pay the proper market range if am interested to put my cv through.
Thats like 25% more than I currently make.

Am a bit scared to jump into a mid level position in another company because i lack a bit confidence in my core java skills.
although a senior dev who used to be on my team thinks i can do it.
i recon i can take on the responsibilities of a mid level dev in me existing company since am pretty familiar with the products

I dont get to work with senior devs and learn from them since we are so stretched thin, hence am not really getting the chance to grow my skills

I know i have gaps in my knowledge and skills having not been able work in java for a while hasn't allowed me to fix that too well. I badly need to learn stuff like proper unit testing, not the adhoc rubbish we do at the moment, frameworks like spring etc

Since I have been pretty much pushed into being the js guy for the large chunks of the project over the last year , its kinda funny am the only guy who has the barest idea how some of the client facing stuff works

The new manager does seem to be a nice guy but he is like a politician, a master bullshitter who kept reassuring all is well and the company is fineeee (just ignore the redundancies as the fly past you)

The deal for thr aquisition seem to have sped up according to rumors
And we heard is a massive company buying us, hence things might pick up again and be better than ever

Any ideas how to approach the 121 with him?

Any advice career wise?
Should i push for a raise ?
promotion to mid?
Leave to find a junior to mid level position?
Tought it out and wait for the take over or company crash while trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge ?

Sorry for the length of this post