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So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.
I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.
I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.
Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.
Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.
Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.
At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.
Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.12 -
Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?8 -
I really hate this company.
The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.
Fuck him.
And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.
Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.
and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.
Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.
But I digress.
I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.
just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.
'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.15 -
Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.
I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.
The second day after vacation:
Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.
Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.
And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.
So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<
but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!16 -
Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<
I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.
The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.
I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.
After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.
I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/
But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/
But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)
I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.
... six seconds pass ...
... another two seconds pass ...
... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.
asjdlkagjdsk.
> Pic related.
22 -
So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.
I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.
She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.
I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.
Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!
I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”
Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?
A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”
So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.
I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.
But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.
“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.
God I hate people like this.20 -
- be the most productive member in the team and everyone dumps their tasks on you.
- be the laziest person in the team and everyone sees you as a bottleneck.
- be the senior + the laziest person in the team and you can complain about others being a bottleneck and dump your tasks on the most productive member.
fml ( ︶︿︶)_╭∩╮3 -
Having some thoughts as I sit here, trapped in the house by equal parts coronavirus and a layer of smoke drowning out the sun. The smoke is a bit of an annual thing; every year, some irresponsible jerk will go out and put their convenience and enjoyment over everyone else's quality of life.
It's a bit different this year since coronavirus has given people cabin fever. Those same people who lose their minds after weeks of isolation and suffering the indignity of wearing a mask headed out into the wilderness for recreation in record numbers.
The result is record wildfires.
Where I'm at, it's mostly coming from the eastern part of our state. The area is typified by being on the mountain range's dry side, more rural, less densely populated. Towns have burned, people lost their homes, millions of acres of land will likely burn before it's over. It happens every year; people pack up, head out into the wilderness, and cause devastation due to a simple lack of common sense or regard for the consequences of their actions.
On the west side, we see the fallout in the form of days without sunlight and abysmal air quality. We also see it in cost; we will unquestionably and without hesitation contribute to eastern recovery efforts. The western half of the state will cover almost all of the damage in both taxes and recovery aid. Our local ethos demands it.
The mountains form a kind of natural barrier, both cultural and environmental. The fact that few people cross the mountains by choice is symbolic of that divide. Those who enjoy greenery and lakes and thriving vibrant nature prefer the west, as we have them in abundance. People who have a strong appreciation for distance between themselves and other humans prefer the east, as it affords them cheaper land and few urban environments.
Here's to hoping people learn from this in 2021.17 -
So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).5 -
So I was rejected by the management today for promotion to Senior 2 although I have done several major feature developments + infra design and basically end to end ownership.
Reason for no promotion? That's the best fucking part, according to the feedback, the work I performed on the service I created is well-designed,
and the code quality is commendable. However, they pointed out a notable difference in code quality between the micro-service
I built and the rest of the project developed by others. This, apparently, suggests that I lack a strong sense of ownership over the broader product.
First of all, we have super tight deadlines (almost 996), and I burned midnight oil to make sure the service I am in-charge of is designed really well.
Also, how in the flying fuck the other how the inability of others to maintain good code quality elsewhere in the product is being used as evidence against my sense of ownership
and initiative in ensuring high engineering quality for the repository I wasn't even working on
What a delusional management, the entire feedback feels like just an excuse to fuck off, we are not promoting you...
May be instead of doing actual engineering work, I should have just do minimal work and write more design docs / technical artifacts
It is very demoralizing after I worked hard for so many months, product went out really well.. yet when performance review comes, rejected with a petty reason7 -
I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell5 -
I used to blast throught everything accademic in a really short time span. I used to push hard on the gas pedal since my college years, up to my bacheler degree. I was always on schedule with every exam, even graduated top of my class and first amongst my colleagues. But then, I felt the urge to change university, I moved out of my parent's home, in a far away city, and everything simply collapsed. All of the sudden, not only was I struggling with my exams, but, most importantly, I started struggling with telling the truth about it. I constantly felt in debt of my parent's efforts to put me through university, to have given me a chance. This caused a strange feeling in me, it was similar to a weird form of depression, I was unable to...act. To do stuff. To even wanting to do it. I started procrastinating everything. I lived at my parent's expenses in this far away town but all I could do was playing videogames. I somehow managed to get to the point that I only had three exams left plus my thesis, but I did this by avoiding all the real hard exams, somehow cheating myself. I was already two years behind schedule at this point, and willing to quit. I was desperate, I cried a lot, thought about running away fron everything as I fear the disappointment I would have caused by simply telling the whole story.
Thankfully I met my girlfriend who helped me realize all I needed to do was move back to my former university and take it step by step from there onwards. I almost didn't make it...again. But I was able to pull throught, I worked during the day, wrote my master thesis early in the morning and late in the evenings. I gave it all. And I made it.
I graduated last year and got a job in the industry. I don't feel as useless anymore. I still fear and dread what the burnout made me feel. How it almost destroyed all confidence I had in myself.
Tldr; I burned out right after getting my bachelor degree. And I stayed like that for years, up to the point that I ended up being years behind schedule. I was able to recover thanks to my gf but still fear and dread those feelings I had when I burned out. -
So Im still a college student but my worst burnout happened a week before finals this year as a sophomore at DigiPen
On the same week, I had to conduct and submit 10 playtests for my competitive Unity game by Friday, submit said game polished and completed on Sunday, finish and submit my team game project that I've been working on the whole year with 10 other people also on Sunday (which we would discover so many TCR submission issues we ended up finally resubmitting on Thursday the following week).
On top of this I had to write a memory manager for my operating systems class due Thursday, a water retainment assignment involving recursive queues for my Data Structures class due Saturday, and to top it all off that class also had a final Thursday when that memory manager was due :'). I don't know how I managed to get OK sleep.
All stuff was due that week so all game teams could have next week before finals to work on submitting, so some CS teachers also move their finals to before that to theoretically distribute the load (which sucks for people in my major because we're almost a double major for CS and Game Design) However my team wanted to submit early to snatch some bonus points but we ended up having to resubmit late anyways :(. Due to the week of hell we were already burned out when trying fix our resubmission.
I love the school and the people in it but there's a reason why our most heard phrase is "I want to die" and no its not just a millenial thing I swear.
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