We will no longer be accepting contracts which have an internet explorer or edge support requirement.

All of the front end devs are going hysterical and celebrating 😂 🎉🎉

The beginning of my freelancing time. I was so naive. Didn't even used contracts...

This one client wanted a website with 2 specific features until a certain time. It should look nice, but only the features functionality was defined. All seemed reasonable at first.

I delivered 2 weeks before the deadline. The client was furious, as it didn't look like they imagined. They wrote me 8 lengthy emails with very fractioned feedback. It was becoming unreasonable.

But hey, I'm a newbie in this business. I have to make myself a name, I thought.
Oh was I naive....

This whole project went on for 2 more months. The client was unhappy with every change and 2-5 emails a day with new demands were coming in. I was changing things they wanted done 2 days ago, because they changed their mind.

Then they started to get personal. They were insulting me and even my family. My self-confidence dropped to an all-time low.

In the end I just sent them all the code for free and went to therapy.

BTW: this was also my most important experience, as things went up hill from then on. As Yoda once said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

Just got a job offer for a SysAdmin job at CERN! :D

A big fuck you to the italian philosophy of hiring newly graduated students with shitty contracts and a big win for a simple student that wants to learn from the best :)

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

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

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

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

Writing code for a startup without signing a contract first...

*deep breath*

Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.

*deep breath*

Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)

In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.

There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.

Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.

It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.

However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

Tonight I was getting ready to pay my monthly apartment maintenance bill so I Googled my property management company's name because I always forget the url. It's always the first result, but I noticed Google placed a little "This site may be hacked." line of text on their listing.

Seeing that before and knowing what it means, I went into the source for their index page, and to my suspicion, their WordPress installation was hacked with the standard invisible spam links.

I realize this happens to a lot of WordPress blogs, but this is an NYC property management company that is responsible for a lot of buildings and has millions of dollars in contracts. Normally I would inform them, but having dealt with them in the past I don't like them very much, but more importantly, I don't think they'd understand what I was saying because they are so technically inept. They might even think that because I found this, that I had something to do with it.

So devRant, it is up to you. What should I do?

NO. NEVER HAPPENING. For the sake of all the fuckery in the world, I WON'T FUCKING WORK FOR FREE. Not as a learning experience, not for contacts, not for future contracts, not for a fucking blowjob from your wife and not even for a place in heaven. I will be bunkmates with the Devil before I build you your website for free. I feel like strangling a cat with my shoelaces and bashing your brains out with the carcass every damn time your balls swell big enough to ask me to build you a 5 minute website for your well-earning business, you cheap bastard. Take a shovel and dig yourself a hole to sleep in, you piece of biological waste.

There are only two reasons you should use Windows:
1. You are developing for Windows.
2. You cannot live without a game which still has no Linux support.

However, the right thing to do is refuse all contracts on Windows development and quit playing games that have no Linux port.

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Less recruiter and more recruiting company.
Specifially: Robert Half.

t;ldr version:
Robert Half is scammy as hell, and they 'fired' me for quitting when my girlfriend got raped. Really.

------

Robert Half took half of my paychecks for the entire duration of my contracts with them. I didn't know right away because, as a policy, they hide how much the hiring company is paying for you, and they also forbid the company from telling you. (The company pays RHI, RHI pays you). Makes sense why they hide it because it certainly pissed me off.

Long story short, I worked for a php dev shop through them (after telling them to lower their fees or i'd walk), worked there for awhile (while remote moonlighting because why not!), and quit. I quit because my girlfriend at the time had just gotten raped, and with the emotionall fallout from that, there was no way I could focus on two jobs and be there for her. My boss understood and let me leave, though it put him in a bind.

The next day, I got a call from the regional manager of Robert Half. He was a total tool. He demanded to know if I quit, didn't care why I quit, proceeded to "educate" me in the finer points of why that was unprofessional and why i'm unemployable, accused me of lying about idr what, and finally switched into legalese to say "I regret to inform you that you can no longer consider Robert Half as a means of employment." (or something along those lines) and hung up on me. Asshole. I hope various large someones rape him so he has an inkling what it's like to be objectified and thrown away like trash.

Guy was an asshole; probably still is.
RHI was awful and scammy; probably still is, too.
Wasn't really a fan of the job either.

So at the end of it, I wasn't out anything but some patience and serenity (a lot of serenity). I kept the first (remote) job, was there for my girlfriend, and helped her through everything.

But yeah, Robert Half?
They can fucking go to hell.

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

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

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

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

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

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

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

(tl:dr at the bottom)
context:
my partner programming skills are pretty basic and he does not work in software development. instead he is in the largest (and only) electricity company here.
history:
one day his boss ask him "hey, do you know how to use google maps?"
Partner: "yeah, what do u need?"
His boss: "great! please make 10,000 routes with these coordinates, i need them for tomorrow"
Partner: "WTF!" ,grab his phone and call me, "(explains me te situation) dude, can you make like a script or something?"
Me: "Sure, but we'll need a loooot of coffee"
We spent 18 hours developing a routes generator with java-fx, mysql and JS.
Next day we went to deliver those routes and to "show" the system. They told us that after searching for 6-7 months, they wasnt able to find such a solution as ours.
Next day, I took a plane to this company HQ (My partner was food-sick, so i had to be there by my own), had a meeting with the TOP Bosses (on of them arrived in a Helicopter, lots of body-guards) and after a 3-4 hours, just like that, we had our first Big Contract with a huge ass company.

tl;dr:
we ended making an 8 months national project with the biggest and only electricity company with an 18hrs-developed system.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

Initially:
Me: "I'm becoming a web developer"
Extended Family: "You're going to ruin your life"

2 Years Later:
Me: "I just signed contracts with companies X Y and Z"
Extended Family: "Working without a degree will get you nowhere"
Dad: "he's attending X uni and has a y% scholarship"
Extended Family: *no comments*

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

23:04 Client: We need these changes pushed to production before morning.
06:22 Staff: Changes pushed to prod.

<Tells story to manager>
Manager: Sum up the time you've worked on it and double it.

This isn't a special thing, we however have a policy stated in our contracts that all changes must be scheduled with a minimum of 24h before the time they're needed.

I was working on a website for a client and he wanted an illegal (breaking TOS) functionality and I refused to implement that part so he paid me $800 less than what he owed me. Unfortunately there was no real contract besides some emails detailing the specs and payment, and if I pushed it any further he would've charged back the money he already paid me. Basically I'm screwed :/

I guess now I know how important it is to get those contracts and detailed specs written out from the very beginning.

Best current career choice:
Quit to become a Freelancer.

OH BOY did I sleep bad directly after that decision - no contracts, no sales running.

Oh BOY do I now 2 days later sleep like a dam relaxed, happy baby :) - My network for the win!

The days before handing in my resignation I really looked forward to just leaving, but the actual task again was scary. Why? Cause until then future for me was bound to income, job=stable income = happy me, happy wife, happy child.

Now? Just 4 days later, If all goes to plan I'm already overbooked twice. Truth told!: Couldn't have done it without the network that I built over the years where I was employed. Let's see how this works out :)

I stand up with a huge smile each morning: Just a great feeling!

A few months ago, I decided to let go some old clients with bad behavior and/or bad projects, since I noticed this was affecting my mental health (lowering my self esteem, make me feel depressed, anxious, etc).

I was exhausted of doing miracles in projects without git, build files, staging enviroments (yes... you can imagine), and receive all sort of curses when sudenly something stopped to work.

I set some requirements to work with any new project/client: 1) project needs to be under version control, 2) it must have staging enviroment, 3) I must work with build files.

As I still have contracts running, I'm communicating this to clients as soon as I finish my obligations.

Today, one of these clients told me they are leaving to work with another developer.

Reason: They said my new requirements are unreasonable and they prefer doing the old way.

In our morning stand up, dev was bragging about how much code he was refactoring (like over-the-top bragging) and how much the changes will improve readability (WTF does that mean?), performance, blah blah blah. Boss was very impressed, I wasn't. This morning I looked at the change history and yes, he spent nearly two solid days changing code. What code? A service that is over 10 years old, hasn't been used in over 5, mostly auto-generated code (various data contracts from third party systems). He "re-wrote" the auto-generated code, "fixed" various IDisposable implementations and other complete wastes of time. How –bleep-ing needy are people for praise and how –bleep-ing stupid are people for believing such bull-bleep? I think I should get a t-shirt made with a picture of a BS-Meter and when he starts talking, “Wait a sec, I gotta change my shirt. OK…you were saying?”

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

2008: Back in the days when Vodafone used emojis for their contracts. Cool.

Where I work we develop drivers and command-line software for embedded systems. The contracts we have with our customers tend to be in the £100k-£500k range and are usually completed in 6 - 9 months; our team is made up of 20 developers. You would think that it would be worthwhile investing in the department. But no, instead we have to deal with >10 year old build servers on their last legs; limited numbers of development boards with wires soldered on so that we can keep up with new board revisions; no room for R&D into new products; and to top it all off, not one of the executives has a laptop on par with the placement students in the next department. It's like the company is trying to kill the department, we've seen our staffing dwindle with no new graduate (or higher) positions being made available in the last 3 years while we've lost at least 5 people to other places. I just don't get it!

So the story start like this, 6 months ago i left my job in a big company for an oportunitiy to work on a new one without all the bureocracy and shit and with better benefits , the first months were wonderful we were using a nice stack of technologies and the team that was assembled was a nice one with smart and hard working people with a few exceptions, but overall very good. One day out of the blue the manager started to presure us to release a project that was on time and wanted us to make extra hours and work on saturdays, sadly we blindly did because we cared for what we were creating, fast forwarding to yesterday, the whole team was called to a meeting and our contracts were terminated without previous advice because the company could not afford to pay us for more time and blahblahblah..., soo here i'm feeling used and sad but with renowed feelings about starting my own business!!

I got unemployed 6 months ago. I tried to find work for about a month but the answer was always "we call you back when a position is available" and "let me ask the team if they think you are good". So far no one responded, then I got tired of that.
The next month I became self-employed so i can make contracts and work for more smaller projects. Not too much time later I met a company that offered me a long time contract for them. I don't hesitated to accept it.
Luckily since then I have this company and a few smaller jobs.
It was a steep change in my life but was worth it.

Applying to more internships today and found this:

Position: full stack blockchain engineer intern

Basic qualifications:
- 7+ years of experience in software development
- 2+ years experience developing smart contracts
- 5+ years professional experience in Java, Go, Node.js

Wtf is this? What intern has 5+ years of professional software development?

Why even label the posting as an intern when u want someone with years of experience?

Stupid fucking shit I swear

In PHP (yes, it's a language I... don't hate) I've always hated exceptions. They're like GOTO, in an OOP world with interfaces and contracts, try/catch is really odd as it breaks a promise about returning with a typed value.

But you can now do this in PHP8, which comes pretty close to Maybe/Either monads (Option, Result whatever it's called in other languages):

function getUser(): User | UserNotFound

PHP8 unions don't come with the same strong guarantees as in other languages but *pets PHP gently on the head* you did well, my boy.

Now I would really love it if PHP9 could do:

function getUsers(): Collection<User>

Type Tree<T> = Null | Node<T>;
function 🎄(): Tree<Branch<Ornament|Light|null>>

So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)

He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol

So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.

What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst

well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol

btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear..

Customer: can you set my forgotten password to "1"?

Me: there's a six signs limit in your domain. You have to use upper case letters, lower case letters and at least one symbol

Customer: "123Aa+"?

We have to set such passwords to avoid customers cancelling contracts....

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

We're digital plumbers.

90% of this job is figuring out what thing to connect to what thing and then figuring out how to connect them.

Writing the code that goes in-between both ends of the pipe is easy if not trivial 90% of the time.

Meaningful change in this industry is centered around endpoints: contracts, deployments, etc. Nobody needs yet another way to organize and import their leftpad().

At one of my former jobs, we devs had to do all sorts of non-dev work, such as writing quotes and even contracts!

The CEO of that company had this naughty habit to contact devs directly without delegating through the CIO. Sure, if it's really urgent like when some system is down because of a bug, go ahead and disturb a dev. But interrupting coders to write some freaking quote? Come on!...

Once, that CEO asked me to stop everything I was doing to write a quote to a customer ASAP, as this was really urgent.

I spent several hours writing that quote. It had to be done right as any specifications in our quotes were used in our agreeements and were referred to in the case of any dispute. So not only were we devs and salesmen in the same time; we also needed to be lawyers.

When I was done and delivered the quote to the CEO, he told me he had no intention to take on that customer in the first place. Instead, he wrote a polite we-are-not-interested e-mail to the customer and cc:d it to me just so that I could read for myself how very sleek a businessman he was.

Me: why did I have to write that quote when you knew all along that you were not going to use it anyway?
Him: It's for your own personal development.

Another naughty habit of that same CEO is that he made "jokes" and remarks that I found inappropriate, such as "You walk like a drunken sailor".

Later, he decided to discontinue our team/product because "it isn't proftable". Well, what do you expect when devs are forced to waste half day completing pointless tasks?!

It was for the better anyway, and I was actually relieved when I left the company. I'm still thinking though, that the real reason he sacked me is that I am too honest and not the docile kind of employee that would be ideal for him. I did question some of my tasks, and worst of all: I didn't laugh at his stupid jokes.

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Although today Friday,

It was a very sad day for me, I just got relieved of my only remote dev job, now to unemployed, I have a wife and home to take care in a semi bankrupt country, I need help.

Do you know where I can get good remote contracts?

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

Currently balancing my full time job. A Rails bigass project and certain php contracts.

The rails one is unpaid, and I am doing it on my free time since my "payment" would be a portion of the company and a CTO position once it is done. I am building it with one of my best friends and he got the contract from this one dude he has who is loaded and will be selling this to the dptmnt of education of certain country.

The thing is, we all know how it works with those projects. The CEO had contracted this project to some people. He paid them handsomely and as is the case with certain situations the project was abandonded, the devs took the money and ran. So that is why he decided that instead of paying people like he should he would instead try and see if he could get someone interested. He told my friend to get himself an "American developer" since he was fed up with the devs of said country and that is how I am here now.

But the thing is, he is somewhat desperate to see something and even tho I show advancements on a weekly basis I hate the wordings of his group text messages:
"All right guys. I need to see some advancements, show me what you got now"

Motherfucker. You sit your ass and WAIT for me to want to show you something, but don't demand shit like if you are paying me. As far as I know my priorities lie in my current day job or the other people that ARE paying me.

>i need to see some advancements

Fuck off.

New contract termination clause to be included in all future project contracts: "Contracting client agrees that uttering the phrase 'Your job is whatever I say it is,' or any semanticaly equivalent variant thereof is grounds for immediate contract termination. All work product and IP rights will transfer and assign to contracting client ONLY upon payment in full of contracted payment amount prorated to contract termination date."

!dev

Just sold my car waaayyy under it’s worth just because I don’t have much time left to relocate.

And those fuck faces want me to pay half of THEIR transport costs..

The both of us just signed a fucking contract you morons.
Read the contracts you write before giving them to anyone.

Good for me that I did.

Fucking unfriendly assholes trying to rip people off twice in a row..

They make immigrants look bad just because those guys are fucking idiots..

They didn’t get another penny from me those cock suckers..

And now, a good evening too all of you.

Just8littlebyte out! *mic drop*

Working on photo contest site, no design, no specification. 2 weeks until deadline.

CEO: Deadline is one week earlier, and client wants to have video uploads and automatic facebook share too.
Me: We don't even have a contract and design to work with yet.
CEO: No worries, the contract will be signed by the time you finished the website.

Site done in 1 week, including weekend days and overtime. Production on client's server as asked by CEO.

3 weeks later...

Me: So van you pay the overtime I worked?
CEO: Sorry client not payed and says they don't like the end product. I can't afford to pay you overtime.

2 days later.
CEO: The online department is lossy so you have to work harder in the next month, we have 3 sites to be done.

Me: Do we have the contracts?
CEO: No worries...

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

Not dev related.

I am fucking tired of the house buying process in the England. Honestly it is such shambles that I don't think I have ever encountered anything like this. Nothing is ever predictable, everything and everone works at random timescale and nobody gives a fuck of you as a buyer even if you are paying crazy money. Apparently we are meant to be moving next Monday but contracts haven't been exchanged, my mortgage broker gave incorrect solicitors details to the bank so they are having to redo some paperwork, the buyer of our current place has not responded for last week to confirm the date, the seller we are buying from has been jumping up and down to exchange and here I am with no certainty.

My anxiety and frustration levels are through the roof for last 10 days. I can't wait for it all to be over. I don't think I am ever buying another house unless the process changes. Just needed to vent my frustration somewhere

I really like this book on the basis of the philosophy overall, no this doesn’t solve all problems but it’s a good baseline of “guidelines/rules” to program by. Good metrics or goals to architect and design software projects high and low level projects.

Fight Software Rot
Avoid duplicate code
Write Flexible, dynamic, adaptable code
Not cargo cult programming and programming by coincidence.
Make robust code, contracts/asserts/exceptions
Test, Test, and TEST again and Continue testing.. this is a big one.. not so much meaning TDD.. but just testing in general never stop trying to break your software.. FIND the bugs.. you should want to find your bugs. Even after releasing code the field continue testing.

Received a complaint that the year dropdown list isn't far enough (ends at 2022). They wanted it to go all the way to 2027. My script handles this by getting the current year then add 5 to it and it generates the values in the dropdown list. All I had to do was change from '5' to '10' in the config puppet files. Contractually, any source code changes needs to be documented and informed to the client. I followed suit, documenting how I am going to make the change. This is new as it involves using git to commit the changes and pull it in the server that talks to the git server. This shouldn't take more than a minute to fix.

Submitted and wanted to finish this today. Client decided to wait til next week to complete the code change to fix the complaint. A work that can be done in a minute is now dragged to a week. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Job description: designing and building microservices and API contracts for enterprise use. Deep understanding of api/rest design, AWS, etc.

Interview: in this weird IDE while I stare over you, go through and parse this multi-dimensional primitive array using recursion.

...Wtf does this have to do with the role?

Just my luck.

I was supposed to sign a new contract last week and get paid 2x more than now + get a lot of benefits. The day before, obviously, they just HAD to stop signing contracts with new people because of COVID.

Also my engineers exam is postponed indefinitely. They are thinking about making it online, which would be awesome, but again - it was supposed to be last week. A lot of stress and time wasted.

I know, those problems are really miniscule when compared to other, but it still is annoying as fuck.

Thank for listening to my Ted talk.

Best: 100% of my contracts have resulted in extensions and permanent roles offered, after worrying I wasn't good enough to try contracting.

Worst: Used the wrong set of monitoring when doing my first deployment at a contract and thought what I had deployed was working fine. It wasn't. For 24 hours. Cost the company a lot of money. (why did they offer me an extension again?)

You realize that the ERP software you use at your company is shit when:
- there is no service-side ERP backend handling requests
- the whole permission system is client-side (!)
- every client directly connects to the MSSQL database with a supervisor user (stored in plain text in a local config file)
- the MSSQL database contains tables with:
- typos
- names like "contract" but then also "contracts"
- mixed german and english words
- the multiple-business-unit implementation uses 4 columns named "Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, Layer 4" in EACH table
- you find out that the ERP software is created with a fucking "software creation tool"
- there is no API, so you have to program one yourself to use for services

Yet, they charge us shit ton of money for their broken ass software.

1. Get some money with little contracts got by my school
2. Pay fucking good holidays with my gf
3. Finish my big school project that will validate almost two years
4. Launch my startup

Oh, well. Work on bad projects with bad clients/managers, for the sake of the money, it's a life sucker. At first I thought it was not a big deal. I was collaborating to someone's elses business and doing the best work I could.

I was tired, depressed, sleepless, having allergic rhitinis every two weeks, frustrated without any opportunity to grow intellectually, fearing clients calls and emails, and... in denial.

Since last year, I decided to stop working on some kind of project and for some kind of people. As the remaining contracts and projects were being wrapped up, I started to feel relieved, despite of all anxienty of let go long term clients and see income lowering.

Then I started to use my free time and savings to futher my education, send cvs and work on side projects. It's not an easy transition. I'll still need to keep working on not-so-good projects to pay the bills, however, I've been selecting more.

Slowly I'm recovering my life, health and enthusiasm for cs again.
I'm learning to not give a fuck and it really helps.

=O hi there, new in here, coding smart contracts and shits

still unemployed,

closing peanut freelance contracts here and there,

totally burnt out.

God save my soul.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

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 :)

Ok people. I got a contract last year with a company, and I was their support for one year, which ended back in February. They still email me for all their problems. I don't know why. They emailed me today, for Christ's sake, on the Saturday of Easter, to tell me that their 3rd party software can't send them emails because the mailserver has that IP on greylist asking me to look into it and find a solution. AS IF I CARE! I'm with my family, taking a break for two days damn it. Panic attack came, my heartbeat rate problem kicked in and now I can't calm down. I'm trying to get into the "I don't give a fuck" mood but I can't, I'm too responsible for that, in the worst dramatic way (the world is gonna end etc).

Piece of advice:
Be very clear next time you come to terms with another company, be precise and don't let them have it their way.

Being able to make THE game I've wanted to make for 4 years. I have a team of people who wants to participate (dev, artist, etc) and I even started building my engine from scratch.

But most importantly, my dream for this game is to have it published on the Nintendo Switch (also PC, OSX and Linux of course)

But right now I must focus on finishing my degree and doing contracts to make enough money to hopefully work full time on my game.

I'll see you in 2 years Albi

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

Best boss I've had was when I was collecting recycling materials as a truck driver.
The company mostly employs unliterated people that can't get a job anywhere else, so It has lots of dumb, jealous people who made his life miserable.
Still, he's so good with people that he could filter it all out and we had a great relationship even in such a poisonous environment.
He was really sad when he told me I wouldn't have my contract renewed. He allowed me to work from 5 am to 2 pm so I could finish my 12grade class (high school) at night and I fell asleep one day. The company does not renew contracts if you miss even one day. When people talked bad about each other he would just nod and do nothing or descalate the situations.

Well, I'm off to help my dad again :( he's the one who gave me the taste for DIY, but fuck his projects take so much time. Were repainting a motorhome :D

Contracting:

Con - It can be hella stressful and last minute, especially when contracts and agencies are a real pain.

Con - finding out you’re probably gonna need to go to site at like 11PM the day before, and train tickets are a fucking scam

Pro - Sitting in first class with a complimentary croissant and orange juice isn’t so bad.

Pro - Being able to finally travel to an Apple Store to get that MacBook you’ve been eying for a while because now you actually have to travel. 👀

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

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

Well thus far is a bunch of rails small jobs. Funny enough this week I managed to get a bunch of php contracts "with the possibility to extend for larger contracts"

I am not really interested in long term contracts, but being that most developers that I see hired for small php jobs are not used to the patterns of development used for modern php and that i bring in a lot of my own stuff for it I know that I will be maintaining them for the long run.

So good stuff. Lets see how the week pans out. Getting really excited. Even tho I see more horrors in php than even on JS or ASP.NET or Java I still really love all languages that I have used. And normally I work like a mechanic. In which I bill by the hour(i am an expensice hooker...I mean developer) and finish everything as fast as possible to let me lazy around the house. So for example, if something takes 10 hours I will do it i 5 or less and charge all 10 hours, or I would charge per build(custom login and registration that kind of deal) and yeah. Pretty basic.

Good shit man!

You know what's fun? When your client insists you use an agile process with a delivery at the end of each sprint, then proceeds to bitch at each release at the features that weren't implemented yet. The thing isn't even slated to be done until 4Q 2018 and is on schedule/early. Glad I am not on that team . . . yet.

wrote my first smart contract today!

OK...so not to long ago some guy I know from my old school contacted me regarding a start-up he was planing on doing...first he wanted me to work for free (which, in retrospect should've been the first warning sign) and then offered me shares of his non-existing company as payment. I didn't want that so I told him that I'll only work for real money. After some discussions he agreed (tho for less money than I demanded) and I started investing more time into the project (talking to him and his partner about what they expect, looking into some libraries and evaluating whether they can be used in the project or not...stuff like that). Some weeks later (some days before I would sign the contract) he calls me and tells me that he had found someone else to do it who would accept shares as payment...fuck that fucking self-righteous prick and his fucking start-up...the idea was stupid anyways...

I accidentally deleted a folder containing contracts and files worth millions.

There's no backup. 😭😭😭. EaseUS didn't help with the entire recovery.

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J K. I put a recurring backup every week 😌. Hadn't made any changes in the past week. 😂.

I left my previous job without notice period (didnt need to coz i hadnt signed any contracts with them yet and have not been there for more that 3 months) so they got pissed and decided to not pay me my monthly salary.

Today (4 months later) they have the nerve to contact me to check if I want to go back to them. :)

hackathons are just 24 hour contracts where you test some company’s api in exchange for free redbull

That this one component being object orientated is necessary and good design.
We have uh interfaces, theyre contracts.

Spoiler: it wasn't, I could have written it in half the code and half the time. But no, we gotta have those patterns, can't miss on dependency injection!

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.

Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.

Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.

We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.

The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.

So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.

Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.

Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.

Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.

Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.

The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>—

This happened many years ago.

First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.

They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.

The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.

That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.

About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).

However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.

I was working in the field for about 6 years, and had my bachelors (working on masters). I went to Robert Half Technology looking for work, and the recruiter there said I didn't have enough experience (are you kidding me?) and that she couldn't market me.

I went to another office location 4 years later, and they hired me on full time (very unorthodox) as a consultant because 'I was a purple squirrel guru". (what ever that means)

The original recruiter at the other location now is forced to find positions and contracts for me without 1 ounce of say in the matter. If I am waiting on another contract, I get paid, it's like vacation. Makes it so much sweeter

Oh man. When I look for a job after I'm done with school, I need to watch out for those "pay-per-line" bullshit contracts. More lines? Everyone can do that, but it will cause inefficiency just for the money. I could make a fucking Python Hello World program have 100 needed lines if I wanted to, but why would I? More lines = more typing ≠ more work.

I have been a professional Dev for about a year for a cyber security startup. Unfortunately, startup died do to finance mismanagement. My lead Dev said that he wanted to start a co-op contract business and since we all work great together than we should stick around. So we tried to obtain contracts and it is going much slower than imagine. I am going on my second month of no work or contract work. I'm working on my own site to do some freelance work on the side for myself offering ever, marketing and ERP software services. That is the goal for side hustle. However, for the main hustle well I'm stressed now of being home and we'll meetings not turning into money. I actually want to call it quits and do my own thing and look for normal gig. It just feels rough as he has been my mentor and offered me my first software gig. I don't feel like I own anyone anything I'm regards money or time. However, I do feel bad of I take off it will hurt them from being able to handle larger contract if they do get one.

Note: I'm pulling from my savings

Thoughts??

Although im starting a job in 2 weeks, i feel depressed already. I know what awaits me and I'll know even more what is yet to come. It's going to be hell. If it was a huge amount of money like 5-6k i would be less depressed. It would solve lots of problems. But its nowhere close to that

Tomorrow morning i have to go and sign the nda and other contracts. I really dont want to. This is not what i had planned. I planned to finish my project by the end of this year asap. Now i have to speedrun and finish the whole project ASAP before i officially start this job

Although im starting a job, i feel like a failure even more than not having a job. How is this possible and why is that? Why do i feel so bad to start working a job?

Knowing already that ill sign a 3 month contract, and knowing that I'll earn exactly $3900 in the next 3 months, is fucking pathetic in this economy

How do you deal with anti-competitive clauses in contracts with your employer?
I have found them to be unavoidable here in the field of IT/CS related fields, and I don't want that to affect my future career as much.

My current strategy is to gain more of other skills than just in software development, so I can fall back on those skills for a different field (e.g. DevOps, sysadmin, ...) instead of being unemployed for a year because I didn't like my workplace anymore.

The only other way I can think of would be to open my own company, but I'm not going to be ready to do that right after school.

Any other thoughts?

I hate UpWork and Freelancer.com fees and policies about the privacy (or lack) for your projects. But I grudgingly admit they offer protections against fraud. If you're a freelancer, or if you employ freelancers, and do so without the fraud protections of these types of services, how do you guard against being taken advantage of by clients or freelancers? I mean, anyone can write and sign contracts but in the end they're just paper promises not worth anything if the people you're working with or for are "dogs on the Internet" who can simply disappear.

BPOS client sub contracts a website and wants a WordPress one. Creates a design based on a theme.
This particular theme has a demo page.
And when running it through pagespeed insights returns a score Of 29.
Pingdom score of grade D.

Halfway through "development" we get a complaint from BPOS that the site is returning a score of 49 and a Pingdom score of grade B.

Considering how bad the theme is and how optimized we got. I believe that this was a miracle.
The things we do to make a living.

@linuxxx I'm about to found a start-up.

In fact me and my buddy with some freelancing contracts. And we are in need of a dedicated server.

Our plan is to host the clients inside docket container.

Technology would be dotnet core and either react/angular/Vue.js, if that matters.

The host will run on arch, because I feel in love with it! 😍

Do you have any suggestions for a provider for us?

Budget between 100-125€
Location: Germany.

Thanks in advance!

My old boss who somehow has gotten his small team of 4 PHP development contracts with Vodafone and Tesco etc. No QA, no tests, no frameworks allowed.

Sets random deadlines and used to suddenly drop demos on me for projects I'd just started and he had no idea of the state of them. Needless to say one project I was so rushed with no idea what I was actually making (for real) that I got sacked.

PC setup upgrade

I'm making baby steps, at least I can boast of a very standard PC and write code in peace and use all that screen real estate to my advantage

looking back at two years ago when I was crying and begging my parents for just a core 2 duo laptop that I could learn programming with,

now I almost have all that is needed and an even stronger drive to push my limits and become a better programmer

yes, the kind of PC makes a lot of difference when writing code.

I'm still unemployed and relying on small side contracts but it's still a big step and a consolation for me when I consider the crap I have been through for years

I'm not stopping, higher we go

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

I have 15k in unpaid invoices. 5k of which is over a year old. Everyone has contracts. Considering getting a job and just giving up the biz.

I found some billing information in a sharepoint folder for a contract I am on. I make 3.25% of the amount the customer pays and my boss makes 28%. No way does she work that much harder than we do on any of our contracts. There are several people that make way more than I do who send emails and manage jira. The core of the business is building software yet developers get paid less than email jockeys.

I can see that we only have 67 employees and 6 developers. The rest are contractors. I'm tempted to share this with the other 5 full time developers but I may bring the company down because contractually the company has to have a regular full-time developer assigned to each contract's SoW even if they aren't full time allocated. What should I do? I'm on at least five different SoWs.

Introduced software that created failures to a product line and then let it sit for a week while contracts got argued.

Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.

A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.

In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.

These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.

The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.

Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.

When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.

After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.

This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it.

Finished my contracting project I’ve been working on for the last 2 months. They said that they might have more after the new year. I get two weeks off! Contracting is great until you don’t have any contracts… or they pay you a month late… or they don’t tell you what to do and expect you to do it…

I'm most excited about Smart Contracts & Distributed Applications.

In early January I started learning Solidity thinking it would be super difficult but was pleasantly surprised when I'd completed my first DApp in a couple days. Two months on and I've finished 3 major projects and launched my own Udemy course.

I'm not a big follower of Crypto Currencies at all and haven't become financially invested in anything really. I just love the way development works on a blockchain; it is quite interesting and It feels really fresh solving problems using code that will become immutable.

I think some managers would be happier if there was no leave allowance for staff in their contracts. Every single time I apply for a day it's like pulling teeth with this guy. When 3 years of vacation leave backs up and I *have* to take all at once then it's a problem too. Tf is it with some people?

Working with government contracts...

Them: We want an agile environment!
What they mean: Waterfall with bits and pieces of agile.

Them: We want to modernize our code!
What they mean: Oh, that is open source code from Russia or a country we don't like? No, even though it is a norm and a very powerful tool, we can't have communism here.

Them: We have a new task order for you.
What they mean: We won't approve you the money till you have a month left of the task order.

Last internship : I learned modern opengl, libav and ffmpeg. I even was the only dev on some big contracts. Was a fucking cool internship because I learned everything I wanted to. But my manager had really low social skills. So been able to teach myself all of that was a good thing for everybody, but not for him. When the internship was over I got the worst mark of my promotion for the business with for comment that I didn't enough ask for help Oo wtf dude. Still get the best final markof the promotion and the only one who didn't work on web technologies :p but fuck you should have tell me sooner man...

Training in NodeJS for 3 years so my first contracts ask me to do Reactjs, fire me and then got hired only return to WordPress and Drupal which I havent touched since 2016.

Guess I'm back at PHP and working crazy hours fixing legacy code.

This time I think I'll master it because I lost my job last year, got sick, move back with my parents and have bills to pay.

I'm still sick but I'll keep pushing...

everyone glorifies ethereum and its smart contracts, but the actual build tools and overall development environment around it sucks balls.

when testing a contract locally with truffle develop and metamask, you have to reinstall metamask after every transaction because it gets out of sync with your local chain... people are seriously okay with working with this shit?

I could write a book on this (and I am) but long story short: contracts people that have no tech know how, don't get tech inputs, then get mad and convince managers it's all the tech people's fault when the contract bombs.

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

I have always had android phones but after 18 month into 2 year contracts the batteries always become crap and last about 18 hours. Is this just an android thing or does it happen to iPhones as well?

I was thinking of going on the iPhone upgrade program to get a new phone each year and just getting a simple only deal.

Any advice welcome!

RANT!

4 months ago I asked my company do we get new contracts?
Yes in December they said. In December I asked again. yes in two weeks. Two weeks before the end of the year. contract received. It is worse than previous contract. 20% less pay, overtime not payed. Obligated to do overtime once in a while. And more issues just to name a few

Happy fucking holidays.
Start your year fresh being unemployed yeah!

We had almost finished integration of debit card depositing for our application.
Yesterday, the clients told us they signed a contract with a new provider.
This is after telling us they'd signed the contract with the previous provider, but as it turns out, that's a lie.
So we have to scrap the entirety of the last 8 days work because the new provider is a shareholder in the client's company now.
The new provider doesn't have an SDK for our language, and what they do have is XML.
It's time to parse, I guess.

Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?

Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.

Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.

Before my vacation I’d been chatting with one of our dbas about an etl tool we needed for a customer we’d already signed all the contracts with saying we would provide one for a historical database of old data. They had been looking at one from SAP but in typical fashion a license was worth more than the actual contract.

Anyway long story short on the weekend before I went back to work I rattled together a little python proof of concept using a couple of azure databases and when I went back demo’d it to the pm and dba they loved it and we built on the poc to have a working loader which saved us about £30k by not buying the SAP product and just wrote our own.

memo to myself: do never take government contracts again

Client: I put a signed copy of my contract on my website, like someone told me to do, so that people can click a button, download it and sign it. I'm having the problem of people changing the contract before they send it back to me. Can you fix that?

Me: Yes. Take your contact off of your website.

Client: ok, my next question is: can you make it so that I can use the phone and the internet at the same time? Someone told me that I couldn't. I have cable internet I think. (She was remembering dial-up)

Every topic began with "someone told me ..."

This client is going to be .... interesting.

I work in the Android team in a company whose main product is a consumer facing mobile application. The backend developers around me are always looking to cut corners and do things the fastest and easiest way possible. If they think there might be a dependency to another team they go to extra lengths to avoid it just to save themselves the efforts of communicating and learning things that are beyond their scope of interest. I have to put up such a fight to ensure things are done the right way. Contracts are as optimised as possible.

I once had to fight for half an hour to ensure they processed the response before sending it over to app and left the processing to the end users mobile app. They just wanted to query their database, serialise it and send it over.

For my current project, I have proposed a solution which will not require any app side changes in the near future ever, if we make things generic enough and follow a set contract. The app architects loved this solution, but it was an entire task to convince the backend team. When they finally agreed, they keep hinting at how we should've just done things the easier way to solve just for our current use case because doing it this way is taking time.

Mind you, they are the ones who had set the deadlines anyway. And now they use the excuse of these very same deadlines to try and push out a very sub par solution.

My iOS counterpart is no less. We were given two sprints to finish this task. And he kept fighting me every step of the way to make things the easier way. I feel singled out and I feel like I'm being too pushy and uptight and if things are delayed it'll be my fault and not the because these people are lazy and incompetent.

Our manager doesn't care either. He just wants the feature out as soon as possible. He wouldn't care about the nitty gritties of the solution if it was delivered on time.

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.

Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.

I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.

Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.

The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..

with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire

tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either

P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

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?

Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?

Just had this weird experience:

Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.

Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.

Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.

I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.

Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.

Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.

What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.

To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?

Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?

Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?

You know, I don't mind getting dragged if I deserve it. But it would be nice to have ALL the information I need to make an estimate BEFORE you hang me out to dry.

First I was told that work on this issue could be kicked down the road since we were getting big contracts. The next day the issue was in the sprint.
I tell you I won't be able to get it done with the business critical stuff you said absolutely had to be done that sprint (turns out we had 3 months of leeway even before COVID). You say alright cool. We push it to next sprint. The next day you say we have been pushing that issue too much and we absolutely have to get it done this sprint. At least have it so QA can look at it by Tuesday.
I give a preliminary look to QA cuz I found a bug, but they can test other shit about this fucking issue, but then get shut down fucking again because it isn't code complete.
STOP. MOVING. FUCKING. GOAL POSTS. AND. GASLIGHTING. ME.

And as a bonus, I disagree with the necessity of this work in general. I think it's fucking stupid, unnecessary, and zero value added. It's a management jerkoff issue that is going to piss off all of our users.

How pervasive is underestimating project/sprint work to land contracts and expecting devs to make it work in time?

How often are you expected to work more than 8?

Spend weeks porting everything to Docker and automating deployments so we can be cloud provider agnostic...

Hosting providers all want long term contracts.

7:45 am
get broken by alarm #1, fall asleep

7:50 am
get broken by alarm #2, fall asleep

7:55 am
get broken by alarm #3, fall asleep

8:00 am
get broken by alarm #4, fall asleep

8:10 am
get broken by alarm #5, fall asleep

8:20 am
get broken by alarm #6, fall asleep

8:30 am
get broken by alarm #7, get up

8:35 am
Prepare for work

8:40 am
Go to office job

9:00 am
Slave for $8.125 an hour matrix job

5:10 pm
Come back home, hungry, exhausted

5:50 pm
Finished eating, take a break

6:10 pm
Finished taking a break, time to start working on my side project

8:00 pm
Feeling exhaustion and stunned, as if i got hit by a flashbang grenade

9:00 pm
Exhaustion exponentially increased. Yawning. Eyes barely open. Extreme tiredness. Head movement started producing motion blur. Body just wants to shut down and sleep

10:00 pm
Start losing concentration while coding my side project. Start making stupid beginner bugs that i fail to debug

11:00pm
By this time i am barely functional so i have to go to bed. Sleep and repeat all of this bullshit every day

---

Is....this...the life thats awaiting me for the rest of my life if i dont earn millions asap? If so then i dont want it. I reject this type of life like satan rejects cross. I do not want to be a part of this clownery.

REALISTICALLY getting 2 hours per day of optimized time and energy to work on my project, is not enough. Even 8 hours a day is not enough. I need full time work on my project. Thats how valuable it is.

This job is draining me. I feel like i signed a contract with the devil to drain my soul. Fuck. Seems like all contracts we sign is the same shit as selling our soul for money? WTF think about this bullshit! Celebrities seem to be the smartest then. They sign contracts to perform satan rituals in exchange for MILLIONS of dollars while we sign a contract to work for satan and get paid $8.125 an hour like fucking losers.

I cant believe nobody warned me about this satanic society since i was a little kid

Dear Java, I don't care about your tight rules and patterns; I just want the data.

Do I want some values from some far, hidden-away objects? Oh no, I can't, because I must respect the OO contracts between those objects and interfaces and type safety and blah dee bla.

Can anyone suggest me how I can learn building dapps in fortnight? I went through a lot of medium articles and dapp university but all of it was not enough for me.

I really want to start up a business as sort of a consulting service, or a software contractor...

Does anyone know how to get started in contracting? I see contracts online and they are only like 2-3 month long contracts? How can I get involved with that to get some experience and not have to quit my current job...? Is it possible to do both?

Also it seems like a lot of the ones I see are where you have to go live there during the duration of the contract... Why don't they do any remote contracts...?

I've only worked at one place as a Software Developer, and from my previous post you can tell that I really hate it, but my location is hard to find anything else at all... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Sigh...this is kinda stupid.

I'm getting a new ThinkPad at work after 4 years. At first I was like "oh yeah...a new machine!". But they are replacing my quad core T540p with a dual core T560. The T560 CPU has a 30-40% less multi core benchmark score (surprise).

So...dear IT: We are not a small 50ppl company that builds some console apps or small shiny hipster web sites. We are developing fucking large business applications with dozens of projects. Our IDEs and our compiler platform are benefiting from raw CPU power and multiple cores. So can I pls not getting A FUCKING DOWNGRADE AFTER >4 YEARS FFS? THANK YOU!

(before anyone asks: keeping the current notebook is not an option because of warranty/support contracts)

I think it would be nice to see less contracts with those companies which only have in mind barebones training and profit. That kind of relationship between institutions drops the standards and it's expensive af. Those who sells cheap computers and bad software and charges more than ten time their value, those with enough power and influence to bend every single rule...

That kind of companies shapes the industry according to their needs, and will never give a shit about anything but the next semester. They teach you to be just a bit more than a user, they charge you like if they were really teaching science.
You end up full of debt, self taught on the technologies that matters, and accepting jobs on projects as outdated and mediocre as the "educational plans" you paid thousands for. And all that just to get a piece of paper signed by a stranger who doesn't care about you, and enjoyed by a corporation which wouldn't even consider to hire you because they know what they sold to the education department.
Fuck this, today I hate it all.

You know what's terrifying? When you hear a contracts person say "we already know what we're going to bid, so we don't need engineering inputs."

Face it.

Most of the time, in PHP, you're just using Contracts to be cool.

Unless you're coding something like a framework, I don't see the point.

Or I guess, if you're hiring someone to take on your project... but even then, that person might feel restricted for no reason?

I would like to learn how to do a full decentralized application and smart contracts, from the front end (react js) to the back end (c++) on the eos.io platform

Can I use bubble programming platform to write smart contracts on ethereum? I just found out about Bubble

Only dev in the company, couple of on going wordpress projects, just left without notice period. Im going to hell arnt I.

Explanation: I had not yet signed any contracts because the boss “trusted me” i just completed 3 months (standard probation period in other companies) but just got a job offer with triple the salary but recruiters seemed in a rush and i figured i might lose my shot if i told them to wait. Keep in mind in my country that kind of salary is impossible to get for a 21 yr old dev.

How about "it's not your business to know that as long as they deliver what's necessary"?

That whole tracking and screenshot software movement for remote work is so vile, main reason I work at fixed rates where I just add a percentage of space on top and then do new contracts if they exceed that.

Holy fucking shit bois. This is gonna be a long one.

So, its my last studying year for me. I found a nice apprenticeship in a dev company for which i'll have to make apps and stuff, so, I'll work at the company and at school.

Now it's good innit? Well here's the catch. I have to sign a contract for this. And the CUNT who is filling this shit is retarded enough to fuck up.

This bitch, a 40 yo accountant, surely filled many goddamn contracts before mine, but nooo, this wanker fucked this, the contract was missing important infos and some of them were incorrect, in short, it's not valid, 0/10, will never sign this.

Now here's the fun part, this cunt asked me for my infos, i gave them to him so that he could fill the document : he misinterpreted them, filling the paper with junk.

Today, I heard that he is unhappy of my behaviour towards him, and that I shouldn't insult his work with these accusations, saying that if I gave them more info (for which they didn't ask), there would be no problems.

He then called me, while I was in class, he acted smugly, said I was unclear and that I should gather more info for them, in other terms, "lmao do this yourself cunt"

"Fuck you, you cumstain, if you would've asked me, I would've been able to give you these infos right away, but you didn't, it's your fault for this, you're breaking mah balls yadda yadda"
(Roughly what I said, especially the insults)

I'm now forced to fill the contract myself because this bitch isn't able to google shit for 5 minutes to find everything he needed.

I have had so many problems with people of his kind, that I can't stand them now. Are they like animals? Do they feel my hate for them?

Sorry for dat long post, but fuck this, if the contract isn't filled, signed, and validated before the end of the month, I'm fucked, since i won't be able to sign up for the school.

Does anyone have had any problems like this? Like, a very egocentric cunt that isn't able to do something good because he is too proud to ask, so he prefers doing things his own way?

!rant
Looking for some guidance. I am thinking of doing freelance work on the side, but am a little hesitant when I think about contracts, closing out the projects, and getting paid. I even see it with my company where clients keep asking for little things here and there and it adds up to a lot of extra work and refusal to pay until this out of scope work is done. Do you guys have any tools or other suggestions that can help protect me as the developer in a freelance project?
Also, a good PM tool would be helpful too. I'm used to Trello, but it tends to get cluttered real fast.

I want to hear everyone's opinion!

What do you think of smart contracts?

MindFucked by how to get started with Blockchain/IPFS for storing contracts. Any leads?

How do I get contracts in upwork.com, It seems its way harder to even get response.

Started 2022 with working 2 full time contracts. Might look for 3rd since I'm still not even close to having put in more than 6 hours a day. The goal is to save up for my own apartment in a year. Wish me luck.

I'm starting to learn Solidity, and explore about smart contracts.

Anyone have a nice resource for learning?

Well was my last day at my old school for this contract and I already miss being there...

Fuck 3 week contracts man.

Who has experience with Blockchain - Smart Contracts - Solidity language?

Would love to share resources if anyone is interested.

*learns solidity/smart-contract dev and is excited to start a blockchain revolution and spark new pathways to financial freedom*

realizes none of my friends even know what blockchain is, and don't care. feelsbadman 😢

Which website is good for getting ios app contracts and freelance work?

This team of coders sharing with us how consumer driven contracts using Pact helped them detect client-breaking changes quite early in the cycle.

Then the facepalm moment follows. Suddenly my "boss" takes over and says - "You know what, we do better than this. We use a tool called cucumber and test the interface in every build...."

The presenter: "Oh yeah... You surely are ahead of the curve. You don't need pact. Cucumber it is..."

End of the story.

Hello guys, apparently I'm going to write a thesis about Smart contracts and its benefits for the financial industry. Have you got any keywords I definitely should look into and write about in my thesis ? Just a little community brainstorm here. Would be glad if you could help me a little.

Also, do you think it's possible to fill about 50 pages in 8 week time ? The short time is making me nervous

Agency people, do you offer support contracts, if so, what do charge and more importantly what do your customers get?

Any tips for getting into the freelance game?

I’m a FE dev (React / TS / Next) with a11y certs and 7+ yrs of experience, but am wondering how I can get my first clients freelancing?

I’ve got drafts for contracts and all the legal protection stuff sorted to prevent me getting fucked over in most cases, but am struggling when it comes to getting myself out there and actually grabbing clients.

What tips do you guys, gals and non-binary pals have for someone wanting to break from big-corpa and to go into this new direction?

Any tips on getting contracts? I know this can be “googled” but maybe someone else out there has some interesting tips that don’t show up at the top of the search results. Im a full stack engineer in the US, mostly React, Node, MySQL

1 - Correct me if I’m wrong, but in true Agile, a product owner ought to be able to interact directly with the dev team, and vice versa, in the card/conversation/confirmation process of creating, estimating, and executing the user stories, correct?

2 - If Company “A” contracts with Consultant “A” to have software developed, and then Consultant “A” then contracts with Company “B” who then contracts with Consultant “B” to do the development, who would you define as the Product Owner?

3 - If Company “B” is barring Consultant “B” from talking with Company “A” and Consultant “B”, is Agile even possible?

Short question, is a blockchain without smart contracts worthless?

What does it bring you if you've got one, besides a use like bitcoin ?

Hey guys,

I need some help with reviewing a service agreement contract from a french startup where I am the service provider/freelancer living in my own country in Europe where they will open an office. Ideally a french person who knows about freelancing contracts in France.

You dipshits! Yet again...
- use contract X from team WeJustFuckUp
- WeJustFuckUps tell me I "used the contract with the wrong semantics"
- What the fuck how is that possible!? Explain to the fuck ups that if it's the wrong semantics then it shouldn't be documented. Ask what right semantics is... They do not support their own correct semantics...
Fuck you! Just say you fucked up and come to me with a new contract!

Two weeks pass, new contract breaks half the functionality... And they ask me: "is it a problem? Can't you use it as is?"

Now listen here you pile of elephant dung, you have an unresponsive system with an unscalabe architecture... You have twisted contracts and you come to me to fix them!? I have more to do then to babysit your assess!

I am so tired of your bulshit... You are a bunch of prairie dogs hitting keyboards and call yourself developers!? My dog is a better developer, he at least does not break he's own software and when he takes a massive dump he owns it...

I am this close to making a request of changing your work computers to an abacus! It's all you can handle...

Fuck off! You are waste of resources and your parents should be spanked!!

You know
When I first saw etherum talking about am distributed state machine i thought wow. Not very practical but NEAT. I envisioned being able to make a byte code that could be stored in transactions and run by individual clients in an async function and each step of the resulting execution and the values of managed ram would be stored at intervals so other clients could take over and execute a few more statements and compare what should always be expected results that are identical

A grand incredibly inefficient system however really neato from the theoretical computer nerd standpoint !

Boy was I disappointed lol all it is a basic contracts language but yet they state it could be like a word computer ! How ? I thought maybe if you had enough nodes participating maybe you could store registers and the like in transaction values ? Wouldn’t that be the way ?

Seems like as a word computer they’re stuck somewhere between very simplistic js and something prior to amptron in usability yet they advertised as a world computer
Am i missing something ? I mean you could create something that would translate higher level code into smal numeric statements and then send it additions values but what would it be useful for and how would you actually. Store anything ?

!rant | need help tho

I'm a freelancer and i do local stuff and projects but recently i want to do international projects and works but i don't know where to go and how should i get contracts and stuff. Any idea on where should i start and go for international projects and contracts?

I know it doesn't really exist in one solution, but I need management software to keep track of customers (crm), projects, products, licensing and contracts, and time keeping. Right now we are using MSCRM (ugh), and old homebrew project/time tracker written in Perl spaghetti (double ugh), email (sigh) and handwritten notes (kill me). Now I suddenly find myself with a budget (somewhat) and the authority to actually fix things. Any ideas would be appreciated.