As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2020)
-------------------------
We've been at this a few years now, and over the last 6 months we've been working closely with a brand consulting agency, and after numerous developer interviews, surveys and focus groups, we've come to realize "devRant" is simply not capturing the cultural zeitgeist of this new decade. Therefore, we have a bold new brand that will be rolling out over the coming week. devDucks is our bold vision for the future, today. devDucks speaks to a new generation of software engineers who resonate with a more upbeat, optimistic tone when they go to an anonymous web community to swear and lament their current work situation. While we finalize the new logo and other key marketing collateral, we have started a staged roll-out of our new brand styling, including the conversion of all avatars to literal devDucks. We hope this brings more joy to your ranting, as it has to ours. Sincerely, David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus) - devDucks co-founders

I am gonna rage for a bit.
Before I start, know this: I diehard love development, computer science and everythjng surrounding it.

The area comes with a very nice and interesting history and cultural impact. In particular, here as it was in the U.S of A. I love it, I love researching till my eyes beg me to stop and my brain fries. I love reading about history and the silicon knights that madd shit happen through digital wizardry.

And you can only imagine how happy I was when I got my shiny lol B.S in Comp Sci, keep it in my office and errthang.
I
Fucking
Love
My
Field

But. I have noticed something recently. In 2018(obviously before that) this new generation has a knack for making things cringey.

What do I mean by that?

Well, shit like that. Is it necessary? Or what about images(multiple) showing stuff like "double tap for your favorite language!"

Why? Why must we be this way? Why do people find a way to shit all over nice things? Is this shit necessary?

I specially hate pictures of girls showing their legs and right next to them a laptop with some basic af css file --->#codergirl ....fuck off.

Or the trillions of code pictures that are only html or some js framework flavor of the week.

Its just retarded man.

Chinese co-workers visiting in our European office would just loudly fart in the office, no problem.

Then they'd be VERY embarrassed at someone using a toothpick after lunch.

Interesting cultural differences.

Story time!

My exboyfriend used to code in php 5. It’s his favourite programming language, and I hardly teached him how to code in Python.

One day, I said to him: Hey schatz, let’s go to the sex shop ...
He: Oh yeah 😏
Me: ... and buy an elephant thong 😁
He: What?!
Me: Yes, a blue elephant thong for Php

Me laughed

Me: So?
He: No way!
Me: Please!!!!!
He: Ok. I’m working at a cultural events web page. When I got my first client, we’ll go to the sex shop and buy the “php thong”.

Well... I broke up with him before we could go to the sex shop 💔😂😭( for another reasons, not for the php thong, obviously)

Do you have any funny story like this?

Professor in college: We have our fest coming up. We need some volunteers for technical team to build website and android app.

*She says that and looks towards guys. Some guys raise hands saying they were interested.*

She didn't look towards girls even though some girls were raising their hands too.

Then she looked at girls finally....and she said "Oh you girls are interested too? We have cultural and decoration team. You can join that. "

I was triggered to next level.

I stood up and asked "Can't girls be part of technical team?"

She said "oh...yeah sure...." With not much hope that I would get into technical team.

But I ended up passing the screening round and got into technical team. She realised at that time that I knew my shit.....

There was even a time when I was in HODs office and she pointed at me and went "She is my student." trying to take credit for me being so Awesome ;)

LOL!

She was my guide for final year project too. We ended up writing a research paper and won best project award as well.

This was a year back. I have graduated and now I am working....
Just remembered....

Dev from MIT argued about every. Single. Thing. I said. I'm not talking language or cultural or political barrier, I'm talking about just a naturally confrontational person. Maybe it was just his nerves (people do weird shit when they are nervous), but damn if i didnt want to throw him out after "agreeing to disagree" for the 4th time in 10 minutes.

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

Just drew devRant stressball on public canvas. It's on recently popular Minetest server - mtPlace.

A bunch of cultural swag there, mostly libre and 1337, so I thought it would be wonderful to have a piece of dR as well to liven things up. 😁

The other month i went into work, excited to actually get something done. On top of that it was yearly bonus day. Quick check on adp to see the bonus and nothing there. Email my boss and ask whats up. Ten minutes later i am unemployed after two years because of a cultural fit. No warnings, nothing bd said about my work, made all the deadlines. Guess they didnt want to say budget cut. Haven't replaced me yet.

I am so mentally drained from having to deal with the intern who I have to literally spoon-feed every single thing. My previous posts illustrate the situation...

The language and cultural barriers are too much, and I am too afraid to open my mouth because of the sensitive nature of my country's history and I'll get labelled as some horrible person.

I told my manager today that I'll stick it out until end of January (thankfully I am on vacation for most of December and January), but I cannot work with her. She was supposed to move to the data team end of December, but my manager told me if she can't even properly grasp this HTML and CSS stuff, then she will not be able to do the other tasks they have for her.

This was a disaster of an experiment and I'm somewhat traumatised ( I am sure the intern is too) and I never want another intern again, nor do I want to manage people. I never said I want to be a people manager, I just want to quietly code at my desk.

This company sells MBTI psychometric assessments and they damn well know my preference, so I'm seriously annoyed that they threw this horrendous surprise on me and kept ignoring my requests for revisiting this intern's role, because I noticed a long time ago that she was struggling with basic concepts and all they did was make her do Udemy courses.

I told them multiple times that she seriously needs computer literacy training because she will not survive in this industry if she still struggles to understand how files and folders work. Other employers would have fired her a long time ago.

She's just too slow for this job. I feel sorry for her, but I do not have the capacity to do this anymore. I'm tired, it's been a long year.

Having some thoughts as I sit here, trapped in the house by equal parts coronavirus and a layer of smoke drowning out the sun. The smoke is a bit of an annual thing; every year, some irresponsible jerk will go out and put their convenience and enjoyment over everyone else's quality of life.

It's a bit different this year since coronavirus has given people cabin fever. Those same people who lose their minds after weeks of isolation and suffering the indignity of wearing a mask headed out into the wilderness for recreation in record numbers.

The result is record wildfires.

Where I'm at, it's mostly coming from the eastern part of our state. The area is typified by being on the mountain range's dry side, more rural, less densely populated. Towns have burned, people lost their homes, millions of acres of land will likely burn before it's over. It happens every year; people pack up, head out into the wilderness, and cause devastation due to a simple lack of common sense or regard for the consequences of their actions.

On the west side, we see the fallout in the form of days without sunlight and abysmal air quality. We also see it in cost; we will unquestionably and without hesitation contribute to eastern recovery efforts. The western half of the state will cover almost all of the damage in both taxes and recovery aid. Our local ethos demands it.

The mountains form a kind of natural barrier, both cultural and environmental. The fact that few people cross the mountains by choice is symbolic of that divide. Those who enjoy greenery and lakes and thriving vibrant nature prefer the west, as we have them in abundance. People who have a strong appreciation for distance between themselves and other humans prefer the east, as it affords them cheaper land and few urban environments.

Here's to hoping people learn from this in 2021.

Ada Lovelace

Why? For thinking outside of the box and not conforming to cultural standards.. and most of all, cuz she started it all!!

In another news. COVID-19 continues to ravage certain places of the world. Most notably India (for right now)

Is there a mathematical correlation between this and the decrease of scam calls asking about your social, vehicle warranties, IRS frauds etc?

A friend mentioned that he has not gotten scam calls in a while now, I noticed this as well. I would normally have vendors contact me daily, vendors with shitty practices and poor sounding accents that insist on them having names such as "Joe" or "Steve". This sucks for India since I believe it is a country with absolutely beautiful cultural heritage and good people. But man, the decrease in scam calls from there is outstanding now.

It's maybe a cultural or language thing (or perhaps a generation thing!), but I've read some rants today where there has been a suggestion to shoot/kill yourself if you're guilty of some inefficient process or bad practice.

At the risk of over-reacting or coming across as humourless or stiff, it's not something I would ever say to anyone - light-hearted or otherwise.

Well today I found out that is perfectly fine to not communicate or look at your phone and be unresponsive while pair programming. They can't even write a single line of code on their own. I'm having to dictate them things by character. How can this be seen as a cultural difference. How the hell are they still employed and the most important question. Why do I need to accomodate to them and find ways to motivate them?
They should be doing what they are paid to do.

Today I had what might have been my worst job interview to date. It had many different technical, cultural, and business red flags. One that really stuck out to me was when I asked my interviewer why he loves his job, he went on about how great the benefits and events are. Not a single word about the work he does or his teammates. A younger me would have seen this as an opportunity to put in some hard work and contribute to something great. Older me knows to avoid this dumpster fire like the goddamn plague.

Not exactly a co-worker, but one of the devs from the client's team spent a few months working in our office next to us. He would always take a nap at lunch time and snore loudly, and eat an apple afterwards and it seemed to be impossible for him to chew with his mouth closed.

Whenever he had a cold and his nose got blocked he would still force himself to breathe through his nose, so it sounded something like a mix of darth vader and someone drowning.

He also lacked any notion of personal space, and would always sneak behind us to ask questions and then put his laptop right on top of our keyboards or in front of our screens and start talking while we still had headphones on.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

You're all fucking idiots with no thoughts of your own. No one gave a shit when Drupal and Django made the master/slave change 4 years ago because the idea of the "regressive left" wasn't the cultural enemy of the zeitgeist.

Think for your fucking selves instead of being so brain-dead and reactionary to something that doesn't even affect you.

Fucking neo-reactionary bullshit, that's what it is. You people don't care, you just want an excuse to rant at "teh SJWs".

Fuck.

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

You know what I god dam hate.

The likes of Microsoft, twitter and Github trying to change the English language and the definition of words based on your bad history.

How about, instead of banning words like Master branch and server slaves. You instead hand the language back to the English people and fix the spelling mistakes in all modern day programming languages!!!!

Talk about cultural appropriation!!

The cultural fit round. The very first round. Got rejected multiple interviews because of failing this round

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

Watching all the StarWars for the first time (to fill in the gaps in my cultural knowledge).

I think Yoda may have had some syncronization issues -- some race conditions in his speech I noticed have.

Ok so we have 2 useless remote contractors in our team who got hired as seniors but actually are juniors. They take weeks to deliver most basic things and never ask for help or offer help for others. They take days to fix most basic comments after review.

Today our teamlead in a call said that it's a cultural difference, these guys dont ask for help because they are very independent.

MOTHERFUCKER, I WOULD BET MY SALARY THAT THESE IDIOTS DONT WORK EVEN 10 HOURS A WEEK.

I was doing more than them when I was a mere junior.

I don't think the Internet became toxic because of anonymity like all those people claimed post-90s

I think it became toxic because normal people with their real life cultures found it and brought their real life cultural norms onto it

I've been thinking why are video games communities so much more holistic than other types of communities
the last few years this is becoming less and less the case, however
and now even games suck.

games now, instead of their old cultures, are becoming derivative plain cultures
everything has to be easy, meaningless, shallow
everybody has to follow the meta or people rage at you with their entitlements to your behaviour
it's exactly like real life!

mystery solved

Saw a counting variable in code. It was a necessary counting variable, so that is not what this is about.

However, this is a US based company that has a somewhat PC (no cursing) and professional cultural facade.

This variable was called "cnt". How the hell did that one not get caught in peer review? I have gotten dinged for having "possibly offensive" variable names (think Point5Hit though I have never written that as a variable name). It was funny. But I have changed it because that's just lazy.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Can anyone tell me what’s that “cultural appropriation” bullshit is all about? What does it mean to appropriate some foreign culture?

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

O Friends, It Is Great To Be Writing To You Again. Let Me Share With You A Most Amazing A Tale! I Have Spent Some Time Now In CapitalizedCamelCaseLand. It Is A Glorious Land, Where All Written Word, Language, and Culture Is Governed By The Almighty CapitalizedCamelCase. The People Are Productive And Extremely WellTyped (A Phrase They Charish And Use To Mean General WellBeing).

The Honorable Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Have But Few Fears... And I Shrink To Speak Of Them Or Even Write Them Here, As It Is A Heinous Crime To Even Mention Or Write These Words... But I Must Report, As It Is My Duty... So, Their Fears: The Horrible And Most Repellant lowerCamelCaseJavaScriptianDevils, Or Even Worse, The Grisly And Ghastly snake_case_fiends_of_pythonia!!! O My Friends How It Fears Me To Even Form Such Foreign And Strange Characters And Symbols That Remind The Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Only Of Pain And Suffering!

Many Wars Have Been Fought Upon The Lands Of Both JavaScriptia and Pythonia (The Cultural And Correct Way To Refer To These Harsh Lands In Respectable Company), But To No Avail Or Final Stop To The Fighting. While CapitalizedCamelCaseLand Is Currently In A State Of General Peace And Prosperity, There Is Surely A FlareUp Of Conflict To Occur Against The JavaScriptianDevils Or The PythonianSnakeFiends!

For In DevWorldia (The Name Of This Strange Planet I Report From), There Has Rarely Been A Time Of Peace Lasting For More Than About 5 Minutes, Which The Citizens Of CapitalizedCamelCase Assure Me Is Already A Massive Length Of Time And Achievement To Be Cherished.

Alas, I Beleive In The Coming Days I Must Travel To The FarAway Lands Of JavaScriptia And Pythonia. I Can Only Hope That I Am Also Treated With Kindness And Respect In Those Lands By Attempting To Emulate Their Ways, Just As I Have Here In CaptializedCamelCaseLand. I Hope To Write To You Soon And Wish You Well.

Signed And Sincerely,

Language Traveler FullStackChris

Coding is not the solution to unemployment or gender inequality... This what the MF don't understand.... Until you create a better Sys and population is controlled and there is cultural evaluation. - you MF are just running a circus show.

Every MF want to jump into the bandwagon of cheap CSR - "hey we are empowering people by teaching people how to develop a website , aren't we good peopLE 😊"
Lol like programming is fucking open source, you don't need to teach people, anyone interested can learn it , and they are billion FREE RESOURCES out here for them to learn, so why not just fucking focus on doing something significant than clowning around "become a dev ".
Fuck havard, fuck Google fuck KMPG fuck the fucking dumb Government fuck youth empowerment📌

Dear Managers; we do not appreciate how comfortable you are behind a facade of ignorance. Your inaction is directly responsible for the failures of your team; both technical and cultural. You are why we are unhappy, you are why we stop growing, you are why we do not care, you are why we do not innovate; and most important of all, you are why we leave.

After going through the regular process of talking to HR/Recruitment and passing the casual interview with a team-mate for cultural compatibility, I got the task of grilling a candidate on some technical matters. This being a PHP job, we got to talking about PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations).

As he seemed to take pride in his knowledge of PSRs, I decided to focus more closely on that.

So we got to a recomendation regarding dependency injection containers. Nothing special, and he seemed to know his stuff. At that point, he made a statement that parts of that recommendation were a bit stupid.

Now, I hate to put people in their place, but his statement did not match what that specific PSR stated. So I gently tried to correct him. The candidate, being on fire thus far, pointed out that I should trust him on this, as he clearly knew his stuff.

Again, I didn't like having to do this, but I also did not like him having a misconception about a topic he was, otherwise, really on top of...

So I asked him to trust *me*, as I was one of the writers who contributed to the standard.

The true test here, of course, wasn't if he knew all the minutia of every standard but how he would react to being corrected.

We, as developers, are wrong all the time. Its how we learn and evolve. So being able to accept that is vital.

Sadly, he did not respond too well and sunk into a bit of a sullen silence. At first I though maybe I'd scared him or that he was afraid of having made a gaff but it soon turned out he genuinly did not like being wrong.

Sadly, I had to advise against hiring him.

The earliest high-profile “native ad” I know of happened in 1831, when Alexander Pushkin released “Evgeny Onegin”. This is a very big deal. Russian Empire had huge cultural influence back then, and it was fashionable. Everything coming from it was cool. Sobranie London still has Russian Empire coat of arms as their logo. Also, Pushkin is regarded by many to be the best Russian poet ever, with Evgeny Onegin being his flagship masterpiece.

So, Breguet, the watch company, decided to advertise in this very piece. It went like this (sorry for the lack of rhyme and the overall lameness in my translation, it is hardly possible to translate Russian poetry to English):

Wearing a wide bolivar hat,
Onegin is going to the avenue
He's chilling there until
Breguet that never sleeps
Chimes him that it is time
To go and get something to eat

To put it into a context, it's as if someone bought an ad in Romeo and Juliet.

After years of working at a place where you are as good it gets in terms of domain knowledge, it can be refreshing to work with someone who has way more experience than you.

The previous company I was with wanted to have me as one of their primary engineers, and everyone else who came in would have to learn from me (most of them were low-skilled contractors). This should have been great in theory, but it was actually quite frustrating since I did not relish being the mentor figure while just being two years into my career. Despite it getting to my head at times, I was aware that I still lack a lot of skills, but with no one to teach me, I hardly progressed in terms of growth, even though the leadership treated me well and listened to me.

Took a leap of faith and quit, to join a start-up where I would be the most inexperienced (and the youngest) person. Has been a few months, and I have stumbled and goofed up more times than I like to admit, but taken with the right mindset, it is nice to see how a team of professionals goes about it. It is a learning curve to get back into the mindset of the novice (after more than a year of being the undisputed "go-to" person), and to make effort knowing that you'll fall short in multiple places by the standards here, but at the same time, it's nowhere like the frustration I felt previously when my head was pushing against the shallow ceiling.

Fun part is, the learning is almost not at all about the code, but about how to be a proactive team member and all the things to think through and finalize BEFORE getting down to code. Some of it is bureaucracy, yes, but given the chaotic place I come from, I don't really mind it as long as it only goes as far as what is required.

The most amusing part of it all to me is how I try to be humble and listen to people (everyone's got a lot more experience than me), but I'm often asked to be critical of what others say and poke holes instead of just taking what they say at face value, which has been one of the most challenging things to adapt to for me (for similar organisation cultural reasons mentioned previously)/

!dev

Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).

Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.

I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.

But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.

This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.

That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.

And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.

Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.

Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.

Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.

All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.

Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.

The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.

We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.

Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.

I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.

In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.

Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.

Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!

I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.

it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.

Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.

I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.

But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.

And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.

Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.

When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.

In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.

Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.

Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.

I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.

So I have a friend. One of few who I can freely speak with using my natural language (so that means, narrow down topics to IT, mix some of my native language, mix in lot of english and mixture of our favourite languages terms (don't ask me how it works, but it works brilantly and its actually easier to communicate)). And its true friend, seriously.

But when we meet, 80% of time we spent together, every, single, fucking time we argue (in cultural maner, its more of discussion) about what enviroment and what languages have advantages against others. And it pisses the fucking hell out of me, when he takes his enviroment, takes his problems with exac his enviroment, and applies his favourite solutions to it, and goes on how they are fucking awesome and brilliant, and than I reply, sure in my enviroment if I ever had XYZ problem, I wouldn't say use mongo DB becouse I can do it my way, and it would work well too, but it's not really the way I really should solve XYZ problem, becouse in my enviroment you dont have it in the first place. And he will fucking go on, but at least he understands my solutions and finds various details where HIS solution works better. His solution to his problem vs my solution to non-existant problem.

But that's actually an example of much grander thing that I want to rant about. You see, that's not all that bad, we keep it civil and we somewhat enjoy these discussions even if often times, they are pointless. It's like playing games and shit like that, so it's not the point, I just used the example to make it clear what I mean later down the line.

So, to the actual point. What the living fucking fuck is wrong with people, for living fucks sake they cannot physically, mentaly, virtually or otherwise change mindset and point of view if they are telling YOU what to fucking do, what's better to do, etc.
What the fuck! You have around 0.1% of context that is in my head, and my solution works with most of it and your bearly manages to deal with your given 0.1%, so kindly please for living hell, fuck off telling me what to do, what is better in my fucking situation etc. You don't know most of shit I know about my own situation (dosent apply to people with coma and heavy mental issues, sorry its not 100% universal) that I know, yet you have something in your brain that fucking allows you (dosent tell you "its no-go lol") to try push thru your shit to me like it was your fucking life. It's not.

And to be clear, before someone gets sad becouse I was to broad and generic. If you giving advice you can do it properly. And there are people who legit have mindset "well, if I was you and known what you told me, I would do XYZ", but for what the living fuck reason most of people I know have more mindset of "Do XYZ coz fuck you if you dont, coz dat is my opinion and shit and I dont give a living fuck if it does what you want"

Do you often have meetings with overseas colleagues? Do you notice cultural differences? Do you read up on what kind of business etiquette or anything similar they have there? Or do you just dive right into IT stuff?

I'm working in a company that still use Flash for softs/websites... On the other side, il be working on m'y free time on a cultural app

Hey folks!

! Do not read further or open this rant if you are likely to be offended!

I always wanted to know but had no nice way to ask so I'm just gonna shoot.

Most of you must have worked/be working with foreign people: canadians, french, chinese, etc. How would you describe those people as colleagues [e.g. lazy, stubborn, chatty, etc.]? The goods and the bads would be perfect.

The topic is sensitive. Please be polite but sincere. This question nor its answers are not meant to offend anyone. We all have our cultural differences, we all have been taught different. I'm just wondering what could I or anyone else expect from each foreign teammate.

Every time a new hype thing appeared, I was annoyed, like "kids these days and their tiktoks".

But at some point in time, this pattern of mine changed completely. I don't know how it happened, I don't know when it happened, but now I experience... acute nostalgia?

I miss Elon Musk and his twitter fanbase. I miss tiktok. I feel like a time traveller who went into their past, which is our present, to experience the cultural landmarks once again, because their time here is limited, and tomorrow they will have to go back.

I miss my autism problems and mental health uphill battle. I miss avengers and thanos. I miss metaverse.

Oh, and also... I miss you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'M JUST FUCKING DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

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

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

I've posted about this a little in the past but.. my situation is that I got hired by a company as a developer, it turns out it was a lead dev role and they some how believe that I'm a one man army that's gonna finish a really huge web application started by another dev that left the company (apparently out of frustration from what I'm gathering in code comments and other employees)

All of this needs to be done in four months. I have never written a web application from the ground up and have always been subordinant to more competent developers. The team I with speaks mostly French and I can't help but notice the ever increasing social, communication, and cultural divides, being ostracized by people that I need support from because they don't speak great English has been frustrating to say the least. People have taken a step back in other areas which has me concerned they might be wanting to axe me cause I'm not making enough progress. Helppppppp

Random Saturday night questions: UFOs...are they a real thing or are they just a figment of cultural imagination? If real, from a technology perspective, what do you think is involved? Has anyone here seen one?

I was going to rant today about lack of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in some developers, this rant was based on the interviews I have seen flop over the years.

But then, as I am typing it, people in my office start having this exact conversation. We get together and discuss it and in the end we come to the same conclusion as my rant.

Now it feels like a waste to rant about something on the internet when I got to have a real in-person discussion about it.

It’s like devRant in real life!

——

The outcome of the offline chat...

- Have a cultural policy that is strictly NO ASSHOLES
- Watch for people who are nasty on the internet, especially LinkedIn
- Be careful with people who have a lot of questions for you but answer your questions with “we are in stealth mode” or something similar
- There is no point in wasting your time on these folks in an interview, just politely conclude it as fast as you can and move on

Not a dev question but a cultural question for any of the German devs I’ve seen post here.

My American daughter is living in Germany on an exchange student program. She’s frustrated right now because her host dad and host brother are being really rude and impatient with her over her difficulties with speaking the language. She currently writes it better than she speaks but that and her efforts to keep trying don’t seem to matter to them. This conflict spills over into other social interactions. They constantly berate and make fun of her over everything. The host mom and host sister are nicer and more patient. But they also have to put up with this boorish behavior from the males.

On a train ride home, my daughter was sexually propositioned no less than three times in one hour by three different men. And at festivals she went to where there was lots of drinking, it was even worse.

A German exchange student we once had living with us here in the US regularly broke program rules, slept around, and even downloaded child porn on our network (highly illegal and alarming). My wife was the coordinator for many years to govern the students who came here from many countries and we struggle to think of any but one or two German boys who acted like gentlemen toward ladies.

So is it just a “German guy” thing and commonly accepted in the culture? Or is this type of behavior generally frowned upon and these guys are just in a minority of jerks that we keep having the bad luck of running into?

I know the same question can be and is often asked about American men, too. But I’m more interested in knowing how Germans view Germans who act this way.

!rant(maybe)

So after taking a long weekend and applying to some different companies, doing some cultural fit and technical interviews, I thought to sit down and take a different look at my situation (with the help of my partner, of course, bless her patient soul).

* My work output isn't bad; all things considered, it's the people I work for who are doing a shitty job. If my project fails, I have to remind myself it's not my fault or my team's because we're doing all we can to the best of our abilities. I mean, it's not our fault we're being mismanaged.
* The best way I can effect change is if I am in a position to do so. Instead of looking outside, I should be challenging my way up - and if no opportunities are there, then I have to make them myself.
* This is still a year of uncertainty - starting fresh isn't going to be easy. In contrast, I've already built a rep in my current company - why throw it away because I work for sucky people?

Looking at my previous rants, they were definitely coming from a place of frustration; but as the saying goes, if I'm not part of the solution then I'm part of the problem. I'm gonna see how I can fix that then without clamboring for an escape hatch.

Yes, it was a very insightful Valentine's dinner conversation.

I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.

Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.

I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).

We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.

Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.

Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:

- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.

You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.

Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.

On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.

A Fresher in my company stated he'd like to get into CyberSecurity. I offered him mentorship, however his motivation and drive doesn't really line up with this interest. If I stop reaching out and pushing him, this whole thing would probably just die silently. Or is there a cultural gap between USA and India that I am missing?

In Russia, battle rap is huge.

The most viewed battle rap video of all time is Russian "Oxxxymiron vs Slava KPSS" with over 46 million views and one million likes.

As it usually happens in rap, initially the Russian battles was nothing but dick jokes and yo mama puns delivered aggressively, but as the new, intelligent rap culture was brought to life by Oxford graduate Oxxxymiron, Babangida and others, rappers started to see battle rap as a way to express their own ideas and picture of the world.

Today, if you don't know what was the philosophy of Kant and Hegel all about, who is Slavoj Zizek and if you didn't even read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", they won't call you a retarded loser – they just won't talk to you.

In Russian you can put the words into sentences almost any way you wish, which allows intricate poetry and many additional meanings.

Many see today's Russian battlers as direct descendants of The Golden Age and The Silver Age of Russian poetry. They are just that – more poets than rappers, and they deliver really sophisticated rhyme structures really often.

Despite that, their flow is also solid, with grime, doule-time and even constantly altering flow with the changes performed flawlessly.

Some compact punchlines are so complex that they unfold in a whole new picture as you google trying to understand them. They are virtually untranslatable, requiring a lot of cultural and philosophical context to even scratch a surface.

My most upsetting rejection come from before I got into tech.

I was working in visitor services at a a cultural institution and I was trying to transfer to a different department. A big show was about to open and we were anticipating large crowds. I was tired of the stickup rich people that made of most of our guests. Now, there would plebs would be coming in droves and they would be even more ill behaved.

I didn’t get the job and had to continue on visitor services. It was upsetting because I was trying to save myself from mental stress. I went through months of being verbally demeaned by gross visitors and had physical injuries from working the incessant crowds. Only the seasonal hires were given special gifts when the show ended and I received nothing.

I did reapply for the transfer again when the position reopened a year later. I got the job. The hiring manager admitted that he should have hired me the last time. The girl they hired left after a year because she wanted to go to grad school. They wanted someone who was going to stay longer because training and hiring takes time.

"Some people say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers solve problems but so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention." - Jack Schulze

I join a company last few weeks ago, there is a cultural where new employee need to share 3 secrets to satisfy them in upcoming Christmas party. Any suggestions? I have totally no idea~

today I will have the last of my high school finals.
I feel like after today I will be a free boy (for three months, at least). Like I have won the game, beaten the boss level.
After 7 years of resisting to comply to this system which tries so hard to shape every pupil into a compliant individual, it will be done.
My creativity and productivity (which lies in tech, which isn't really represented in any subject in my school), set free.
No more mandatory pseudo-interest in loads of literature and cultural history. The bits that are interesting would have come to me anyways through Reddit.

Victory is mine. YAY \o/
World, here I come!

P.S. yes, of course, there were also positive things. I'm actually thankful for that time I failed the year's end exam about literature which ended in me having to redo that year. It landed me with loads of free time, which got me into tech-tinkering, a now two-year employment as a programmer, and a juniar participation at the nearest Hackerspace. And a chance to pretty much build and operate a 3D-printer, for which the physics department mostly covered the cost. The school unknowingly gave me the opportunity to extend my own horizon outside of school, and it brought me so much nice things. :) But the mandatory interest in literature and cultural/religious history and the lack of technical subjects and the digital oppression still sucked.

P.P.S. oops that was only supposed to be a short P.S.

5% of the content on the internet has cultural value and the rest is just pure trash. 4.9% of that quality content is basically instructions on how to build things for the internet. (I didn’t really fact check those numbers - but I’m pretty sure I’m correct)