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/*The following dialogue is an excerpt from an actual conversation I had a couple of hours ago*/
Microsoft support:
Please check that you've installed the correct version of JavaScript in the Control panel.
Me: JavaScript isn't standalone software.
MS: Are you sure you downloaded JS from Oracles website then?
Me: *ended the chat*2 -
Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?
Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)
------
Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.
So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~
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Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"
Cue Inigo Montoya.
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Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?
Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."
------
Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."
I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.
------
Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.
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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?18 -
A friend sent me this in the morning:
“By convention, type names such as String or Int (or Dog or Cat) start with a capital letter; variable names start with a small letter. Do not violate this convention. If you do, your code might still compile and run just fine, but I will personally send agents to your house to remove your kneecaps in the dead of night.”
Excerpt From: Matt Neuburg. “iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift.” iBooks.1 -
An excerpt from the best rant about whiteboard interviews posted on the internet. Ever.
"Well, maybe your maximum subsequence problem is a truly shitty interview problem. You are putting your interview candidate in a situation where their employment hinges on a trivia question. — Kadane's algorithm! They know it, or they don't. If they do, then congratulations, you just met an engineer that recently studied Kadane's algorithm.
Which any other reasonably competent programmer could do by reading Wikipedia.
And if they don't, well, that just proves how smart the interviewer is. At which point the interviewer will be sure to tell you how many people couldn't answer his trivially simple interview question.
Find a spanning tree across a graph where the edges have minimal weight. Maybe one programmer in ten thousand — and I’m being generous — has ever implemented this algorithm in production code. There are only a few highly specific vertical fields in the industry that have a use for it. Despite the fact that next to no one uses it, the question must be asked during job interviews, and you must write production-quality code without looking it up, because surely you know Kruskal’s algorithm; it’s trivial.
Question: why are manhole covers round? Answer: they’re not just round, if you live in London; they're triangular and rectangular and a bunch of other shapes. Why is your interview question broken? Why did you just crib an interview question without researching whether its internal assumption was correct? Do you think that “round manhole covers are easier to roll" is a good answer? Have you ever tried to roll an iron coin that weighs up to 300 pounds? Did you survive? Do you think that “manhole covers are circular so that they don’t fall into manholes” is a good answer? Do you know what a curve of constant width is? Do you know what a Reuleaux triangle is? Have you ever even been to London?
If the purpose of interviewing was to play stump the candidate, I’d just ask you questions from my area of specialization. “What are the windowing conditions which, during the lapping operation on a modified discrete cosine transform, guarantee that the resynthesis achieves perfect reconstruction?” The answer of course is the Princen-Bradley condition! Everyone knows that’s when your windowing function satisfies the conditions h(k)2+h(k+N)2=1 (the lapping regions of the window, squared, should sum to one) and h(k)=h(2N−1−k) (the window should be symmetric). That’s fundamental computer science. So obvious, even a child should know the answer to that one. It’s trivial. You embarrass your entire extended family with your galactic stupidity, which is so vast that its value can only be stored in a double, because a float has insufficient range:"
Author: John Byrd
Src: https://quora.com/What-is-the-harde...3 -
In your opinion what is the best programming rant to ever grace the internet?
My submission === programming sucks:
http://stilldinking.org/programming...
(small) excerpt: "You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for “Infinity” when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn’t, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn’t going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he’s a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can’t even find the cat."7 -
Here's an excerpt from GitHub's mission statement -
"Code is about the people writing it. The tools we create help individuals and companies, public and private, to write better code, faster."
And yet, is there anyone else who goes - "What a load of crap! You came up with Atom and Teletype, but couldn't make your Search feature even a tad less annoying?!"
Only me?
.
.
I'll see myself out. -
“If the Start Windows Restart when Windows starts check box is checked Windows Restart will start automatically every time Windows is started.”
– Actual excerpt from a windows program help file!2 -
Today I got a message from a potential client. See following excerpt:
Me - "ok I'll need you to give me a brief before I can send you my quote."
Potential client - *sends me only a screenshot from the damn App Store showing an existing app with the desired features*2 -
Fuck Amazon! Or apple? Or both? I don’t know...
I just wanted to read a book on my iPad using the kindle app. I can read a free excerpt from the book but when I decided that I wanted to buy the book, I couldn’t. Not from within the kindle app nor the amazon app.
I read on the internet that it has something to do with the greediness of apple and that they want an astronomical cut from the sales. So amazon decided that they wouldn’t sell ebooks in the iOS-Apps.
I had to get my android phone and buy the book using the app I’ve installed there. I could’ve also opened the amazon webpage in my browser.
Fucking retards, I just want to read! And the worst thing is, I don’t even really know whom to blame!
Anyways, now I can read the book (zum Leben ist es schön aber ich würde da ungern auf Besuch hinfahren by Tilman birr if anybody is interested)4 -
An excerpt from the encyclopedia of "Developer Confessions":
At times, when I have no clue what some code does, I comment it out to see what breaks. Sometimes I just want to see the code burn.3 -
That time when I requested someone from a different department to include the ID row in their database excerpt. Me, having the lowest possible status in the company, did not know the who I wrote to was the boss over at the other department. So I ask straight forward: "Could you please include the ID row?"
Then a damn long email comes back stating that there was absolutely no time for stupid shit as mine. There existed no ID row and I would only waste his time. All further requests should be route via my boss.
So, fuck, he's pissed. So what he deserve? A shit load of honey right into his mouth, like he wants to.
That company had a huge ass hierarchy in job positions and I was at the bottom. So I write my oh-im-so-sorry-mail.
~I never knew what position he had and that I would of course fuck off with my stupid request.~
What was his response?
Oh, yeah, thanks. Have a look into the attachment, is that the ID row you requested?
Yeah, as one can guess, it was.
Stupid honeyfucker. Of course an ID row exists, duh. -
Can someone get an excerpt from the SO user db and diff it against the DevRant user db and compile a do-not-hire list of the ones that are only on SO?
And yes, I was recently triggered by a SO elitist.
This also assumes all the nice SO members are members of DevRant, which I think is fairly accurate.2 -
When you convince your client to purchase a commercial thread-dump analysis tool, and that pies of soft gives you flamegraphs like this one [excerpt].
And then your own TD analysis tool works significantly better than that.
[P.S. I wonder how many of you will spot what's wrong here :) ]
5 -
I had a complaint about a product I bought from a store a while back. I was resistant to taking into the store because the people there make you feel like you are stealing when trying to return a defective DVD. So I contacted the store via their website. I put in my first and last name and my email in the message to them. This is an excerpt of what I got back:
---
Response By Email (Triston) (12/12/2019 03:56 AM)
Hi Phuckin,
Your satisfaction is our top priority and your comments have been forwarded to your local Store. The management team there will take appropriate action and you can expect a response from them within three business days.
<store specific info>
Customer By (Phuckin Chit) (12/11/2019 03:40 PM)
<details of my complaint, etc>
---
Apparently I had created an account with this store a while back when I was angry. Hence my name being reported as Phuckin Chit. Even though I entered my name in the form it used the stored name associated with my email. At this point I am not sure they are going to help me.1 -
Who decides these things?
Excerpt from an article about a semi-state comms company in Ireland being obliged to provide a minimum service to all rural citizens.
28.9kbps is not functional internet access, it barely ever was!
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"Oh, i know exactly which file this snippet goes in! I'm glad the author of these docs didn't waste a precious few extra seconds to tell the reader where this is supposed to go."
- An excerpt from "I'm Not an Impostor, and Other Lies Developers Tell Themselves" -
How to write programs on Android 10 that work with files/directories? Have used a number of JVM-based languages like Groovy, Clojure and Kotlin.
My last try was with Groovy. I ran it under Dcoder which has to be cloud-, based as it supports numerous languages. I gave it permission to access storage but got a file not found error from Java. Copied this excerpt for the file path.
import java.io.File
class Example {
static void main(String[] args) {
new File("/storage/emulated/0/read_file.grvy").eachLine {
line -> println "line : $line";
}
}
}
Do I need root? Do I need to change file permissions using Termux? Why can't I find a way to write simple software on a Motorola Super, 3 GB RAM and 8 cores? I hate using a phone for a computer but a seizure has me in a nursing home with only one usable hand.
Any help is greatly appreciated.5 -
This article about the types of legacy code bases you will have to deal with just made my day!
Not only do I have every one it describes but somehow it even made me laugh at thought of each of the std riddled petri dishes of code that I reluctantly maintain... My "Happy Place" is a folder dedicated to reliquary projects I like to look at when I feel sad to lift my spirits and restore hope that one day things will be better.
Do you have any definitions to add or know where to find more? I'm hooked.
Link: https://medium.com/@dylanbeattie/...
Excerpt:
The Reliquary
The reliquary is that one repository full of really good ideas. Clean code. Brilliant algorithms. The OpenID implementation that you optimised until it shone. Classes so beautifully designed and perfectly documented that they’d make a senior architect weep.
You remember the big rewrite? The project that was going to fix everything, only you never worked out how to actually launch the thing, or get any revenue from it? The reliquary is where you’ve preserved it, pickled in revision control like a fabulous museum specimen. A treasury of good code and good ideas; maybe even an entire codebase that was “a couple of weeks” away from shipping before somebody finally looked at the number of critical features the team had somehow forgotten to include and discovered — to everybody’s surprise — that validated XHTML, normalised data models and 95% test coverage are not actually features any of your end users cared about.
Like Buran or the Spruce Goose, the surviving artefacts stand as a testament to the quality of your engineering… and a poignant reminder of just how much fun engineers can have building high-quality stuff that nobody actually wants to use. -
Pretty niche tool, but Sencha Architect!
It is a wanna be GUI-Builder/IDE for ExtJS, but neither works properly.
This rant is not about ExtJS, just about Sencha Architect, which my coworkers and I were forced to use.
If you want to join the ride, here an excerpt of just some of the issues:
- installation: already the setup is more of a gamble than an actual setup, either it works on your machine or it doesn't, plain and simple
- GUI Builder: just drag and dropping components is actually nice, but the editing capabilities are frustrating, you can't edit the UI code by hand at all, just through pre defined properties. If there was the need to really mix things up it wasn't possible, I couldn't even rebuild shown examples of their ExtJS documentation. Furthermore the property editor was data type locked, which means if you want to enter a string which ExtJS already supports, but architect locks the value as a boolean, you can't edit it at all, while still using Architect
- code editing: well it is a colored texteditor, which is fine, and I could live with that, but Architect let's you just edit areas where it allows you to - want to change something else? Nope not allowed
- autocompletion: there is none at all, same goes for refactoring, multi highlighting, string replacement, and others
- code storing: well now some may think edit it somewhere else, well no, also not possible... Architect not just only saves simple js, there is also a Json formatted file for everything you have created, which is needed so the tool can actually load it for further editing. They possibly never heard of DRY. But the worst of this code storing was actually using git along with it - have a merge conflict? Merge both files! Every single time, it was so damn tedious
There are a few more, but these were the worst I can remember.
Luckily I don't have to use it anymore!
Maybe they have fixed or changed a lot of it, because the developers were aware of the issues and eager to resolve them, as far as I was told on a roadmap presentation. And some of the tools they had released in the end of my time using ExtJS were actually really good, like an IDE plugin for the framework, and I liked using it.
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