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I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?
32 -
I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
so i just got fired 🔥 🔥 🔥 because i wanted a 200 fucking dollars raise after 1 year of work and sacrifices and feeling like shit.
200$ because i live in the 3rd fucking world, working with a stupid motherfucking boss (you know the fat old tone deaf cunt), he's american, and he brings projects from the US from clients paying thousands of dollars, and he pays us 300$, and by the fucking way he used to pay us 100$ (we are 3 developers, a dick who does nothing but report our behavior, and a shit who does shit. we are a development company and we are the only developers and we got fired because he thought we didn't deserve the raise and that he sees no reason in giving us more money because we're already wasting the company's money and time).
So now the only people left there are the dick, the shit and the fatass boss who's in the states rn.
the funny thing is after we left by an hour or so we got calls from many other companies that we refused to work with because of our loyal-fucking-ty.
the motherfucker thinks we're conspiring against him, that we don't trust him, well of fucking course we don't, he lies about having a company in the US, well it's there but it's suspended (we looked it up), he says he's a microsoft, intel, adobe, dell, lenovo partner, and he's not.
well fuck i'm kind of happy that i left, i'm sitting with my friends in a cafe right now thinking about finishing our personal projects.
forgot something: the projects we were working on are unfinished, and there's not a single fucker to finish them, so he's ball deep in shit. hope this rant is relatable40 -
Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.
Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.
Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.
Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.
Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).
Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!
Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*
Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.
Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.
Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.
Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).
I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!14 -
Today I had a reflection with an client and they surprised me with a present. They wanted to thank me for the hard work and effort I made.
Wauw! It just keeps me motivating to work hard and keep my clients happy!
4 -
[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.7 -
===rant
So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.
When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.
With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.
After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.
The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.
I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.
After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.
Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.
I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.
I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.
And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.
On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).
So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.
So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.
During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.
The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.
I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.
I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.
Bring it on.9 -
Gotta love clients which ask you for a quote to expand the system you did for them, then a week or two later "accidentally" found some cheap absolutely garbage dev that made it for 1/5th of your price and during all that destroyed half your work, by e.g. replacing uuids with just ids, making the system now leak how many users there is, all their user saved content, allowing to just increment through them all, also then acting surprised when I decline any further work with them.
Then theres also clients that even after explaining all physical or software limitations, act like you should be a core developer and just fix that, for fucks sake you were using freaking excel sheets before, be happy with any possible change.3 -
I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?
I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.19 -
1) Starts a company that builds cloud systems
2) Takes a bunch of jobs and thought you'll be happy for a while
3) IoT era smashes in your face
4) 72% of your existing clients ask for IoT revamp
5) With a lot of hacking you made a small portion of the projects possible with some Raspberry Pis
6) Client bought a bunch of arbitrary parts from Shenzhen and now you have to deal with kernel overlays and shits that you didn't even heard of
7) Made it work for the second time and told yourself it'll never happen again
8) Last customer happy so they tell a bunch of friends and now they're asking for more
9) Stares into void, wondering how you gonna end this nightmare5 -
Ugh, fxk. I got a promotion, I'm now a team lead for 4 developers, and I fxking hate it.
They never asked me if I wanted the position, they just threw me into it this week. They ripped me away from the team I had great chemistry with and put me on this other team with people I have no connection with.
To make matters worse, I'm also responsible for production servers of the clients of this team, one has malware even.
On top of all of this, they made me move desks for a new developer to fill my spot.
How do you demote yourself? Why would a company want someone to perform poorly (on purpose, I don't care) than to just keep their employee happy?
/end rant14 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.
Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.
I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS. -
I was pressued to shift the blame.
We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.
I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.
By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:
"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."
The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.
A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.
I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.
With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage. -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.16 -
Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!
Anyway, story and rant:
The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.
All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.
This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.
The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000
I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.
I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.
The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.
I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.
She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.
I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.
Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.4 -
On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================
Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.
2 -
This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.
One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.
I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?
They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.2 -
Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.
But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!
So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...
For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.
For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!7 -
So, we have this ma'am at work that is the least direct person I know.
She can transform one sentence in a paragraph and the meetings/talks with her I usually end up in my "happy place" at the middle of her phrases and come back latter when she isn't finished and I'm like
"wtf is she talking about yet? Damn I went away again, shit... Just nod and smile..."
We had a meeting scheduled with her and some clients today... She missed it... MOST FUCKING PRODUCTIVE DAY EVER!
Thank you.7 -
Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.
We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.
After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.
So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.
And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.
So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.
So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.
Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)11 -
Has anyone who's running a start-up had to deal with email happy clients?
I just watched a thread of 14 emails be generated for sending a maintenance contract which was already agreed upon.
Most of the emails are "thanks for the reply........."
To which some one will reply " thanks for the reply.........1 -
My biggest regret is the same as my best decision ever made.
The company I work for specializes in performing integrations and migrations that are supposed to be near impossible.
This means a documented api is a rare sight. We are generally happy if there even IS an (internal) api. Frequently we resort to front-end scraping, custom server side extensions and reverse-engineered clients.
When you’re in the correct mindset it’s an extreme rush to fix issues that cannot be fixed and help clients who have lost most hope. However, if your personal life is rough at the moment or you are not in a perfect mental state for a while it can be a really tough job.
Been here for 3+ years and counting. Love and hate have rarely been so close to each other. -
Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.
I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.7 -
I got call from a recruiter today for a job I applied for on ziprecruiter. The job is listed as remote. He says no, it's Denver, I said ok, well the listing says remote, he says, ok, remote is fine. He then argued with me about salary after I said it depends on the company on where I'm happy to negotiate to, and I'd want to know about benefits etc.. here is what I currently make, etc etc. He kept on trying to make me pick an hourly number.. I said I don't know the company, so he told me the company name.. them started in again about hourly rate (no idea who the company was). Finally he moved on and said he'd email details.
5 mins later, email comes through, please give hourly salary. Then another saying he'd pass my details on and I can just ask for about remote during the interview. And then another email 2 mins later asking for education etc, all of which is in my resume. I looked the company he was recruiting for up to find that it's an IT recruitment firm, looking to fill a clients position. So a recruiter recruiting for a recruiter :|
I'll be so happy when I find a new job and don't have to deal with these idiots again.3 -
It's rant time!
So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).
I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.
One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.
Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.
6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.
Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.
I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.
Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.1 -
One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.1 -
me: *starts receiving emails of clients having technical problems and errors and asking for help* wat, im being flooded with all these mails!
me: *sends email to boss* umm... i think im receiving the wrong mails...
boss: nope! from now on, you'll be in-charge of tech support for our clients. good luck and merry christmas!
me: *dies internally* happy holidays to u too5 -
After working on 7 projects last year with 7 different groups and learning to "flow like water", I don't feel the urge to rant anymore. There are always going to be all kinds of weird scenes, cheap clients, incompetent coworkers, people that pretend to know something when they actually know shit. All of those are just tests life is presenting you to make you learn to be peaceful and tolerant.
The world is broken, accept it, and allow yourself to be an ordinary human being, you'll be free and happier. Stuff like the law of attraction does exist. Just learn to be happy and grateful for what you get and you'll get a ton more reasons to be happy and grateful9 -
almost a year ago, i have no idea of what i was doing at work cause everything was new: coding languages, databases, clients, co-workers, etc. i had 0 experience and i am back here again on devRant after 3836382 years and i am proud to say i've learnt so much and have been promoted to Project Manager. im happy asf and i am now ready for another round of dev rants!14
-
I got recognized!
I'm new here and was mostly learning, but my team pushed through some bad issues and I got recognized as well. Even for helping whatever little I could.
For all the rants of bad bosses and clients and work. Here's a happy one. :)
I'm in good company in this company. -
So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?
The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.
The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.
The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!
Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.1 -
This log says way too much about me as a person.
Happy new year devRant! May the bugs be few and the clients plenty
3 -
There is nothing more fulfilling than working you ass off 2 days, learning a new technology, and getting it to finally work as per the requirements and then ...
getting told that the absolute cunt of a client forgot the release date, announced its release 2 days early and decided to casually ask why there is no app on the released URL (it's a tiny Agonizing Reality [AR] app meant as a gimmick on the invitation cards for an upcoming convention).
My boss told me, the thing I worked on is now being scrapped and will not be released.
Yes, I wish the clients could slowly die in agony by a tree growing out of their appendix. Nature shall reclaim their corpses and feed a happy pig which I would happily have a feast of. 🤗3 -
Mom and Dad were proud, when I said I will develop Apps.They helped me to found my own company and arranged some new clients.
My brother is happy with it and is taking CS courses at school.
I've never met people who treated me as a nerd or did not accept my choice1 -
I work in a dev company. One of our clients hired us to help them out as their devs are failing with their deadlines.
I had to expose app services via an api. I did it. Client company devs didn't like the way I did it as I rewrote their datamodels and declared them as api-use-only. I was demanded to return bkend services' data structures.
I didn't agree and waited until deadline to submit my code.
Now they are honestly thanking me for what I did as I've saved them from a forever-mutating-api-and-angry-integration-customers hell.
Not sure whether should I be happy or worried. I forced my solution onto them. It's not proffessional. But yhe customer is happier now than it would've been.
What do you do in such situations?6 -
I don't know what to do with my life anymore, as a self taught web developer, I started like anybody doing HTML, CSS and js, and then I met PHP and WordPress.
why the fuck PHP is ugly ? and why WordPress is uglier ? I tried to learn how to build a simple plugin in WordPress but the hooks system make me want to kill my self, how the fuck PHP powers 80% of the web ? every time I write PHP I wish I was never born, the problem is that I can't change job because I am old and I live in a fucking country who is technologically primitive, they fucking know only PHP and JAVA, no Node, No Ruby, No Python, only fucking PHP.
I learned React, I learned Node but you know what I did this last year ? I raped a themeforest theme for about dozen plus websites, A SINGLE THEME FOR MORE THAN DOZEN CLIENTS, my boss does not care, only me who is not sleeping at night because a tried to customize a Prestashop theme and it gave me cramps in the stomach, I feel depressed and useless, I want to quite my job but I can't, I have mouths to feed, WHY THE FUCK DID I FELL IN LOVE WITH PROGRAMMING, I was happy fixing computers, what can I do if the only project that I have are WordPress and Prestashop?
how did you do to stay sane when working with wordpress and prestashop ? are you not human ?I can't take it anymore.
I need a new road map, fuck it I will focus only on JS and Node and fuck PHP.10 -
They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *
They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.2 -
I used to think I was the kind of programmer that was good with people. That somehow I was special because I could get on with colleagues and make clients happy.
But fuck people. It’s so easy to be nice, just don’t be not nice. Don’t say rude things and be surprised when I’ve had enough.
For some reason my latest colleagues think it’s too confrontational to talk to each other and instead give management anonymous feedback on who they don’t get on with. Which obviously gets fed back to everyone immediately.
I’m done putting on a smile. Elegant code speaks for itself. I’m getting a PA to talk to people from now on because fuck this.5 -
I really like DevRant, but why can't an avatar look happy, is it because most developers hate their jobs, because of clients or what not?14
-
Core library was giving serious blow out of execution speed as data file size increased.
Traced it back to a GetHashCode implementation that was giving too many collisions for unequal objects, so when used as the key in a hash table it was causing the lookup to fall back to checking Equals (much slower).
Improved the GetHashCode implementation, and also precalculated it on construction (they were immutable objects), and run time went to warp speed! Was very happy with that.
Obviously put in a thread sleep to help manage expectations with the boss/clients going forwards. Can’t give those sort of gains away in one go. Sets a dangerous precedent.1 -
My first rant for ages
I'm working on a new project at a new company. We ha e a bunch of front end clients talking to an api.
I suggested that the api only communicate in terms of view models in order to bring some kind of standardisation to the project since at the time the gets and posts were either dB entities, view models, or just whatever the dev at the time decided.
I got a no, but that we could do posts and gets just with database entities. OK better than nothing..
I'm the front end angular app I implemented a generic form component and a generic data table component. The models given to these to build the components need to implement a view model interface.
Now we have a problem of the api giving us not view models and the front end needing view models so I put together a way to handle this in the front end.
My colleague with 8 years experience asks for my help and I'm happy to oblige. It turns out a model should have multiple child models in the database but the database entity models don't reflect this and therefore there is no way to build the view models. The data just isn't there from the api... Still I show him what the front end model should look like and write all the front end code for him to handle that.
2 days later he asks for my help again. It's exactly the same problem. Instead of fixing the backend and setting up the one to many relationship he has ignore the problem, retrieved a one to one relationship model and is just trying to force it to work - even though the data isn't there. He has also commented or removed all the code I helped him write and overwritten a file of typescript models that get autogenerated for us to be in sync with the backend...
I actually felt bad afterwards but I got frustrated as hell and he could tell...1 -
I am happy about a lot of code i have written but most recently speaking, the fuck you github page mentioned in https://devrant.com/rants/4934026/...1
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I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.
When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.
So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.
I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.
I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.
Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.
Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?4 -
A little and sweet rant about RANTS! What the hell guys, I can finally think about a social network happily, but I have the feeling that I'm not a part of this awesome community :'( I mean, everyone is getting problem with some clients or whatever. But I'm currently unemployed, and never really get through that kind of problems. Ok they lied to me on the job, ok I paid 15000 euros 2 years of school where there were still people who doesn't care about the work, ok I left my girlfriend, ok I have a fucking hard time to go back to work with that... But all of this is not really juicy, my life is simple and mostly happy :'(
Maybe I should hope that my next job will be with stupid people :o
I love you guys <35 -
A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:
Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."
Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.
Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.1 -
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.3 -
!Dev related but still freelance.
So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.
Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:
He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!
Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.
Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell2 -
I told myself for 18 months things like; ‘im being here, working here, and i like it here’.
Also when others left, nothing could break my confidence.
Present moment i’m happy to leave this place. This madhouse. This stressed out place where everybody keeps licking clients asses. Fuck this shit, i’m much better off elsewhere!
I am dreaming of leaving this company while the building burns. Or just before leaving, throwing my pc to pieces.
I wish i could scream: FUCK *company name*!!! -
I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.
It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.
Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:
I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.
Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.
Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!2 -
Fastforwarded a bit, I have LOTR marathon to catch later.. 😋
May your bugs diminish, coworkers grow brains & clients calm the fuck down!!
Happy, better & successful 2018 everyone!!
🍦1 -
So someone from another team in the company asked on our public Slack channel if they can send a field they're sending for one client, for all clients, so they don't have to have a branch for that one client that sends it.
We're talking about a string of up to 20 chars, typically much less even connected to each record, of which we have let's say a million per month and each of those records has at least 30 columns, some of them being longer strings even.
A dev from my team responded that they shouldn't send it because, while no one uses it so it's not going to break anything, it will require extra storage.
This was not 20 years ago, this was today, in 2021.
I responded asking what storage does he foresee to be the problem, because I can't see where so I'd like to get more details.
Guess who got ripped to shreds because it's a bad thing to question members of the team in public....
This is just one in a long line of similar brainless idiocies I've had to deal with from this asshole.
And no, I'm not a junior dev or something, I'm transitioning out of the Principal Engineer role for that team (for this reason exactly, otherwise I'd stay as PE). And no, I'm not the transitioning the role to that asshole.
At least 3 people who have left the team because of this asshole.
Managers not helping either, responses like "Yeah, you're right, but you're reasonable, he isn't, so let's appease him until we can find a way to deal with him"...
I used to love being a developer, this asshole made me want to vomit at any mention of anything remotely dev related...
Hope y'all are reasonably happy with your jobs and, more importantly, don't have such an asshole around you! -
TLDR, i am not performing as I used to in my job before i made my side hussle and idk if i should do anything about it.
every since covid started and companies started laying off people, I started realizing im in danger when no company was able to match my current salary, and the ones that do would, make me do a hunger games hackerrank competition with thousands of other people which I don't really wanna take part of..
My company even laid off a lot of people due to budget cuts a while back and i didn't feel secure at all, and knowing that i might end up with less salary should i get fired and settle for the next company that accepts me, kinda made me lose any trust i had for the whole being an employee thing... I have financial goals i want to meet and depending on this one company to not fire me is scary...
I registered a tech company and hoped I could take on some high budget projects, got nothing the first year but slowly i started getting some projects and now im hiring contractors to help with projects and its going great and im really happy and excited about it.
But i often need to manage said contractors, have calls with clients and even do some coding myself. Some of that i end up having to do in secret in my company time... we work in a big co-working space so i get to sneak into a meeting booth and do all that.
my manager lives in another country and basically im in a situation where i can get away with it without anyone noticing.
However, I used to be one of the top contributors in the company. I used to finish a butt load of tasks every day and i ended up being promoted to manager, but i still get some coding tasks. But generally, if it weren't for my side hussle i would still be a top contributor and shine like i used to, but now i mostly do what is expected on me, and im afraid someone would ask me at some point why im not as productive as I used to be.
nobody asked me anything but i just feel kinda guilty and miss having the one job to focus on and taking credit for a lot of things and helping everyone, but at the same time i dont trust that the company cares about me enough to give me any guarantees or stocks or bonuses so i feel i need to keep growing my side hussle to have a safety net..
thank you for reading my rant1 -
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.2 -
I HATE the idea of only releasing on pre-determined schedules despite work being completed and just waiting for that day to arrive.
I'm a co-founder of a small software company. We have partnered with another particular company that also writes software. Some of our clients have access to paid content of that company's services through our application.
Every once in a while, our clients will report issues with that company's service to us, because they access it through our application. They think it's our issue.
We then pass the report on to the partner company, telling them that their stuff is broken. Their reply goes like this:
"Ok. We'll get the bug fix scheduled, and we'll release it next Thursday."
"Next Thursday? The issue is now, they can't use the service."
"That's our scheduled release date."
O.M.G.
We voluntarily walked away from our safe, cushy jobs working for other people, taking enormous pay cuts to start this company. Now, we're 6+ years in, disrupting established fat-and-happy competitors in this space. I GUARANTEE you that if we had that same attitude, we would have been absolutely obliterated early on.
We are quick. Guided by kanban boards, our suite of unit tests and integration tests is vast and kick-ass. With continuous integration and the click of a button we know if we broke something or if the piece we're working on is ready to be pushed to production, IMMEDIATELY. Our "release schedule" is when the damn thing is complete.
It isn't all bad. Our integration with them has been beneficial for both of us. I just loathe their snail's pace which negatively affects our mutual customers. It can make us look bad, and we can do nothing about it.
Blah.3 -
Happy New Year From Singapore!
In this year,
May all the Devs out there be able to code peacefully everyday without being disturbed by that annoying coworker.
May all the Devs out there be able to get clients who understand our pain.
May all the Devs out there be able to work on the projects that they love while getting paid proper amount.
Cheers! Love live devRant and it's community.1 -
When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.
Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?
Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.
You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.
You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.
They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.
Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.
I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.6 -
We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?
Well... It's not all white and black...
As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...
Let me take an example:
Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.
Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.
So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.
A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.
So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.
Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?
Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?
---
Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.6 -
Keeping the clients happy is very important but when you have alot of shit to do, being a glorified helpdesk bugs me the fuck out. My inbox is screaming at me: "Please no more... Master please end me!".
-
So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)
I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.
But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).
But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).
My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.
How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.6 -
Who, more than I, totally HATE emoji?
lol I hate emoji after it caused so much problems with Microsoft Outlook and email backups from said program combined with emoji in subjects.
Wrote an subject filter in exim4 (took 3 days to debug and get working propely) that totally eradicate anything that isnt ISO-8859-1 from the subject line, then converts the rest to UTF-8 (because said IMAP client isnt following standards).
it also converts ISO-8859-1 characters in subjects to UTF-8 even if the original subject is declared to be UTF-8, because obviously some software (especially newsletter software) are transmitting ISO-8859-1 subjects that are declared to be in UTF-8 (but the opposite isn't true).
And also cuts subject to 100 chars, because too long subjects are a problem too. Same with date headers, I replace them with the server date/time because some software are sending Date: 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00, because some of these erronous headers are put by some mailing list software, aswell as causing problem in OEM clients like Samsung Mail.
Problem solved, all IMAP clients happy on internal network.7 -
It's been a little bit over two weeks since I quit my first job, thought I would share some stories 😁
I started my very first job in the middle of August (last year) and my duties were to fix some issues on front-end files. You can see my previous rants to see how long were these files 😐
So after 2/3 months I managed to get my shit done, started learning Vue on my own to implement it to new projects (and done it successfully) and learn something about shitty clients who don't know how to live and don't know what do they want.
When I quit the job on the last day of April, I was so happy to end it mostly due to this one specific client who were able to turn happy innocent coding of a great project into hellish shit. Plus there were some issues I noticed with some people I worked with (like they were sending these sexist memes which weren't funny at all 🙄)
TL;DR if you feel that your job post is not for you or that is doesn't make you feel happy or comfortable, don't be afraid to walk away. I did and I don't regret it 😉 -
My last week of 2017 sucks! The function that been assigned to me has been 7 months until i doing it without any priority tasks. The bad for this, is becoming worse for the clients and they really want it until the end of 2017, so happy new year motherfuckers.
Here's the story, the function i am doing requires a heavy calculations, and i am no brainer in math, though my logical skills, hopes me up to made it quickly as possible. However i am full of workloads/to-do for the past 3 months, that i am unable to comply my documents regarding my employment!!
Much worse for this is the coding guidelines. There no fucking guidelines at all, like do what i want just to make it work, but my team lead ironically speaking that never touch that because it's already working. Dude, the server response was the real issue there and i was supposed to handle that function because your fucking json was not formatted well! Shout out to git for giving me a saving grace not to fire me.
Lastly, the leader's attitude. You're so sarcastic as fuck! Of course i won't get mad at you on personal matters, i understand. But on work, the way you communicate was not like my any mentor/prof that i ever met!! I hate my fucking work. Hope my 2018 would do my best, AND I AM GONNA MAKE MY OWN GUIDELINES ACCORDING TO YOUR ASSES!! HAPPY NEW YEAR, GODDAMNIT!! -
I’m sooo excited when any new frontend JS framework is available. Angular, React, more recently Vue, Svelte. Bring ‘em on. I wanna try them all.
Just kidding…
As long as the tools at hand allow me to get the job done, keep clients and end users happy, I don’t give a fuck.
This meme is actually the epitome of what I hate with a lot of web developers I’ve encountered
2 -
Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.
There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?1 -
!rant
I'm having an awkward episode of excitement-fear-shock, so I don't know why I'm exactly writing this; I just needed to tell this to someone.
Few hours ago, I found out that, in a hardly believable turn of events, I have been accepted in a PhD program in the exact field I wanted, computability theory, in one of the top universities in my country. I would say this is a dream, to have the chance to study what I like most in this world, now I see I just got the opportunity to make this dream come true.
With an absurd feeling of joy and sadness, it also means that I have to let go of programming, at least as a career. I really don't know if I will have to crave for the job I have right now ever again, but I know that I won't regret this decision; this is what I want.
But anyway, I enjoy to code, and I will enjoy it any time.
dev4Life2 -
Since early 2016 a LinuxDev at my work, pushed me (windows admin) right in the CentOS world. With some practise I had to build a infrastructure to deploy Ubuntu to development clients (laptops with stuff without windows) In perspective I had to migrate this infrastructure to my team (windows admins) and run it there as were this all the time our business. I loved powershell but for some reason I have had to learn Ruby, bash etc.. Now I am the first Admin with some pretty skills in Linux, my workplace comes without any version of Windows. I am flying with Debian, Ubuntu, redhat and CentOS. The finished work from past enabled my team and me to drop fully automated Linux Clients for our developers.
Well last weekend Windows 10 fuc*** up with the creators update and destroyed even my USB3 ports... I didn't even spend lot of my time playing with this machine... So my desk is now running arch.
That day my colleague thought, windows isn't my passion is thanked every week once for directing me in this pretty good world.
Today I am still the first Linux DevOps in my team, but still happy.1 -
My server has constaly 40% CPU usage.... Even when there are NO requests.
I'm searching "wtf is going on" for the past 2 days.
0 results. Clients are unhappy, sales team is unhappy. Noone is happy and I don't have an answer. Grrrrrrr.
*Goes back to reading logs
By server I mean Azure WebApp, not a VM/ohysical server17 -
More of a moaning than ranting.
I feel like I care a bit too much.
I'm not a great programmer - I may be decent, but nothing more. I know Java and C# enough to write production code that works but as I gather more experience it's getting more and more annoying that I have no one to teach me in work. All I know is what I have learned by myself, from courses online, books and just writing code.
And what drives me crazy is how I'm being pushed from one project and technology to another! It's been a week since I've returned from my exams and I've already worked in C# (ASP.Net Core, MS Office AddIn, WPF, .Net console app), Java (Spring, some legacy project with JBoss, Android) and to top it all, I had to come back to the worst project I've ever been in, where I'm implementing some third party system to county administration, just to finish it off.
I'm happy to gather experience - invaluable with only two years of real, production experience, but I can't focus on one thing because I'm immediately forced to work on another. For some reason I'm seen as Jack-of-all-trades but I really don't feel like that. It makes me anxious as fuck. Not to mention that my personal development as a Dev is held off because of working all alone with no supervisor.
Post Scriptum
Fuck my boss. He won't let me refractor our biggest project yet (console, C#) because "he can listen to my moaning all day but when clients start complaining he has to act fast". Yeah, right. Wish me luck with fixing sluggish performance without reworking base of the app. -
I'm on a project that has been off the rails for a few weeks. We're no longer working off tickets/the scrum board. Clients are asking for production servers yesterday.
Things are behind. Some people are working nights and weekends. I'm one of the people who are vary vocal about not working over time and I haven't worked a single night or weekend yet (we're salary exempt too; no extra pay).
I even bought up in a meeting how I was not happy about people being guilt tripped for not working over (our PO messaged me out of band a few weeks back telling me my teammates would appreciate me putting in more effort).
I agreed to work this Sunday and already regret it, even though they said there'd be compensation (without mentioning what that compensation is). I was also told everyone is doing it and that's not true either.
In my 18 years in IT, I've worked at ~ 13 companies. This one is in the bottom 3 for sure.2 -
Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.
I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.
Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."
Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.
Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.1 -
So I am in a dilemma right now... I have like two lifes right now: One the one side I am a student in applied computer science and on the other side I am already working in a Dev company and as a freelancer. Compared to my work, university is boring as hell. I would love to just skip university and start my own company with my other freelancer friend! We already have some clients so we would have a good start. But many people, like my parents for example, told me that need at least degree to achieve something in life. I told them that I would try do earn some certificates (like Cisco) but they are still not happy with this idea. So I would love to hear your opinion guys... Do you think that a degree is absolutely necessary? Thanks in advance!5
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Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.
Damn you software and hardware corporations.
You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.
Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.
If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.
Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.
If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.
Get me out of here you asshole.1 -
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? -
Ive had it with this job. It it right now the most unthankful job ive had.
There is no thank you, no good morning or evening. No hey how are ya?
All that matters is the 10 deadlines we NEED finished still in 2023. There is too much to do and no time or guidance.
How are we gonna fix this if i keep screwing up everything i touch. How can i do my work if NOTHING is ever good enough in the eyes of colleagues or clients. Im well on my way to burnout and/or depression.
Happy holidays y’all! -
So i got this service i made for fun and learning. Theres many providers in it for money, not me, only a little (lets not lie to ourselves).
Id just like to have a handful of happy clients to make it pay for itself so i dont lose money.
I have no idea how to advertise or gain clients. Those potential clients i cling with are from US and the server is in EU, and i wont convince anyone to buy something i wouldnt buy myself.
I suck at marketing.2 -
Google is like the parent or teacher who is never happy with your work. I've never seen something so unattainable in a world where non-technical clients rely on CMSes, theme templating, server-side page rendering, and external scripting as Google's mobile PageSpeed recommendations. Especially under the Lighthouse audit in Chrome Inspector. Unless I go back to pre-2001 web development methods, and never have external scripting, and make every page have its own CSS file with only critical path CSS for each page, I will never get all the high scores I'm expected to have to rank well for mobile. When and how will Google get called out on this B.S.?9
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Happy new year friends
Hope all yer projects will be fruitful
And the clients not the usual pain in the ass
MMXXI let's go -
Some background:
About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.
So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).
Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.
Everyone is happy.
Fast forward to last Thursday night.
“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.
I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?
So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...
The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.
What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...
His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.
Now we have
POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback
The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...
But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!
Arghhhhhh1 -
!dev !excitedToBeInSchool
Just got back from an exam about workethics; damn that shit is so useless and does not resemble the world in any way, shape or form.
Basically you had to conclude out of 1 A4 piece of words what kind of ethic sotuation the main person was in, after which you need to give your personal opinion on the matter
Which you had to give arguments for in three specific bullshit ways, all the while considering standards, values and virtues.
Now after doing all that you are probably not interested in the case we had to decide on, but for those that are, down the rabbit hole you go;
So the case was basically a guy that was doing his graduation internship at some neighborhood care company, which wanted a system that automatically generates a route for their workers to walk.
So the guy had to do a research into whether or not their clients and workers were interested in this system; TLDR: They didn't want it (ehat a shock). Reason was that it would be less personal, which neither the clients or the workers were happy with.
So after all that I decided the guy shpuld be honest in his the conclusion of his research and afterwards just build it anyway, just because he might otherwise fail the graduation which would then set him back half a year.
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You still here? Wow how persistant, have a GDPR-mail.
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Good so now we wait for the grade I get for this exam, I am guessing it's not positive and I will have to do the exam for the fourth time, what do you think?2 -
I had dabbled in some game programing in Unity (like Unity 1 or 2 at the time) and played around with python. But I hadn't spent much time programming. I was going to school for marketing because when I graduated high school, there were basically no software jobs anywhere near my hometown. But I got an internship at a place that had a single web developer but like 5 clients who had websites. The dev left and I volunteered to build websites, thinking it had to be better than writing about asphalt pumps. They gave me a $5 raise. At that point I realized 2 things.
1. The area around my hometown was starting to have more software jobs (I actually ended up moving and I'm extremely happy I did now).
2. Devs usually make more than marketers.
I already knew I enjoyed programming, I just didn't see it as a realistic career until I got a pay raise I didn't even ask for, and for a job I wasn't qualified to do even.
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