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Search - "how to get my email"
-
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
TLDR : I left a company which doesn't understand the concept of email id and passwords.
Me (trying to login to the alumni website) *no register user option*
Customer support - you've to click on forgot password to create an account.
Me - Wonderful
*clicks on reset password*
*enters employee id, name, email, father's name, DOB, date of joining , date of leaving, current city because apparently if I just enter my employee id it is as if they never knew me. Sigh*
*your password will be sent to your email id*
Me - okay. *waits for two weeks because I assumed someone will manually go and create my account and email me, considering the state of system. *
After two weeks,
Me - I still haven't received my password on email after I created my account. Can you please check?
After one week,
Customer support - you need to click on forget password if you forgot your password.
Me - *inventing new curse words* I have not forgot my password, I never received it in the first place!
After one week,
Customer support - yes you'll receive your password on your email id.
Me - *runs out of curse words* seriously dude?
* proceeds to reset password*
System - your password has been reset. Your new password will be sent to your email id. *apparently anyone can reset passwords if you have the employee id, which is an integer*
After a week
Me - Am I going to ever receive the password? I've tried generating passwords, resetting my password. I never get my passwords. What should I do!!
Customer support - yes you need to click on Forgot password.
Me - are you fucking kidding me!!!
You fuckers need to be fired and replaced by a FAQ page which has no question and just a single answer, because a peanut has higher IQ than you. For any questions you may have, just reset password. Goddammit idiots!
Also, which email id are you sending my passwords to?
Customer support - myname@oldcompany.com
Me - you do realize that this is the alumni website for the company. Alumni means ex members.
Being ex members, you can assume we don't have access to our company email ids obviously?
Customer support - yes.
Me - how am I supposed to get the password using my old email id then?
Customer support - you need to click on forgot password option.
I think I should probably move to the Himalayas for my anger management issues. Plus it'll be probably easier to throw idiots off a mountain.31 -
You remember when I said the people near me might take everything away?
THE DAY HAS COME.
FUUUUUUUUUUU-
Do I have to say how retarded it is to take a PC and a phone away from a person who first off, loves tech, second of all, gets all her university assignments and information THROUGH an email, third, wants to be a game developer?
Seems like even telling them that I am trying to get as much informed about gaming industry as a whole isn't a valid fucking reason for why I use tech as often as I do... I want to be a game dev, you fucking morons.
So... This began by them AGAIN drilling me about the university progress. I cannot even remember my goddamn schedule, for fuck's sake! How do you expect me to remember every damn grade, every damn exam date and every damn subject name? They also expect me to study 100% of the time I'm using the PC. WHO does that?
They start drilling. I try not answering. It drives them mad. They start exploding. I try all I can to calm the goddamn situation. It's not enough for them. NO, they HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING! I try all I can to survive the situation without a conflict. Too late. At a certain point my amazingly clever father says I'm definitely autistic for trying to answer in as little words as I can. Because they totally don't give me a reason to never want to talk at all in their presence...
They got mad enough to take the phone, the PC and my headphones away.
And now here I am, writing this on a university PC in Chrome of all :|60 -
Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.
I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:
M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.
Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:
M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.
At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?
There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:
M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.
DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.
I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.
PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.undefined tools i have access and you don't haha retards why the fuck would you hire that guy? i don't do development46 -
You know what?
Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.
Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".
To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."
"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."
And that, as it turned out was almost true.
After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.
"Just run "npm install" he says".
Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.
Node 14... nope whole project dies.
Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.
Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.
Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.
Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.
Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.
All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.
Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".
Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Why?
Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...
This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...
We'd been played.
Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.
I rewrote the app in Swift.
So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.
None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.
So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.
And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?
Mine are still working.34 -
My manager started a company and I was his first employee, he literally started it because he wanted to make use of my talent.
So one day I finished my project on Friday and took in advance Monday and Tuesday off. Went back Wednesday to find my manager angry like "you didn't finish your project, you costed us money with our client company (a big ass famous one) I am putting you on probation and you could probably get fired if you don't get yourself together" and he said that my colleague had to do my whole work that I supposedly didn't do.
So I went to the code and checked. And I found that what my colleague did was re write my code in a different structure and pretended like he did everything and did do anything.
Got passed off so I wrote an email to my manager with the commits and links to them and their builds and made sure it's well explained, and titled the email "resignation letter" with me expressing at the end how angry I am and informing about my resignation.
Later on he replied saying it was a misunderstanding and there was lack of communication and he could give me I raise.
I insisted.
One week later I got hired by the client company and suddenly I was sitting on the other side of the meeting table. And it felt so damn good.4 -
So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!
It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"
Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.
My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.
I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.
Then I started to experiment more and more.
After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!
From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.
Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!
I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.
Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?
First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.
Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.
Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!
I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.
Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!
Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.
Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.
Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!
It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).20 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!
*sitcom audience cheers*
Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.
2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?
So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".
"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.
I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems
- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)
While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.
Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.
But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked
"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"
... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not
... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not
... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!
Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?
Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!15 -
More than half of all support calls and tickets we get are so fucking easily searchable through our own fucking website and search engines, it's really fucking annoying sometimes.
"how do I redirect a site?"
Type the fucking word redirect into our helpdesk page.
"how can i reset my email password?"
Literally fucking type the word EMAIL into fucking search bar?!
"hey the article said to go to yourdomain.com/webmail, I'm not getting anything!!!"
"what domain did you use?"
"yourdomain.com of course!"
😥🔫
"how can I add a domain to my hosting?"
Search for the FUCKING word DOMAIN on our online helpdesk.
IT'S REALLY NOT THAT HARD, PLEASE APPLY COMMON SENSE AND USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN.17 -
"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢
"I think we should do some market research" 🤢
"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢
OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.
FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.
SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.
THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.
"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞
NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?
"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿
OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?
"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫
YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡
"Ahem....
1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.
OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."18 -
So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.
Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.
Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.
Manager: No you have enough on your plate
3 hours later
Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long
Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.
I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.
I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)
After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.
Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.
So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.
But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant8 -
I have this old lady that I help from time to time with her computer issues.
She is nice, so I feel compelled to help her.
Get a call one day.
Lady : "hello, my internet and email isn't working, I've tried everything, could you maybe help me?"
Me : "Sure, ill come over after work and check it out"
*arrive at her house*
Lady : "you see, none of the web pages load, and my email refuses to sync. Should I call (insert isp name), or can you fix it?"
Me : I'm sure I can get it, gimme a sec.
*find the issue in a sec or two, dunno how to tell her about it, she isn't totally stupid*
Me : "Uhh, I don't know if you checked, but the ether.. internet cable isn't plugged in"
Lady : *realizes the wtf moment I'm having, obviously feeling very stupid*
Me : "Don't worry, happens to the best of us"
Obviously I lied a little, most of us would probably check the damn cable. Sometimes is just better to make people not feel like its their fault. People learn better when they don't feel like something is making a fool of them.
I have helped this lady with so many things that are just straight out of this world.
The one time she tried emailing 37mb tiff files over her 315kbps network.
Another time she said her email was not syncing, so I went to her house and clicked the "sync" button.
She even once phoned me to get their wifi password.
I just like helping her, somehow it makes me feel as if we all have something to learn.6 -
toxic workplace; leaving
I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.
I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.
------
On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)
Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).
I'm just.
so, so done.
I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)
Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.
But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.
So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)
I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)
With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.34 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:
practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team
It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...
<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>
Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.
So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:
- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole
So lets look at some example of their work:
- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"
- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"
- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"
- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.
- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"
Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them
Thats all the time we have for today,
Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:
- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead
See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex14 -
Ever had a 'why in FUCKS name would you do that?!?' moment with another programmer?
In my first study year we learned about PHP and how to write a login system. Most people would either do a 'select count(something like id) from users where username = username and password = password' or select the values based on the username/email and check if the password matches.
This guy selected everything from the table and FOREACHED the records while comparing if the username/password matched with an if within that loop.
I couldn't get him to understand how fucked up that system would become once you'd have loads and loads of users 😅21 -
So, I got a paid internship and was tasked to create a game from scratch. They told me to start by creating an idea and so I started creating a Game Design Document with 40+ pages. Fuckin epic idea. The idea is presented to the boss. "Very good. But I want it to have multilayer" *Sigh* Substantial changes are made and I'm eager to start working on my masterpiece. Everybody wanted to see how it would turn out. 2 months into the internship I have to make a presentation to the boss. He tells me that I won't be able to accomplish anything in the limited time of the internship. They change my work completely and I am now part of the main team. Two weeks later I have another presentation. "You have been here for 2 months and this is what you have? This is you progress? You need to do better". A couple of days later I get an email stating that my performance was unsatisfactory and I won't get paid for those 2 months. Like, ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME! YOU TELL ME TO CHANGE EVERYTHING! 2 MONTHS OF MY LIFE OF HARD WORK WADTED FOR NOTHING! FUCK YOU! SO FUCKIN PISSED!
I have cool coworkers tho16 -
A recruiter called me today. I had to barracade myself in the laundry room to hear him, and still needed to ask him to repeat himself 7-8 times. he spoke at what must have been 15% volume with a super thick Indian accent. He also couldn't pronounce a full third of the terms.
Here's how it went.
recruiter: you full-stack dev? what experience?
me: yes, about 8 years, maybe 10.
recruiter: you know C#?
me: no.
recruiter: you know java? tomcat? spring?
me: no, I don't know Java.
recruiter: you know react? angular? apache? node?xml? json? html?
me: yes. yes, angular 1. yes, yes, ...
recruiter: ok, i email you java job posting
me: I don't know java.
recruiter: ok, i email you.
Recruiter used "email java job posting." It wasn't very effective.
Recruiter moves quickly! Recruiter used "did you get my email? email" immediately after. It was super effective! @Root becomes angered!
Recruiter calls.
Recruiter calls.
@Root becomes enraged!
Recruiter calls.
recruiter: what [???] [?] [???] [??] java [???] [??] [???] okay
recruiter: You know C#?
me: No, I still don't know C#.
recruiter: ok thank you for time. 😡 *click*
What just happened?
I really don't understand their species.39 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.
Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.
The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.
Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.
At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.
Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)
After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)
We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.
Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.
Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.
For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."
Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.
A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.
Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).10 -
How do I un-idiot my users when it comes to clicking on dodgy email-links??
Got a forwarded email just there from a user who said;
Good afternoon,
Is the below ok to open?
I just tried but got a popup saying I've been blocked from opening it.
I'm not sure who it is coming from and I am not waiting on anything but as it says its from dropbox and is important, i know it's okay.
Can you unblock the link ASAP please?
This is really impeding my work-day as I need to know what it is and act accordingly.
Regards... user.
The Original email came from a random jumble of letters with a subject line of 'important dropbox program' - not only does it look dodgy but its english is horrible! It said;
"Hi tu my freind,
You tu still read a pending verrry important document sent by one of your own contact to be vieweddd.
Install "Highly Confidential english.pdf" by clickinggg here
*insert link leading to something called 'viral-update-trojan.exe'*"
I mean, seriously... help!!! 😢
We have sent emails explaining how to hover over links and to not to click them if it looks wrong.
No one does it.
We hired a company to send fake phishing emails to train users in what to do.
It made no difference!
We now make people 'verify' their email addresses when opening any sort of link to try get them to actually look at what they're opening.
We also strip emails of original attachments and create 'safe' html copies as we can't trust them to look at what they're opening.
Everyone complains about it but Jesus Christ, this is why!!!
Its so exhausting!! What is wrong with people!!! Argh!!! 😤16 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.8 -
Storytime!
Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...
Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...
Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)
Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?
Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!
Dev: 🤦♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)
Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...
Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!
Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!
Long story short:
The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.
WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.
JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.
Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷♂️
Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎
Cheers!10 -
Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
"Do you have 2 factor auth for the database?"
a customer asked. I stared on the wall in front of me and suddenly fel and urge to punch and piss on something.
I took a deep breath while thinking to myself
*Oh boy, here we go. Another retard*
I put on my nice voice and asked:
"What you mean?"
The customer seems confused, as if my question did not make sense and he said:
"TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION! Dont you know what it is? To make the database more secure."
I was fucking right, this person reads to much shit. The fact that the email signature of that person said "Wordpress Developer" made me more angry.
I, still with the nice voice asked
"How would that work?"
"Two factor authentication when I am connecting to the database."
"So, do you want it by SMS then? You'll get alot of messages if it is going to send you one every time a query is made."
The following 7 seconds was dead silent until I heard the person hang up.3 -
!rant but a story
This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me
junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"
We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.
Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:
junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."
*junkfellow suddenly look confused*
my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"
junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!
my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk
junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D11 -
An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..
She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.
The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.
AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...
A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me
Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"
She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.
And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...
Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.
He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.
Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!
Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.
all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.
the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:
Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.
Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.
Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?
Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends
Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.
After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.8 -
Co-worker: hey, can you create an email?
Me: yeah, who needs one? There are no records indicating any new people starting for another two weeks.
Cw: if for Stan, he started today. Also he needs a computer set up.
Me: who the hell is Stan and why are there no records of this person?
Cw: he's new, he started today so we didn't need an email or computer before today.
Me: I get that they're new, but what happened to giving the IT department at least 3 days notice on new hires so I can make sure things get taken care of?
Cw: you know how it is around here, nobody gets notice for anything. So can you get that email and computer setup for me, he can't work without them.
Me: I get that we don't actually plan for anything around here and that 90% of my job is fixing that failure, but hiring someone isn't like a system failing, people don't just show up and say "I start today" they have to go through interviews and background checks and other stuff, someone besides this person knew they started today so I don't think it's too much to ask that I get an email when the offer is extended to the person so I can prepare a system.
Cw: well we interviewed him two weeks ago and he accepted the offer last week, he's here and waiting so just as soon as you can please.
Me: well here's an email, the computer is gonna have to wait, I have a lot going on today and I don't have any computers ready right now.
*Seriously tempted to make them wait till next week to cover the 3 days notice I've asked for 100 times*23 -
!(short rant)
Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"
For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.
tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).29 -
RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.
So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.
Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑
So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.
This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"
And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.
Happy to help with this issue you are having.
After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."
So I concluded that they are monkeys.
Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.
Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.
I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.
So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.
I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!
Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread13 -
So today I got let go from my job.
I've worked for this company for about 2.5 years, and soon after joining I became the only IT resource for software. I had to support literally everything after they fired the rest of the team, but I did a great job and have been praised by all the management at the company.
A few months ago, after a salary review and a frank discussion with my boss and his boss, they agreed that I am due for a raise. They had a massive project coming up with a lot of extra expenses, but I was told that right afterward they would be giving raises.
I spent tons of late nights and weekends on this project, and we were able to get it mostly finished about a 1.5 months ago. I was instrumental in the project (the rest of the IT team didn't even know how to set up simple DNS records). An email was sent to the whole company thanking me for all the work I put into the project.
A week ago, I messaged my boss to ask about the status of raises as he had told me they should be going out at the beginning of this month. He said there won't be any raises, and that's all I heard. Then today I get a call telling me that they are letting me go.
Let me get this straight: you led me on with talk of a raise just to keep me here working long hours for your big project, and then you fire me after recognizing what a great job I did? That's just sick. I have watched them treat other employees and partners unethically, but it took getting it first hand to realize how bad it really is. My teammates were in shock when I said I was leaving as they have all leaned on me very heavily.
Fortunately, I have had several offers come in over the last few months (2 this week) for more pay. I only held off because of the lies I was told about receiving a raise and out of a false sense of loyalty. I'm not worried about my future at all, just angry at the way I was treated.29 -
A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.12
-
You is not gonna beliebers what just happened lol
So a couple weeks ago I earned a stress ball (300+ ++'s) I sent an email about it but never got a reply, so I decided to just forget about it. But then I just ranted (lastnight) about how its so hard to get a stressball. So I basically just said "fuck it i'll buy one". Then some dude comes along and is like "omg not until he shows us the bought one" so I'm like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and buy one...
Then I get an email confirmation from devrant store confirming my order for the bought stressball. And I notive that my spam folder has unread messages in it. i look inside the spam folder and what do I see?...
I see dfox replying to my free stressball request weeks ago lol. So yay, now I gets the 3 balls (or two - depending) lol omg, so many balls.17 -
I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.
But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.
So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.
So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.
So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.
Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)
So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.
I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now15 -
Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.
11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?
Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)
Day 3
No reply from HR yet
Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.
Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.
Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.
Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?
Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.
Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?
Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.12 -
1. Submit my resume, get an email asking to schedule an interview
2. Schedule the interview
3. One day before the scheduled time, I get an email saying that the interview is being rescheduled to another time two days later (no explanation for why they did this)
4. I clear out my schedule and wait for the interview call (it’s suppose to be at 2:30, but I wait like 15 minutes early because I don’t want to miss it)
5. I don’t get a call
6. At 3:00, I call the company and ask whats going on. They apologize and say my interviewer will call me back as soon as he gets back from lunch.
7. He doesn’t call.
8. At 4:00 I call them back. Apparently the guy who was suppose to interview me went home. I ask them wtf they are doing and if this is how they treat their employees. They said they would reschedule the interview and call me back once they did.
9. No one calls.
10. I wait a week, call them back, and am told that the funding for my position didn’t come through (what does that mean? You’re not hiring programmers to design the software for your billion dollar war machines anymore? Seriously?).
I’ve had it with this company. I don’t know if it was just this incompetent recruiting group or if this is a company full of scumbags, but I mean, really?1 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? So many things. Here is one...
Lead web developer had in the root of their web application config.txt (ex. http://OurPublicSite/config.txt) that contained passwords because they felt the web.config was not secure enough. Any/all applications off of the root could access the file to retrieve their credentials (sql server logins, network share passwords, etc)
When I pointed out the security flaw, the developer accused me of 'hacking' the site.
I get called into the vice-president's office which he was 'deeply concerned' about my ethical behavior and if we needed to make any personnel adjustments (grown-up speak for "Do I need to fire you over this?")
Me:"I didn't hack anything. You can navigate directly to the text file using any browser."
Dev: "Directory browsing is denied on the root folder, so you hacked something to get there."
Me: "No, I knew the name of the file so I was able to access it just like any other file."
Dev: "That is only because you have admin permissions. Normal people wouldn't have access"
Me: "I could access it from my home computer"
Dev:"BECAUSE YOU HAVE ADMIN PERMISSIONS!"
Me: "On my personal laptop where I never had to login?"
VP: "What? You mean ...no....please tell me I heard that wrong."
Dev: "No..no...its secure....no one can access that file."
<click..click>
VP: "Hmmm...I can see the system administration password right here. This is unacceptable."
Dev: "Only because your an admin too."
VP: "I'll head home over lunch and try this out on my laptop...oh wait...I left it on...I can remote into it from here"
<click..click..click..click>
VP: "OMG...there it is. That account has access to everything."
<in an almost panic>
Dev: "Only because it's you...you are an admin...that's what I'm trying to say."
Me: "That is not how our public web site works."
VP: "Thank you, but Adam and I need to discuss the next course of action. You two may go."
<Adam is her boss>
Not even 5 minutes later a company wide email was sent from Adam..
"I would like to thank <Dev> for finding and fixing the security flaw that was exposed on our site. She did a great job in securing our customer data and a great asset to our team. If you see <Dev> in the hallway, be sure to give her a big thank you!"
The "fix"? She moved the text file from the root to the bin directory, where technically, the file was no longer publicly visible.
That 'pattern' was used heavily until she was promoted to upper management and the younger webdev bucks (and does) felt storing admin-level passwords was unethical and found more secure ways to authenticate.5 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
* I send an APK so that my client can test*
My client: I can't install the application
Me: Did you download and install it from the email I sent you?
client: No I downloaded from the play store.
(In my mind: Why the fuck do you Download it from the play store? I fucking sent you an email to 3 of your fucking email addresses so that you can fucking test the fucking APK that I fucking fixed it for you! You fucking worthless peice of shit!)
But I reacted as: No no, you should download the apk from the email I sent. I've sent it to all your email addresses.
client: I can't find the APK In your email.
(In my mind: Wow! I just don't get it! How can you be so stupid? I'm just wondering how your company hired you as a 'director for X')
*I send him a Screenshot proving that the apk exists*
Turns out that this idiot doesn't know to use outlook for Android! He then logs in to his gmail and finds the apk.(Coz I had emailed it to his outlook and gmail accounts)
M just wondering, should I drop this guy? Or charge him 2x for this shit?7 -
I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.
Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.
Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!
I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.
My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.
Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.
Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.
Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.
"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?
But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?rant pages seriously load in 10+ seconds slower than wordpress too do i want insurance this badly? 10 trackers 4 ad networks elbonian devs website probably cost $1million or more too root gets insurance stop reading my tags and read the rant more bugs than you can shake a stick at the 54 steps to insanity more bugs than master of orion 313 -
I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.
Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"
2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.15 -
Got laid off on Friday because of a workforce reduction. When I was in the office with my boss, someone went into my cubicle and confiscated my laptop. My badge was immediately revoked as was my access to network resources such as email and file storage. I then had to pack up my cubicle, which filled up the entire bed of my pickup truck, with a chaperone from Human Resources looking suspiciously over my shoulder the whole time. They promised to get me a thumb drive of my personal data. This all happens before the Holidays are over. I feel like I was speed-raped by the Flash and am only just now starting to feel less sick to the stomach. I wanted to stay with this company for the long haul, but I guess in the software engineering world, there is no such thing as job security and things are constantly shifting. Anyone have stories/tips to make me feel better? Perhaps how you have gotten through it? 😔😑😐14
-
So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)
Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.
Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.
Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.
It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.
I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.
So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.
I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.
Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.
An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:
"please reenter card number to validate."
Bupkiss. Dead end.
OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.
One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:
"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"
One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:
With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.
So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.13 -
> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?
So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.
Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).
HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR
Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.
However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.
…What in the ever loving fuck22 -
It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.20 -
Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).
I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.
Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!
I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.
The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.
I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.
I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.
**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**7 -
tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining
So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))
This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"
Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.
Then shit starts to happen
I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)
So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.
Release day!
I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"
That is not true, not at all, in any way.
See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.
So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.
So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.
I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.
Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.
And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.
And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.
Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!
So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!13 -
Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.
Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:
"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>
So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"
Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?
Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"
Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"
Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"
Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?
Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level
ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.
=======
Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web
Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"
Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.
Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.
===
* For another Rails position
Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?
Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.
Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.
Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?
Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.
Me: This is a joke, goodbye.
====
To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.
I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)
I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.3 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...
Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]
Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.
[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]
Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.
May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.
[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]
Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.
[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]
Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.
Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.
On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.6 -
I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.
So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".
I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...
just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔
Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.
Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123
I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.
QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!
Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!rant cover every possibility always suspect the unexpected my problem now! not my fault 😅 data how dafuq was that even missed11 -
I was working as a contractor for a client who just got enough funding to hire a full-time dev. I lovingly referred to him as "Mr. Koolaid" because he was obsessed with whatever the newest hotness was and cried constantly about how the 3-year-old code-base didn't use The Next Big Thing(tm). This was my first interaction with him:
Mr. Koolaid: I'd like access to the github repository. My username is xxxx.
Me: We currently aren't hosting the code on github. If you send me your public ssh key, I'll get you access to the private server.
Mr. Koolaid: I'd like to access the github repository.
Me: It's not on github; send me your public key and I'll get you access.
Mr. Koolaid: Can we skype real quick? You don't need my public key to grant me access to the github repo.
*Mr. Koolaid proceeds to forward me github's documentation on adding users to an organization and the documentation for adding users to a private repo. The email is written in a very passive-aggressive tone.*
ಠ_ಠ9 -
Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!
So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..
Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?
Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.
Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕
Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?
Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".
Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question
Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.
After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically
I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂12 -
Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!
I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.
So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.
I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.
'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.
I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.
Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.
So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.
TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.
Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.
There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.
I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.
Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.
I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.
Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!28 -
Once, at my first job, the CEO of the company sent a group email in which he essentially lambasted my ability to do my job.
I wasn't even hired as a programmer, I was a data entry guy who learned how to code on the job, and at this point I was literally the only person writing code for the company. I regularly worked 12+ hours every day, and even though I had to learn practically everything on my own I was still getting things done -- at least, I would have gotten things done if the CEO didn't keep pulling me off of my projects to work on whatever his latest ultra-important-idea-of-the-week was. I was even working for an 8 hr/day, 5 day/week salary, putting in extra hours for free.
But no, my sacrifices and hard work weren't good enough in the CEO's eyes, and he chose to say that to multiple people in an email, including investors in our startup. I don't remember exactly what was said, but whatever it was made me so livid I couldn't do any work; every time I sat down to code, I thought about that email and it so infuriated me that I couldn't concentrate. It took me twelve hours just to calm down enough to get back to coding.
After that, I refused to communicate with the CEO except through my boss, the CTO.7 -
The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
TL;DR Setup computer for new guy @ office, he got mad about software he was missing that we weren't told he needed, so he complained to the director above our department and got us in trouble.
I work for a small company, in which the I.S. Department is 8 people (Manager Included). We do everything from setting up computers and fixing printer problems to writing custom software for in-house use. Kind of a "Renaissance Department" if you will.
So a few weeks ago we were asked to set up a computer for a brand new user, meaning he would need email setup, a domain account, etc. We were also given a (very) small list of programs he would need to do his job. No problemo, took me 30 minutes, and he was good to go.
Last week I met the guy because he was training at the general office and his training computer lacked a few tools. Since I was called to remedy that situation, I introduced myself, told him if he ever had any problems to let me know and I would get him fixed up.
Now today, 5/5/2017, 15 seconds after walking into the door of the department, I am pulled aside by my boss and asked if I setup up the new guys desktop, to which I proudly replied yes. Come to find out the (very) small list of tools we were told he needed was incomplete, so he was missing stuff (how the fuck were we supposed to know that). So what does the new fuck do? HE COMPLAINS TO A DIRECTOR ABOVE OUR DEPARTMENT SAYING THE IT GUYS DIDN'T SETUP HIS COMPUTER PROPERLY! Like holy shit dude, why not send me a fucking email like you did before telling me you needed stuff? I would have GLADLY fucking helped. Now I hope your computer catches on fire. Or you get fired. I'll take either one.2 -
M - Me
F - Family member
F: So you study computer science... Could you recover my Gmail login data? I don't remember my email address, password or security question. (7th request to me like that from the same person, they don't bother to write down the recovered pw)
M: I can't do it if I don't know any of the above
F: Wow, I thought you're a good student... Could you at least create a new account for me?
M: But you won't even remember the new... [gets interrupted]
F: So, are you going to talk trash or get to work? You would have already been 50% done
PLEASE I'M SO TIRED OF IT. HOW DO I DEAL WITH THESE OTHER THAN TELLING THEM WHAT I THINK ABOUT THEM. I SEEK HELP12 -
Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems
So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.
About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.
I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.
Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.
And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.
Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.
Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.
On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.
She doesn't have any access to the back end.
Guess I'll have to fix it then...9 -
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
How it is to be a dev in my country?
At bit of an odd question this week.
For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.
Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.
Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>11 -
When your primary Android app (with over 1/2 million total downloads) gets banned...
And all the email says is read these [links to] policies!
Back story: this happened to me back in 2011, no matter what I did there was no way to get in touch with a human at Google, I sure hope this process has gotten better! Having my app suspended with no way to fix and get it back is ridiculous!! This could ruin a business.
Over two years later, on a Google+ hangout with Google Android devs out of the Google London office, I said to them how silly it is that this happened....one of them asked me for the app ID, I provided, he looked it up in a system which then had a reference code which then related to SEO violation....wow I finally found the answer, how silly that an SEO violation (too many keywords in the app description) can get your app permanently suspended. What a shame. I wouldn't wish this on any solo developer trying to self learn and make something...
Sometimes I really just have to say "Fuck you, Google" out loud a few times.9 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.
Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"
Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."
BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW
Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."
Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"
Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine
Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT
Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.
Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.
Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.
10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.6 -
OK I can't deal with this user anymore.
This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.
I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"10 -
Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.
I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.
Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.
Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.
Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.
Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.
Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.
If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:
if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.
That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!
Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.
The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.
The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!
It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.
But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.
I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.
The whole thing is a fail.8 -
The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.
reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.
facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.
and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.
in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."
newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.
while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."
Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.
I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.
And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.
..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".
an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.
if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.
it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.
And so enters "political idealogy."
How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?
give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.11 -
Ive just bought a domain name for my nephew of now 36 hours old. Ive a really common lastname and it took me 8 years to get a domainname with my name in it.
By the time he is ten (or how old they will be when they get their first email address) he will have his own personalized email and when they learn the basics of programming he can use his own domain for his site.8 -
I love how the Keybase Linux client installs itself straight into /keybase. Unix directory structure guidelines? Oh no, those don't apply to us. And after uninstalling the application they don't even remove the directory. Leaving dirt and not even having the courtesy to clean it up. Their engineers sure are one of a kind.
Also, remember that EFAIL case? I received an email from them at the time, stating some stuff that was about as consistent as their respect for Unix directory structure guidelines. Overtyping straight from said email here:
[…] and our filesystem all do not use PGP.
> whatever that means.
The only time you'll ever use PGP encryption in Keybase is when you're sitting there thinking "Oh, I really want to use legacy PGP encryption."
> Legacy encryption.. yeah right. Just as legacy as Vim is, isn't it?
You have PGP as part of your cryptographic identity.
> OH REALLY?! NO SHIT!!! I ACTIVELY USED 3 OS'S AND FAILED ON 2 BECAUSE OF YOUR SHITTY CLIENT, JUST TO UPLOAD MY FUCKING PUBLIC KEY!!!
You'll want to remove your PGP key from your Keybase identity.
> Hmm, yeah you might want to do so. Not because EFAIL or anything, just because Keybase clearly is a total failure on all levels.
Written quickly,
the Keybase team
> Well that's fucking clear. Could've taken some time to think before hitting "Send" though.
Don't get me wrong, I love the initiatives like this with all my heart, and greatly encourage secure messaging that leverages PGP. But when the implementation sucks this much, I start to ask myself questions about whether I should really trust this thing with my private conversations. Luckily I refrained from uploading my private key to their servers, otherwise I would've been really fucked.1 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
So following from this rant:
https://devrant.io/rants/618679/...
Warning long rant ahead
I resigned and my last day is tomorrow, I've released the app updates a week ago, patched a couple bugs for iOS.
My boss and the idiot who can't open an email on his phone go off to use the app as part of some training thing for the company.
I got a call yesterday saying the Android app has issues and I proceeded to ask my boss what type of phone they have:
"Samsung and Huawei"
I thought okay I need more info "what type of phone..." He responds with wouldn't have a clue....
I can't see the phone, didn't get a screenshot or anything like that but I'm expected to just know what the phone is.
My boss goes on to say yeah it's the app (he is literally the most computer illiterate person I could think of aside from guy who can't open emails on phone, how the fuck do you know that?)
Me: "From all the testing I've done the app works"
Look if you want a more robust error free update hire more than one developer I can't test every single fucking use case to determine the app is 100% bug free, I've tested on at least 10 phones before releasing the update just to be absolutely sure I got everything done and okay I missed something.
So I proceed to get my boss to tell the guy who has the issue I'll sign him up to the testing app to find out the cause and hopefully fix the issue, I setup crashlytics send the email and get a call from my boss saying the guy didn't get the email.
Well okay is it my problem that we have two emails for the same person where one of them is a typo? No it's the guy who asked and wrote down the email instead of actually forwarding a blank email from him to be absolutely sure, I sent the email to both just to be on the safe side.
I swear if he is another idiot who can't open emails on his phone well I can't help him, app works on my phone and the phones at work.
I need a phone where it doesn't work so I can get a solution I know works but if I have to deal with these idiots that can't even check an email how the fuck do I do that?
Sorry about the formatting just needed to get this off my chest before I start work.
Oh and I get asked "so who'll fix the bugs when you're gone" well I can't (in reality I'm not working for free, I'm not traveling 1 1/2 commute time to fix one bug for free, go hire someone you think will love to work for minimum wage and let's see if this guy can do what I did)8 -
I think I nailed it.
I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.
It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.
Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.
Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.
They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.
Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.
Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.
I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀10 -
This fucking idiot at work needs to use the pre release version of the iOS app for a training programme, and I swear I have tried my best to best to help him get the app on his phone.
I use Fabric and I chose because of how easy it is to install on a persons phone, but this is the situation so far. Also he lives a couple cities away so I can't do it myself.
I had to waste time waiting for him to call me, beforehand I sent the email, maybe 5 minutes before his call and told him that he needs to find the email, he says oh okay alright well I'll contact you if I have any problems.
I waited a day and sent a follow-up email on what the subject, from email, and even what the email looks like with screenshots.
No response for 3 weeks, and I bring it up in a meeting that I need to help him again.
So it's a literal fucking repeat of the first step, wait for his call, this time close to the end of my work day and he's 30 minutes late for his own fucking schedule, I thought whatever so I say the exact same thing BUT expecting him to get it out of the way while I'm on the phone...
Waited two days and sent him an email today and since I forgot to mention it, I've told him that this is to REGISTER to get the app. Guess what his reply was.
Sorry I can't get it on my phone!
He can't get what a fucking email to open on his phone and follow instructions a small bipedal animal could figure out?
It's literally follow the fucking icon moving they have gifs showing exactly what to click...
So tomorrow I have to somehow not blow up and get this app on his phone, honestly I understand some people can have issues with technical things but I got a guy at work that has trouble with his computer all the time to follow my same instructions without me needing to say more than I'll send an email all you need to do is follow the instructions, he actually enjoyed going through it.
...I swear this guy is just not even bothering, and I made sure I sent it to the right email, also second call he told me he found the email..4 -
A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:
Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.
Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.
Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.
Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director
Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.
Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)
Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.
Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.
Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.
Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.
Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.
Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)
Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.
Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.
They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.8 -
So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!
However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...
DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.
Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.7 -
Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?
Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?
Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!
Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.
How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.
I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?
I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.9 -
Microsoft admits they were hacked. Explains how it worked and what happened. No big deal. companies get hacked. That's life.
Indirectly admits that all of their customer support agents have access to your inbox.
Cool. Deleting my Outlook email. Thanks guys.9 -
I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).
Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.8 -
In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.
I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.
I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.
THEY contacted ME.
Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.
So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.
I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.
So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company
What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?
During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.
I said $1500/month straight out.
keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.
Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.
The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more
And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.
Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.
OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?
After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.
During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.
They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.
So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.
What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.
Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?
Etc
Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!23 -
I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.
Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.
So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!
I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.8 -
I’m back for a fucking rant.
My previous post I was happy, I’ve had an interview today and I felt the interviewer acted with integrity and made the role seem worthwhile. Fuck it, here’s the link:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/889363
So, since then; the recruiter got in touch: “smashed it son, sending the tech demo your way, if you can get it done this evening that would be amazing”
Obviously I said based on the exact brief I think that’s possible, I’ll take a look and let them know if it isn’t.
Having done loads of these, I know I can usually knock them out and impress in an evening with no trouble.
Here’s where shit gets fucked up; i opened the brief.
I was met with a brief for an MVP using best practice patterns and flexing every muscle with the tech available...
Then I see the requirements, these fucking dicks are after 10 functional requirements averaging an hour a piece.
+TDD so * 1.25,
+DI and dependency inversion principle * 1.1
+CI setup (1h on this platform)
+One ill requirement to use a stored proc in SQL server to return a view (1h)
+UX/UI design consideration using an old tech (1-2h)
+unobtrusive jquery form post validation (2h)
+AES-256 encryption in the db... add 2h for proper testing.
These cunts want me to knock 15-20h of Work into their interview tech demo.
I’ve done a lot of these recently, all of them topped out at 3h max.
The job is middling: average package, old tech, not the most exciting or decent work.
The interviewer alluded to his lead being a bit of a dick; one of those “the code comes first” devs.
Here’s where shit gets realer:
They’ve included mock ups in the tech demo brief’s zip... I looked at them to confirm I wasn’t over estimating the job... I wasn’t.
Then I looked at the other files in the fucking zip.
I found 3 of the images they wanted to use were copyright withheld... there’s no way these guys have the right to distribute these.
Then I look in the font folder, it’s a single ttf, downloaded from fucking DA Font... it was published less than 2mo ago, the license file had been removed: free for Personal, anything else; contact me.
There’s no way these guys have any rights to this font, and I’ve never seen a font redistributed legally without it’s accompanying licence files.
This fucking company is constantly talking about its ethical behaviours.
Given that I know what I’m doing; I know it would have taken less time to find free-for-commercial images and use a google font... this sloppy bullshit is beyond me.
Anyway, I said I’d get back to the recruiter, he wasn’t to know and he’s a good guy. I let him know I’d complete the tech demo over the weekend, he’s looked after me and I don’t want him having trouble with his client...
I’ll substitute the copyright fuckery with images I have a license for because there’s no way I’m pushing copyright stolen material to a public github repo.
I’ll also be substituting the topic and leaving a few js bombs in there to ensure they don’t just steal my shit.
Here’s my hypotheses, anyone with any more would be greatly welcomed...
1: the lead dev is just a stuck up arsehole, with no real care for his work and a relaxed view on stealing other people’s.
2: they are looking for 15-20h free work on an MVP they can modify and take to market
3: they are looking for people to turn down this job so they can support someone’s fucking visa.
In any case, it’s a shit show and I’ll just be seeing this as box checking and interview practice...
Arguments for 1: the head told me about his lead’s problems within 20mn of the interview.
2: he said his biggest problem was getting products out quickly enough.
3: the recruiter told me they’d been “picky”, and they’re making themselves people who can’t be worked for.
I’m going to knock out the demo, keep it private and protect my work well. It’s going to smash their tits off because I’m a fucking great developer... I’ll make sure I get the offer to keep the recruiter looked after.
Then fuck those guys, I’m fucking livid.
After a wonderful interview experience and a nice introduction to the company I’ve been completely put off...
So here’s the update: if you’re interviewing for a shitty middle level dev position, amongst difficult people, on an out of date stack... you need people to want you, don’t fuck them off.
If they want my time to rush out MVPs, they can pay my day rate.
Fuuuuuuuuck... I typed this out whilst listening to the podcast, I’m glad I’m not the only one dealing with shit.
Oh also; I had a lovely discriminatory as fuck application, personality test and disability request email sent to me from a company that seems like it’s still in the 90s. Fuck those guys too, I reported them to the relevant authorities and hope they’re made to look at how morally reprehensible their recruitment process is. The law is you don’t ask if the job can be done by anyone.6 -
Email: "We just launched our new web interface! It's so much easier to use, and should make life a lot easier for our users."
Me: Oh good this thing has been unusable since I've been working here. How do I get on the new version? Better read on...
"Download this PDF for more information!"
Erm... ok.
In the (20 page) PDF: "Email this address@example.com to get the URL!"
ffs ok
email: "Thank you for emailing us, you username is benoliver999, your password is 'passow0rd' and the url is in this attached PDF
god help me
(50 page) PDF: "Remember to disable pop up blocker, ad-block and to install Flash"
Today I have started building my own version of this product so we can stop using these idiots.
As an aside, the username 'admin' also had a password of 'passow0rd'...4 -
Pattern I'm noticing...
*email* Hey, can you help me with my code, I don't know why it's not working...*end email*
no comments. if you wrote the shit and don't know what the blazes it's doing, how am i supposed to know what you broke? I'm not a mind reader, I don't know what you were thinking when you wrote the code.
true, I could go through and read it and try to figure it out, but then i'll be cranky and much less likely to want to help you in the future because you're causing unnecessary work, and part of my job is to get you ready for work environments, and I WILL DO EVERYTHING IN MY FUCKING POWER TO MAKE YOU THE ONE PERSON THAT EVERYONE DOESN'T HATE, BUT I WILL HATE YOU FOREVER BECAUSE YOU'RE PISSING ME THE HELL OFF.1 -
Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.
Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.
Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.
It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.
It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.
I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.
"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."
It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.
The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.
In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.
It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.
It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.
These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.
The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.4 -
LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.3 -
I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.
First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.
So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.
Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.
Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.
So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.
I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.
I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.
Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.
And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.
Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.6 -
Stop sending passwords in plain text via email. Just stop already. If you don't know how to implement a secure alternative, hire a fucking consultancy to assist you.
Fuck. The next time I purchase from you and I get my password in plain text anywhere, I'm immediately demanding a refund and taking my money elsewhere.
Just fucking stop.13 -
A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).
Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.
"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.
...
"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.
A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.
What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.
I did not get the job.2 -
One of the craziest misconceptions about the IT industry I had was ... "They are a company, so they have tons of money, I can ask for whatever setup I want and they will provide it".
I wrote an email to my boss about how my Core i3 and 4GB RAM laptop isn't powerful enough for LAMP stack development and I need a Core i7 16GB with GTX1080 graphics card laptop to get tasks done.
My boss must've had a good laugh at me.15 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
Oh my God...
A colleague of mine got an email. The email was badly translated into our language (probably Google translate was used) it said 'please open invoice attached'.
The anti-virus software successfully marked it as a virus, and did not allow my colleague to open attached 'invoice.exe' file.
Now by this point you would think that the person would just delete the email, but no. The colleague looked at me, and with the bitchiest voice said 'I got an invoice and can't open it after your anti-virus installation. Fix it!'
Needless to say, I had to explain, what a virus is and teach all the colleagues not to get hooked on scam mail... Took about 4 hours to explain this seemingly simple concept.
Fuck knows, how they did not nuke their IT infrastructure before I came here :/11 -
First year at university, prepared to set up multiple electronics.
rPi, arduino Ethernet shield, laptop, and desktop.
Brand new netgear switch to satisfy my internet surfing needs....
After setting up my devices, I realized none of them have internet. Hm. The feed port on my switch wasn't blinking either. So I tell the front desk, and a short 7 days later the port is back on. Yay, problem solved.
One morning I arise to see the port dark and inactive. Furious I use my laptop to share an internet connection while my actual port is "broken".
Support ticket is reopened and this time I get an email saying the port was disabled due to a security issue.
Me: what's the issue?
IT: there was more than two devices connected to the port
(OnLy TwO dEvIcEs PeR port???)
Me: oh okay I will only connect two.
The next day the port is disabled, again.
Me: can you tell me why it was disabled?
IT: a switch was detected being used, security error.
Me: how do I connect more than one device to the port without a switch???
IT: ...
IT: Please only connect one device.
🤔10 -
WTF, Google?! Get your shit together!! No one wants another GUI disaster makeover which leads us from bad to worse.
Every time I log into g+ or gmail, the whole flippin GUI has changed.. OK, it might be just my taste for simplicity, but I do not think a 'better GUI' should make you feel like an ape trying to code.. :\
If people with programming skills can't use it 'out of the box' & without googling stuff like "where did you hid the new email button", how the f do other people who are IT inept supposed to use it!? OR is it just me?! If it's just me, I'll shut up and love the new GUI.. otherwise: juck!!
#itSucksToBeOnTheOtherSideOfTheCode :\9 -
Recent boot camp grad here with a solid portfolio...holy crap...this industry is so illogical...got a call from a recruiter whose job needs 3 years experience. I demonstrated I know every single one of the requirements, have implemented them, know pros and cons, etc. She says OK I'll run it by my manager and see because we can't fill the spot and it requires 3 years but you meet all the qualifications. I get an email the next day, and she says sorry, we actually need 5 years...fucking face palm...I'll apply again in 5 years because that job will still be open. Really sucks that the only thing holding me back from landing a job is experience, not knowledge. No employer wants to touch me with a 10 foot pole...how long will it take be to find a job...jesus christ.13
-
Boss: "So I'm taking the next week off. In the mean time, I added some stuff for you to do on Gitlab, we'd need you to pull this Docker image, run it, setup the minimal requirement and play with it until you understand what it does."
Me: "K boss, sounds fun!" (no irony here)
First day: Unable to login to the remote repository. Also, I was given a dude's name to contact if I had troubles, the dude didn't answer his email.
2nd day: The dude aswered! Also, I realized that I couldn't reach the repository because the ISP for whom I work blocks everything within specific ports, and the url I had to reach was ":5443". Yay. However, I still can't login to the repo nor pull the image, the connection gets closed.
3rd day (today): A colleague suggested that I removed myself off the ISP's network and use my 4G or something. And it worked! Finally!! Now all I need to do is to set that token they gave me, set a first user, a first password and... get a 400 HTTP response. Fuck. FUCK. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!
These fuckers display a 401 error, while returning a 400 error in the console log!! And the errors says what? "Request failed with status code 401" YES THANK YOU, THIS IS SO HELPFUL! Like fuck yea, I know exactly how t fix this, except that I don't because y'all fuckers don't give any detail on what could be the problem!
4th day (tomorrow): I'm gonna barbecue these sons of a bitch
(bottom note: the dude that answered is actually really cool, I won't barbecue him)5 -
I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that some of my bosses and clients who want to constantly talk on the phone or meet in person aren’t saying that because it’s their preference. The are saying it because they legitimately don’t understand how to read an email chain.6
-
I tweeted a silly story about how I accidentally hacked my principal's email account when I was in middle school. (Yes, I did say "accidentally". The school network's security was that bad.)
Within minutes I had four replies telling me to contact people on Instagram to get my hacked account back. I guess I said the magic words and triggered some bots.
https://twitter.com/EmberQuill/...4 -
The cleaning lady saga continues...
(previous: https://devrant.com/rants/1850777)
Had an appointment with their manager, stuff gets discussed and coordinated at a 3x slower pace than if I'd done it myself (as usual because fuck efficiency when there's muggles involved -_-), yada yada.
*mail addresses for contact start getting discussed*
Incompetent fuck of a manager: And you $realName, your email address is $company@nixmagic.com, then changed to $nickname@nixmagic.com? Mind explaining this?
Me: Oh yeah that's just because I give out different email addresses to each contact person when it involves public forms or registrations, helps with spam prevention and putting the company name of the correspondent in there helps with easy recognition when some company's database leaks and I start getting a lot of spam on that mailbox.
IFOM: Really.. we actually weren't sure whether we should reply to something with our company name in it.. you know, not sure whether it's legit etc. Why would anyone want to use one of our email addresses as theirs?
… Let that sink in for a moment. They think that $company@nixmagic.com is theirs? Just because it's their domain (minus TLD) in front of MY FUCKING DOMAIN? How about you start by learning how email addresses work first, because clearly you have no fucking clue about it. Are you the kind of brainless fucks that get lured in by http://totallylegitbank.com.freehost.com/... scams? Fucking stupid piece of fucking shit.
Oh, and when you're using MS Exchange, of course you can't know that when you're having your own domain, you actually also own every fucking mailbox on it, because Microshaft doesn't allow you to have more than n amount of mailboxes, unless you gobble up money for them. But you know what, in my case it's a fucking catch-all domain running Linux on its servers, so yeah I can use whatever the fuck I want in front of it, including your stupid fucking cleaning company.
IFOM: And then there's your current designated email address. $nickname@nixmagic.com..
Oh you're going to criticise that as well?! Yeah condor is my fucking nickname all over the internet, and my username on all my systems. That's why I use it. But you know what else is an email address that you might come across, because people are shallow idiots like that? ILoveBigTits69@gmail.com or something like that. You know what, how about I address you next time from ILoveBigTits69_OhAndYoursAreAWashboard@nixmagic.com, because you know what? I CAN FUCKING DO THAT. But you know, I at least am halfway fucking professional about my business-related stuff, so I won't because I really don't want to be associated with such an email address. So don't you fucking dare to criticize me for using my fucking nickname instead of my real name.
Long story short, people are fucking idiots.6 -
Warning: long rant
I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm the only person who cares about their privacy
I try, as much as I can, to avoid surveillance. I use firefox, protonmail, duckduckgo, e2e encrypted chat platforms, avoid social media like the plague, and do everything I can to block facebook and google trackers on websites I visit
And it's exhausting
Each search I make means I waste another 30 seconds because duckduckgo doesn't pull the answer directly from webpages like google does
I get weird looks when I give people a @protonmail email address, and I have to explain what it is to them every fucking time
People ask if I have social media, and I either give them nothing or my Github account
And for what? Nobody else cares, no matter how much I explain how toxic google and facebook are to society.
They just say 'I have nothing to hide' as they scroll Instagram, letting Zuckerberg build an intimately detailed profile on them.
They just say 'so what' as they google memes from their chrome browser, allowing google to share that information with god-knows-who
If everyone else has given up their privacy for convenience, why am I still fighting a losing battle?
It feels like I'm fighting a war against big tech by myself, and I'm tired and about to lay down my arms12 -
So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.
My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.
You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.
Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.
I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.
I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.
The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊7 -
PSA to /[devs who things it's a good idea|management who thinks it's a good idea to force your devs]+/g:
There currently exists 1543 (and counting) top level domains. My email addresses follow the pattern: /^[a-z]+@panduro\.guru$/ and I die a little inside whenever I get told my email addresses aren't valid because you thought it was a good idea (to force your devs) to hardcode "valid" top level domains. There is a reason why the filter for input type email does not include top level domains.
And you can't even begin to comprehend how mildly annoyed I get when I message their support and tell them what the problem is (because I'm nice enough to do that) they instead of telling me "thanks for informing us we'll look into it" they tell me "well just get a gmail or something". I should not have to order social status reducing items with my school mail (especially not since I'll loose that email ¾ pairs of years)7 -
A year ago it took me hours to get SSL working on my Digital Ocean droplet I was using to host my website. I had no idea what I was doing and even though I 'knew' how to use the terminal and do most things, I wasn't confident or competent to only rely on the CLI.
About a year later (today) I get an email that my SSL is about to expire and needs renewed. Done and taken care of within 20 minutes, (with a 2 hour gap due to waiting for the cert authority to send me the zip of files)
All that time using i3 and moving to Linux is paying off. Maybe by the time I can afford to build my next desktop I can make my main OS linux7 -
If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.
Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it. -
Applying for jobs
Apply for anything that looks like I have any kind of shot
Get reply from one company
"Hi. What is your salary expectation?"
"x"
Nothing for 6 days
Reach out again "Hi. I'm guessing you've gone with someone else as I've heard nothing back"
"No your salary expectation was a bit high"
"Okay well, what are you offering"
"47% of X as this is a junior position"
Like...
Firstly, X is what I was making at my last job
Secondly, you can see how much experience I have. You know I'm gonna be asking for 2-3 year money not intern money.
Thirdly, all they had to do after my first email was reply with "That's bit much, here's what we can offer, are you still interested?"
So yea, in general, I hate the salary expectation question. I don't want to sell myself short but I'm also currently in the take what I get position. So if you ask me, I'm gonna tell you what I was last making. I think that was a reasonable number and I know everyone has been hit by the pandemic so I'm not asking for more.
Just advertise jobs with a damn salary range.
You know which jobs do have a salary range? The senior positions. You know who does know how to negotiate? Seniors17 -
I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.
Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.
But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle
There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.
So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:
Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.
Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.
The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!
The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.
Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.4 -
So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.
Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….
My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.
After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …
So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???
Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...
Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.
First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself16 -
tl;dr - My company makes me pass around code over email. Is this normal?
How we fix bugs at my company.
1. Simulate bug in dev env (ok, cool)
2. Get the required code from svn and make changes locally (so far, so good)
3. Deploy changes in dev env and test (yeah!)
4. Take screenshots of fix in action along with the files you've changed and mail it to the respective leads (really? send code via mail?)
5. Keep changing your fix based on feedback and keep repeating above steps (what!)
6. Once approval mail comes, check-in your code in the svn branch for deployment and testing in the test env (QA team)
My question to you fine folks is, is this normal? Is this how most companies work? Passing around code over e-mail? Where the different versions of your fix are just attachments in emails. Or have I committed a sin by being a part of this heinous act?9 -
A friend saw me on stack overflow and said 'wow, 4,000 points - you must do this all day.' I explained that I just do it to reinforce my understanding and not really for points(although those are useful for bounties). I showed them an account with 22k and tried to show how one might choose questions for maximum points vs quick solves for noobs etc. I write overly thorough answers to try and pin-point the blind spot as opposed to just fixing other people's code. It's not often rewarded by points. My friend - conspiracist - was convinced that the 20+k accounts were cheating the system.
At my old work we had a stack overflow account just for asking embarrassing questions that you didn't want on the company record. Silly, I know. Occasionally some of the guys would use it to have fake arguments or just cause trouble for fun / vote each other's stuff up.
So - I reached into 1Password and signed into that account and showed him that you could essentially vote up your answers but that it's not likely how people get points. I voted up my last 5 personal answers as an example and made some comment like 'that is right.' And that was that. Closed the computer. The next day my account was suspended and I was reprimanded for sockpuppeting. So, - in case you think you can get away with cheap tricks - you can't, which is nice to know - but after reading the email - my face was red for hours. How embarrassing! Not quite as bad as that time I got caught stealing a G.I. Joe action figure at the mall...2 -
A little background:
One thing I do is teach programming to kids. Normally it goes very well, but the past month and a half, I've had a class that has some extreme issues because of the school network. We're basically unable to do anything relevant to class because of their network firewall.
New boss starts asking me to get this resolved today. Which I've been trying to do now about five weeks. I told her, at this point our best bet is to just offer a refund if we ever want to have a class there again. She sent my suggestion that we refund this whole class to the CEO. This should get interesting.
The one thing I have on my side is my other boss sent out a company email talking about how I'm an example in a certain regard. Let's hope this supplies balance. But, I kind of doubt it...2 -
"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.
Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.
During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.
I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.
It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.
I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.
After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.
We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.
I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.
I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.
I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.
I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.
I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.
This is what burnout looks like.20 -
A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.
Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.
Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.
Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.
So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.
Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.
Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.
So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.
You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.
Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.
Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?6 -
For about 3x years now, we have had 3x generic work email addresses that are used as microsoft accounts for office 2016 licenses.
(The company is dragging its heels on getting office 365 so MS like to make our lives hell.)
Suddenly we can’t get office updates... and when we sign in to see why, it says that because we are apparently only 3 years old we need our parents permission to use the account or we’ll lose access by September.
Never were we forced to enter a DOB when setting the accounts up!!! So it used the account setup date instead.
It turns out that we can’t change our DOB ourselves, as we are a ‘child’ and need a parents permission.
Fine.
I access my personal account and follow the instructions to add the 3x email addresses as my children so i can change the DOB.
‘Ha ha’ i hear microsoft saying, ‘it doesn’t work that way!!’
No, In order for the parent to verify their child’s identity, they are charged 0.50c per child!
Wtf!!
Doesn’t cost a lot but come on Microsoft!!
It’s that, or submit ID, which obviously wont work for a generic support@ email address like we have.
So annoying and we don’t know what to do.
Wonder how much MS are making out of this...2 -
*on phone*
Friend: I want to add 100 contacts to gmail how do I do that?
Me: Add those in excel sheet and import it in gmail
*after 10 mins another call*
Friend: I deleted something in excel. How do I get it back
Me: Ctrl Z
*after 10 mins another call*
Friend: I added contacts to excel and emailed to you. Can you email me contacts so that I'll add to my gmail?
Me; I don't have these powers. You have to import in gmail.
*after 5 mins another call*
Friend: I uploaded contacts but I want it in on my iPhone
Me: Add gmail account to your iPhone. It will sync contacts.
Friend: I know we can do it on Android but is it possible on iPhone bcz Gmail is of Google right?
*hang up*1 -
Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.
Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?
Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.
So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.
The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.
Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?
Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.
At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.
And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.
So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!
Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!8 -
== Internship Interview Rant ==
This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"
He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?
So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !
Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.
And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.2 -
Most succesful project was around this time last year.
A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.
The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.
Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).
The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.
It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.
It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.
So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.
So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.
My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".
The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.2 -
I am a Windows person. I always argue how great it is.
Well, not today.
I was today years old when I learned that you CANNOT uninstall store app via store ;p You need to go to settings / apps and functionality / your app / uninstall
The photo app (Yes the one bundled with win10) doesn't work if you use Hard drive compression AND it is a symlink for OneDrive (So you don't need to keep all photos on the drive). Fucking Paint works without problems.
Email client : If you alt+tab too fast after hitting 'Send email", there is 50% chances that email won't be send. Basiclly you need to hit "send" and wait until you see it in "sent" folder.
Well, as i'm ranting, here for Linux too :
I have a small ubuntu server VM, worked very well for last 6 months. Now "System in read only mode". Fucking apt-get upgrade fucked with something. I don't want to look, so I'll just rebuild a fresh vm.
And macOS should take sometyhing too : Who the fuck decided "enter" is for editing the name of file ?! really !
Well, ALL os are shit, all have downsides, I need my own OS. But I still want AA games... So windows for me.25 -
Contact wants to discuss a list of projects with me next week.
What's the betting that these are unfunded ideas that need code?
I should just check by email, but it's been a while since anyone walked this path with me, so I'm up for some fun.
I see myself taking an advisory role in these projects for equity.
"First thing you need to do is obtain funding for them all. Then get back to me for my insights on next stage. Not sure how to get funding, but I'm not the the 'creative' side of the team."
Ideas aren't worth shit. I have a bunch every day and they are as worthless as yours.
Ideas without execution are like owning a book without reading it.3 -
The moment the first news article was published in my country about covid cases decreasing (it isn't actually decreasing btw), these motherfucking sweatshops just swarm in like a pack of fucking hyenas to open up and get their employees killed again.
What the fuck is up with this sweatshop bullshit attitude of "Devs won't work unless I micromanage them in person" you twats? My productivity has literally doubled the entire time I was at home.
And this sickening, narcissistic email about how we're supposed to enthusiastically go for work and meet our friends and increase productivity, yay, jesus fucking christ, my apartment has two ongoing cases. Try living in the real world some times you HR troglodytes. -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Yet another day at work:
My job is to write test libraries for web services and test others code. Yes I know to code, and have a niche in software testing.
Sometimes developers (whose code I find bugs in) get so defensive and scream in emails and meetings if I point out an issue in their code.
Today, when I pointed a bug in his repo, a developer questioned me in an email asking if I even understood his code, and as a tester I shouldn’t look at his code and only blackbox test it.
I wish I can educate the defensive developer that sometimes, it’s okay to make mistakes and be corrected. That’s how we deliver services that doesn’t suck in production.10 -
Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.
It's not.
Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?
Nope. Nothing.
Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.
"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."
*sigh*
So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.
Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!7 -
I am hating hating hating my junior developer job. Most of my work is updating PDF's on all type of internal intranets. So my days are spent working jira ticket after jira ticket.
Internal customer submits ticket to update 3 PDF's on internal intranet for sales team. They are named so badly I can't match them unless I review all 30 links on this page. Most links with report numbers but here's is not also no notes to where in the page.
I do JIRA comment --no respose even though I tag her.
I politely email her asking her to rename the PDF's with the same file names I am replacing.
She asked it I wanted her to rename them 'other'
What??? So I asked her where she sits so I can show how to easily find the file names in the URL.
Responds with the same files renamed with more description but still not the same.
Respond again giving better instructions on how to find it and second request to where she sits.
1 day later no response!
When I get into today I am closing her ticket!
Fuck these middle aged Midwest dumb bitches!2 -
Attention: incomming resentful boiled up for months rant.
Hands down G2APAY is the worst because:
Merchant account aproval takes fcking months. It starts with unreasonable delays in documents approval. I mean insane nitpicking. They want to see merchants name surname and address on every god damn document that you submit even if for example bank statement doesnt include these details. I had to manually edit pdf’s just so that they would fck off and approve the merchant application. Insane requirements for document check also combined with their email only support answering only once a week you will have to wait one month just to get your account approved.
Then you get to the fun part, approval proccess for vendor gateway and webhook integration. They are nitpicking everything you can imagine: about website not having https, website forum missing some icons, merchants phone number being from another country then he is, and bunch of other hundreds of problems imagined only by them. Again combined with their one email reply per week policy you will waste atleast one month to finish up your integration.
Now finally you are their client and you think you can chill and go back to focusing on your business? Nope bro. Prepare for threatening emails. Last time I got a request to install https or my merchant application will be shut down. I was given 3 days notice on a fcking friday and had to do it.
Then g2a backend is crashing quite often. Combined with their one email per week policy you are fcked in the ass if your users were not able to pay through g2a and you will get no compensation.
Their backend documentation is shiet. Not clear how to integrate everything and after you integrate they make changes without publishing any changesets. Your integration is working? Good luck if it will still be working tomorrow.
And the very worst part is that they stopped proccessing credit cards like month ago with zero notice. Its been weeks and still zero news about bringing card proccessing back. They sad that they were acquired by some other company so shitty support got even shittier now while they are in a proccess of handover.
So yeah thats the worst vendor I have ever seen in my life. For example integrating paypal took me 30 minutes. Integrating stripe and getting all documents reviewed took me one business day. Same with paymentwall integration and document approval took 1 business day. Support is amazing and even have a phone number that I can reach if urgent problems arise. Thats how it should be. Thats why I can pay percentage of my transactions with a smile for them.
Sorry for the typos since im typing on my shiet phone while driving.
Eat a bag of dicks g2apay. I hope you go bankrupt and shutdown.21 -
So here goes my first rant...
I was looking for a job as a software developer when I saw one nice company hiring.
I apply to them via their form online. Then they invite me to come to their event during which they will explain everything in details.
I go there (despite the time of the event being uncomfortable for me) and listen to them for a while. Basically, they say they will send the test task to all applicants and see how it goes.
Later same day they email me saying they didn't get my CV via their form and they need me to resend it so they can send the test task. Alright, no big deal, done.
Now today they email me saying "sorry, motherfucker, better luck next time".
What the actual fuck? I spend my fucking time to go to some shitty event saying a test task will decide everything to not even get one.
So, naturally, I go and re-check my email: I definitely did send them my CV;
seems like they ignored the email and eliminated me from the application process for not having my CV, fuckers.
If they will ever in the future invite me to an interview/offer me a job there, I won't take for fucking triple pay.
Thanks for reading and helping me vent my anger, have a nice day:)2 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
Why do the HR folks cannot be more passionate about their work. Everywhere I have worked, they don’t pay a lot of attention to how their processes affect their employees.
I had a Visa appointment along with my wife today. The appointment was scheduled couple of weeks back. The email with appointment schedule had the list of documents that we needed to carry.
There was one document which HR folks needed to generate themselves and share to me. Its basically the certificate of employment. Now, I had a Certificate of Employment from last year and I thought that would suffice. But then the Visa lady told me that they needed a latest one(generated in last 3 months). It was very weird for the Visa process since I didnt have to carry that certificate couple of years back. But anyways.
My issue with the HR people is that if there was a need to generate this document from their side, they could have already generated it and shared with me. But no, they will wait for something like this to happen. They will only do this when I had asked about it and then they would have generated the certificate and shared with me.
Similar experience in my previous company, when I moved to Germany couple of years back and the company had arranged for accommodation for me. The building where I had my initial temporary stay, had two entrances and only one of them had the elevator, which was at the back side of the building. My apartment was located on the 5th floor. Since there was no mention of the elevator in the email that I received from the HR folks, I had to carry 6 bags up 5 floors after my 12 hours of flight. It took almost an hour to get all of them up.
All of this could have been easily avoided if the HR folks were a bit more empathetic towards the people they deal with and tried making their life a bit more easy. A little note of elevator, or generating certificates automatically feels the lives of employees so easy and it really avoids a lot of hassle, both for employee and the HR folks themselves.3 -
PayPal = GayPal
PHASE 1
1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card
PAHSE 2
7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done
8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money
9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill
10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it
PHASE 3
11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY
12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal
13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:
"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.
As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."
PHASE 4
14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:
"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk
You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out
Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.
Do you understand?"
15. They reply:
"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."
16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?
HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?12 -
Strap in...
- Previous employer
- 3rd party partner firm
- integration link between both over SOAP
- Both sides riddled with poor code and messed up political structures (partner firm CEO is an investor in my employer)
- Doing a deployment to update to https (I know)
- Keep http endpoint live
- Other side starts shitting itself
- Diagnose
- Not us
- feelsgoodman.tiff
- Get angry email
- Explain not us
- Back and forth
- Tell client it’s “irrelevant” on https issue, it’s their side that’s gone wrong
- Get angry reply with boss cc’d about how nothing is “irrelevant” for the client
- We all had to have a make up meeting and meal
- Client was calm and reasonable, all agreed we just snapped and it wouldn’t happen again
- 2 weeks later
- Their system shits itself again and suddenly we’re on the hook
- BA on my team (smarmy little bastard) constantly fucking me off
- Get so close to actually screaming and hitting him
So yeah. I don’t tend to hold that a job is more important to me than my dignity.
I have and will never hold my tongue for the sake of a job, I’m not gonna put up with people shouting / belittling / backstabbing etc. -
Just now I was texting with my little sister, telling her how I'm doing, about that Foobar email etc... My sister replies: "Um.. foobar? Isn't that that place where you get your broken devices repaired?"
… It took me much longer than I'd like to admit to realize what bar she was referring to... Genius! XD6 -
I live in a 3rd world country so we don’t have a lot of technological advancements as compared to to developed countries. This means true technological talent is very rare maybe 0.01% of the people in the space, which in this case is programming. Why then do these dumb Fucks who didn’t even score good enough grades to attend any computer science related course which aren’t even that high, so high minded(pun may be intended). Seriously every time i meet someone somewhat capable in their domain e.g. mobile devs or frontend devs, talk like they can move the fucking world and change the course of humanity but when you ask them to pass down the knowledge you will receive a fuck u note of no reply. This pisses me off because I thought because of our slow progress in catching up with the world we would have communities that aim to expand the knowledge of everyone and help everyone help themselves.
I write this because I’ve attended so many meetups around my area and every time I ask someone for help to get to some enlightenment as they have the reply is always put down your email and I’ll send it to you and this is the last you ever hear from them.
The worst part is you’ll see them bragging on local forums about how awesome they are and see them poking holes at other peoples attempts. Seriously if you are so great why aren’t the tech giants of the world salivating over your talents.
Personally I believe that these people are afraid that once they pass the knowledge someone will beat them at it and they won’t be as “awesome” as they initially thought.
That said not everyone is like this we have some good eggs in the basket. To the others I would like to let them know that we can’t know everything and someone somewhere is always gonna be better than us, a candle never loses its light by lighting another candle. If you are one of these people please try and make a change. You never know what’ll come out of it.1 -
Not dev but I need to get it off my chest, first day back from holiday and I'm already stressed.
Today my company's travel agency made a mistake in my first name when booking me a flight. Once I received the itinerary and noticed the mistake I sent an email telling them and politely asking to have it fixed. They said they'd sort it out urgently.
~4 hours later
They changed my *last name* and now both first and last names are spelled incorrectly..
Seriously, how incompetent does one have to be to mess the very thing they were told to double check. -
I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).8
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In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:
If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3 -
First off murphy is a bitch. Week started off good, nothing bad happening then friday night came and i get an email about a site being down. Ok check it out real quick, cert is expired. No real big deal just a 20 minute fix, didn't bother me that i didn't get an expiry alert. Now is where murphy decided to be the biggest fucking bucktoothed cocksucker, generate a csr for a wildcard domain using an existing key and sent it off when i get it back the private key doesn't match the cert. Again ok maybe i fucked up, generate a selfsigned cert no fucking problem. Contact support to see if they have an idea. Oh now is when it gets fun, the fucking dumbass preceded to tell me how i didn't know what i was doing and how i just had to generate a csr and private key at the same time after i explained to the bastard that I've already tested it with a selfsigned cert. (How does this fucker have a job) By now apparently i was pissed off enough to scare murphy's pansy ass away cause i told the fucker to refund my money, got a list of 30 subdomains and setup letsencrypt on it. Now the part on this that is fucking hilarious is that it took me damn near 24 hours to be called a fucking idiot from a guy that doesn't know his ass between a hole in the fucking ground and 30 minutes of being pissed off more than i have been since i took anger management classes in the 9th grade to say fuck it and switch.7
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Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
I’m in a high-stress work situation where the organization is way too reliant on me to maintain day-to-day operations. We’re working on hiring a second person for my role, but it’s likely to take six months to find someone and get them on board.
And I’m afraid that I’m burning out now. I’m tired all the time and grumpy. Worse, in the last couple weeks I seem to be losing the ability to think. I’ll read an email and be unable to make sense of the words, or unable to figure out what to do with it – it’s just a blank white fog in my brain where I should have words and ideas and next steps. My productivity is less than half what it should be, and I’m horribly embarrassed and ashamed of myself.
I’m taking sick days and leaving work early when I can, which helps a bit, but not enough. I’m also doing all the recommended self-care stuff – diet, sleep, exercise. I’m scheduling a doctor’s appointment for next week.
I have a very good boss, which is the only reason I haven’t said screw it all and bought a one-way plane ticket to Tahiti. (I hear it’s a magical place.) Any thoughts on how to approach this with him? Under normal circumstances I’d try to arrange for some vacation time, but I’m afraid a week or two of rest isn’t going to fix the problem, just delay it a while. Any substantial amount of time off is going to really hurt my department. They may need to bring in someone to cover for me, which would be very expensive. I’m afraid it’d destroy my reputation as someone who can be relied on. What options do I have? What should I be doing next?1 -
I used to be a sysadmin and to some extent I still am. But I absolutely fucking hated the software I had to work with, despite server software having a focus on stability and rigid testing instead of new features *cough* bugs.
After ranting about the "do I really have to do everything myself?!" for long enough, I went ahead and did it. Problem is, the list of stuff to do is years upon years long. Off the top of my head, there's this Android application called DAVx5. It's a CalDAV / CardDAV client. Both of those are extensions to WebDAV which in turn is an extension of HTTP. Should be simple enough. Should be! I paid for that godforsaken piece of software, but don't you dare to delete a calendar entry. Don't you dare to update it in one place and expect it to push that change to another device. And despite "server errors" (the client is fucked, face it you piece of trash app!), just keep on trying, trying and trying some more. Error handling be damned! Notifications be damned! One week that piece of shit lasted for, on 2 Android phones. The Radicale server, that's still running. Both phones however are now out of sync and both of them are complaining about "400 I fucked up my request".
Now that is just a simple example. CalDAV and CardDAV are not complicated protocols. In fact you'd be surprised how easy most protocols are. SMTP email? That's 4 commands and spammers still fuck it up. HTTP GET? That's just 1 command. You may have to do it a few times over to request all the JavaScript shit, but still. None of this is hard. Why do people still keep fucking it up? Is reading a fucking RFC when you're implementing a goddamn protocol so damn hard? Correctness be damned, just like the memory? If you're one of those people, kill yourself.
So yeah. I started writing my own implementations out of pure spite. Because I hated the industry so fucking much. And surprisingly, my software does tend to be lightweight and usually reasonably stable. I wonder why! Maybe it's because I care. Maybe people should care more often about their trade, rather than those filthy 6 figures. There's a reason why you're being paid that much. Writing a steaming pile of dogshit shouldn't be one of them.6 -
tell my boss on Friday that I'll work through the weekend to get done work done on some python code.
he doesn't give out vpn access so I can't use our company git so I put the project on a flash drive to work on.
come into work and I have an email. on Sunday he did everything I said I was doing (and had done) and then refactors the entire repo so even if he hadn't done the work, all of what I did became useless.
His way is the only way. but good luck getting him to tell you how he wants it. you just have to do a bunch of work only for him to tell you he doesn't like the way you did things and then he does it himself.
makes me realize why their other programmers didn't stick around. because they had to work so closely with this guy.
glad I started looking for other jobs sooner then later.1 -
The hand of IT guy in family
My family sees me as guy who works on IT stuff. The best part is that I will have to help them whenever they encounter problem regarding electronics in daily activities.
Son! The internet is not working
Son! The printer is not working
Son! The TV is not working
Son! My phone didnt get any signals
Son! The microwave is not working
Son! The TV remote is not working
Son! Why is this whatsapp popup always appear whenever I opened it
Son! The dvd player is not working
Son! My phone wont charged
Son! I want to buy online stuff
Son! The email that ur uncle sent me cannot be opened
Son! The email that ur aunt sent me is not there
Son! Can u help me download this travelling app
Son! I opened a website and it told me that I have 163718362 virus!
Son! I forget my password of my facebook account!
Son! Some guy idk on facebook added me as his/her friends, what should i do?
....
Son! The internet is not working (again)
The fact is that, most if these problem, I helped them by just.. restarting the router, reboot the router for 1 min interval, find specific toggler in disfunctional hardware that they accidentally hit during sweeping the floor, take out the power and put it back again, show them how to's in many account/payment mechanism in apps, etc
The very best part that whenever they satisfied, whenever things back to work again, whenever they can reset the password:
"I've tried what you told me, but it just didnt work, but idk when u did it, it works! you are really an IT guy"
And i was like
🙃4 -
I've been using keepass for everything and just recently I've just come to realization of just how hard it is to get into my accounts now that I've done this.
Literally, I'm useless if i don't have a computer to get my passwords. (I know it's for android too, but i need the database)
I was trying to log into my spotify, but I couldn't remember my password. Then I thought, oh i know i'll just log into facebook and do it that way.
LOL JK you don't know the password
Fuck... what about my email???
LOL NOPE!
Seriously if i was held at gun point and told to log into anything I'd be dead. I've literally secured myself out of my own accounts...
I guess if there is any silver lining, it's that no-one, and I mean 'no-one' is getting into my accounts any time soon.9 -
Why don't people respond to emails? Everyone complains that things could be handled in an email instead of having a meeting. Well maybe you should start replying to my simple fucking questions so I don't have to send meeting notices. You always accept the meeting notices but you NEVER reply to emails! What the fuck people? Now I'm arranging a meeting for 15 minutes just to get a simple is yes or no question answered, are you kidding me here? You're part of the problem! You are THE ENTIRE problem!! You know how much of my time I've wasted getting no answers in IMs and emails?! Should I try smoke signals? It's not even a hard question! Will someone be at the site on the day we need them to be?! How hard is that question to answer!? Evidently im-fucking-possible!5
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Hi FuLlStAcKcLoWn,
I fOuNd A fEw ErRoRs On YoUr SiTe.
MaY i SeNd OvEr SoMe Of ThOsE eRrOrS aNd AuDiT rEpOrT wItH pRiCeS?
i’m LoOkInG fOrWaRd To YoUr RePlY
bEsT rEgArDs
god this is getting repetitive, how can we spam the spammers? wasn't there a site like "send your enemies glitter"? classic!
i guess this is what I get for putting my company email public
but really, what happened to gmail's spam filter? should spot ones like these from miles away7 -
I already wrote a rant about this yesterday, but since I'm a sysadmin trying to convert to dev.. I dunno, maybe it's not a bad idea to muddy the waters a bit and talk about why not to be a sysadmin.
Personally I think it's that the perceived barrier to entry is just too high, while it isn't. You don't need a huge Ceph cluster and massive servers when you're just starting out. Why overbuild an appliance like that if it's gonna start out at maybe 5 requests a minute?
Let's take an example - DNS servers! So there's been this guy on the bind-users mailing list asking how to set up a DNS server on 2 public servers, along with a website. Nothing special I guess - you can read the thread here: https://0x0.st/ZY-d. Aside from the question being quite confusing, there was advice to read RFC's, get a book, read the BIND ARM, etc etc. And the person to deny this? No one less than Stephane Bortzmeyer, one of the people who works for nic.fr (so he maintains the .fr TLD) and wrote some of those RFC's as part of the DNSOP working group in the IETF. As for valid reasons to set up a DNS server? Could just be to learn how the DNS works, or hell even for fun. As far as professional DNS servers go.. this (https://0x0.st/ZYo9) is the nugget that powers the K root server, one of the 13 root servers that power the root zone of the internet, aka the zone apex. 2 RJ45 connections, and a console connection. The reason why this is possible is the massive recursor networks that ISP's, Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, Quad9, etc etc provide. Point is, you don't need huge infrastructure to run a server!
Or maybe your business needs email. How many thousands of emails per second are you gonna need to build your mail server against? How many millions will you need to store? If your business has 10 employees and all of those manage about 10k emails total.. well that's easy, 100k emails total. Per second? Hundreds of emails per second per employee? Haha, of course not. Maybe you'll see an email a minute at most. That is not to say that all email services are like this - it is true that ISP's who offer email to their customers, and especially providers like Microsoft and Google do need massive mail servers that can handle thousands of emails per second. But you are not Microsoft or Google. So yeah, focus on the parts of email that are actually hard.. and there is plenty.
Among sysadmins you have this distinction between "professional" sysadmins and homelabbers. I don't mind the distinction itself but I think both augment each other. If you've started out by jumping into a heap of legacy at an established company, you will have plenty of resources, immediately high complexity, and probably a clusterfuck right away. But you will have massive amounts of resources. If you start out with a homelab, you will have not many resources, small workloads, and something completely new for you to build and learn with. And when running a server like that, you'll probably find that the resources required are quite small, to provide you with your new services. My DHCP servers take 12MB memory each. My DNS servers hover around the 40MB mark. The mail server.. to be fair that one consumes around 150. But if you'd hear the people saying that you need huge servers.. omg you need at least a TB of RAM on your server and 72 cores, massive disks and Ceph!1!
No you don't. All that does is scaring people away and creating a toxic environment for everyone. Stop it.1 -
(Part 2/2?)
THE RAT-RACE ARC:
I get a mail 2 months into this fiasco telling me to register on their website and take up another test. I was already over with my emergency and was working my full-time default. (Fortunately I found another internship during this time which was one of the best initiatives I've worked with).
It asks me to register as a new user, take up the test and "share" my results. Not pushing it on insta/fb but legitimately share my test results link to my friends manually like a referral code. The more shares the more marks I'll get in the test. Why the test you ask. Of course to sign you up for the same Whatsapp trickery bullshit.
Luckily these nutcases didn't know they could be bypassed. I simply opened the link in incognito and logged in with my own account and that counted as a point. So I automated that shit.
Surprise surprise. The same fucking "Hello everyone" message into my mail. To my surprise I was relatively lucky to get ghosted after my attempt. This story is quite depressing in general cases. You're supposed to do this assignment shit for 2 months and then they ask for 2000 INR for a training period, past which you are paid between 1000/- and 7000/-. Though I didn't get the chance but I'm willing to bet you get 1000/- per month in a 2-MONTH INTERNSHIP. WTF.
You also have the other option of ranking first in their 3 consecutive competition that they hold. The theme is again to create chunks of their actual outsourced work.
WHY NOW:
The reason why this rant sparked is because I recently received an email with my results of the aptitude exam that I first took before the Whatsapp fiasco. I imagine they just pushed out a new update to their test thingy and forgot to set it's limit.
THE CORRECTION ARC:
I pushed this message to Internshala. They were kind enough to remove them from their website. I also shot down their Angel and Indeed listings. I sent a strongly worded email counting their con-artist operations and how I've alerted authorities (obviously a bluff but I was enjoying it). They most probably are not affected by this though. They might still be continuing their operations on their website.
I'm sharing the story here with the moral of:
Don't do jackshit if they're not compensating you for it
Always check for reviews before you start working at a place.
Be cautious of bulk messages (and the infamous HEY GUYS!! opening)
Don't do anything outside your work specification at least while doing an assignment.
You're free to question and inquire respectfully about the proceedings.
If you're good at your job you'll get good working place. No need to crush yourself with an oppressive job due to external restrictions.
And if you manage a company, please don't take advantage of helplessness.
There's no good ending to this tale as I have not received a follow-up. Though I want to see scumbags of their calibre shot down without remorse.
Good bye and thank you for listening.2 -
Asked to do reporting on all of our workstations and servers patching compliance. Invited to team meeting with head administrator which should know where this data is stored and how to get to it. After five minutes can already tell this guy is all talk and has no clue about anything. To make matters worse he has a list of certifications and qualifications in his email signature. I figure out on my own where the data is, how to get access to it, and build reports which show just how terrible the head administrator is at patching and in general just useless. Roll forward two months, his boss comes and tells me useless admin has been let go and that I'll have a new admin to work with that actually knows stuff. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET HIRED!?
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WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??! I LITERALLY GET SPAM MAILS EVERY 5 MINUTES (i know I know, some of you get more than that) ABOUT BITCOIN. I NEVER DID ANYTHING FUCKING RELATED TO CRYPTO CURRENCY! HOW DO YOU KNOW MY EMAIL?? LIKE WTF. I'm sitting here doing my stuff and every few minutes my phone starts ringing and I'm like "hey maybe person x answered or something else important happened" but when I actually look at it to see whats up it's just a fucking email about bitcoin being outdated and it tells me to maybe invest into other crypto currencies. After actually reading one of the spam mails because I was interested in what they actually want from me I had to find out that they do not even mention any other currency or website. WTF INTERNET?? WHAT DO YOU WANT?2
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Can anyone tell me how to become less resentful and less bitter? I am becoming a miserable fuck. Its true that I burned out in this job after doing 100hrs overtime during previous month, its also true that I am pissed off about having to wait 8-9 weeks for my raise to happen. I cared so much that I burned out and now Im trying to set some boundaries but damage was done and Im struggling dealing with it.
I took 6 days off to disconnect from work (still was responding to some major blockers and monitoring stuff). Today I got back at work and interacting with two incompetent devs immediately sets me off. Imagine taking 2-3 days and extra meetings to do a simple fix which shouldnt take longer than 30min. My mind was blown and still gets constantly blown about how ineffective some members of team are.
I am becaming a ranting fuck. I even noticed one person escaping my rants once he sees that they are taking longer than 5min.
Right now I started setting boundaries - I clock my 8 hours, disable slack/email notifications and get the fuck out from the office. I dont care if I will have to sit in traffic extra 30min during summer heat, Im done with putting in overtime and caring so much about being efficient. I will just start working on my side project and put my love/learnings in that. Hoping that by the end of year I will have couple projects to show in my portfolio so I could find a better paying job...
In the past I was the sole dev responsible for apps and I was communicating with ceos/ctos/product owners/designers directly. This is my first position where I work in a dev team and boy oh boy out of 8 devs barely 3 are competent enough but their output is how to say... Not the biggest. Anyways...
Transition to boundaries and 'normal life' is so hard. Nobody told me that I will have to learn to work with and tolerate such retarded and incompetent people. Im talking about illiterate monkeys who cant even read or write. Im amazed how they manage to code.8 -
Thank God it's Friday and my brain is toasted from this specific email to IT department which I had to call to get more details. Here are the parties involved.
1) Original sender (OS), 2) Sender to IT (SIT), 3) IT (Me)
SIT: Can someone from IT print this for OS? She's having issue printing.
Me: It's just an image file in the email. What issues is she having when trying to print?
SIT: Idk. She said she's having issues printing.
Me: Yeah, but what issue? She can't connect to printer, the file won't open or what? Can you ask her what the issue is?
SIT: *hold on...comes back... She just said that again..issue printing..
Me: Well, we need to know what issues it is so we can fix it. In that case she can print and not keep sending documents or files to someone else to print. Btw, did you try printing the image file?
SIT:Since she said she's having issue printing I figured to send to IT to fix the issue and print. I didn't print it.
Me: 😕😂🤔🤨😒..what? First of I still don't know whatever issue she is having. Second, you should try printing it and if you also have issues, let me know.
SIT: Ok how?
Me: *shows her how to get
SIT: Thanks it printed. Now I'm also wondering what issue she was having because this was easy to print..
Me: Can you transfer me to her phone?
Now pay attention here. She is SIT's boss.
Me: Hi OS, what issue are you having when trying to print the image file in your email? I'd like to fix it so you don't encounter that issue from now on..
OS: No issues. I was too busy to do it so I asked my secretary to do it.
Me: So you can print image files with no issues, correct?
OS: Yes.. actually I just printed my a picture my daughter sent me.
Me: Ok, have a nice..
*I call SIT back
Me: She's all set
SIT: Thank you so much fo fixing her issue.
Me: She didn't have any issue. She can print fine..
SIT: WTF!?!
Me: Have a good day, SIT..
😂😂😂😂 I was WOWED!!!6 -
Mozilla really knows how to nudge one to not use email encryption by default.
Since Thunderbird has native support for OpenPGP encryption, i can only chose to encrypt all or no messages by default. There is no opportunistic mode and there are no per-reciepient encryption preferences. The Enigmail addon had both.
So i obviously have gone for encrypt-by-default.
But since then, whenever i want to send a message to the majority of my contacts, i have to manually disable the encryption or get annoyed by the no-key-found dialog.
I thought, i would get the muscle memory to just disable encryption for recipients for wich i don't expect to have a key.
But they also made the GUI so i have to open a dropdown and then click on the right item to do that. All the items basically look the same, as there is no color coding or specific icon for them. The item labels are also too long for unconscious pattern recognition.
So i didn't got that muscle memory.
I now have turned off encryption by default and will probably forget to enable it for some emails wich i actually could send encrypted...4 -
Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.
Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.
Thinking how this feature came to be....
1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!
I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.
**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.
Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP
HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.
IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....
Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...2 -
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 -
Is it OK to punch a game dev who codes stupid numeric bugs?
So my wife got into Stardew Valley, that admittedly awesome comfort game farming simulator.
She went pretty far in the game, and found some item that was supposed to highly increase the damage she could inflict onto cute little monster thingies.
It didn't work as intended.
Since equipping the piece of shit all her hits did 0 damage. She tossed the item away but the problem persisted. And on and on...
She took to the googles to try and find some explanation, and apparently that is a fairly common bug for mobile devs.
Then she called in the big guns (that is how I'm calling myself in this case, you will see why).
Apparently there is some buggy piece of shitcode somewhere in the game with a numerical insecure routine that overflows the attack modifier. I.e. if it was supposed to increase from 1.990 to 2.010, it actually went all the way down to -0.4.
She was lucky her attacks weren't increasing the monsters' HP.
We found a forum post where some dude said that he managed to edit the game save file and reset the negative-value attack increase modifier variable. Seems easy enough at first, but my wife uses iOS. Nothing is ever so straightforward with apple stuff.
We did get to the save file, she emailed it to me (the file has no extension and no line breaks in it, so we facepalm'd on a couple attempts at editing it directly).
I finally manage to get it into my personal 11-yo laptop... that won't open a single line file that big.
Cue the python terminal. Easy enough to read the file into a string var and search for the buggy XML tag. Edit the value and overwrite into a new file. Send it back to her by email. Figure out how to overwrite the file in iOS.
Some tense moments while the game reloads... and it works!!!! Got some serious hubby goodwill points here.
Srsly, this troubleshoot process is not for technophobes. It is out of reach to pretty much every non-techy user.
And now back to the original question: If I ever manage to find the kid who coded a game-breaking numerically unsafe routine and shipped it as if every test in the planet had waved it bye-bye, can I punch them? Or maybe buy them a beer, let's see how I get to cash that hubby goodwill tonight :)7 -
Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.
Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.
So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!
I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.
Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.
I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.
Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".
To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.
OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.
Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.
In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.
OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.
At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .
After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1! -
Just writing this because i’m stressed as fuck and i’m currently having my second sleepless night in a row...
Like i mentioned earlier i have 4 projects on my name. Two are on a real tight deadline, the other two are smaller, more support like issues.
Last week i got asked basically to get about 20 storypoints done in two hours by my Scrum master. Ehh no. Impossible. Wish i could do magic...
Yesterday i had to make a quick hotfix between the two bigger projects. Tried to reject this but had to do this any way. (It was basically the clients fault/content)
Also, f’d it up because there are current changes that are ready for deploy but haven’t been approved yet.
Do i get a f’ckin email this morning about how the progress wasn’t followed and the git permissions aren’t right.
You fucking twat! If i i did have ANY freaking minute in my planning to actually take the time for this damn hotfix this didn’t happen any way! You’re fucking restrictions only make things harder you goddamn motherfucking morron!8 -
Rant against a new religion: the Agile Religion, started by the Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org
This manifesto is as ambiguous and open to interpretation as any religious text. You might as well get advice from a psychic. If you succeed, you'll start believing in them more. If you don't, then they'll say you misinterpreted them. The whole manifesto just re-states the obvious with grandiloquent words.
For example: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." What does this say REALLY? To me, it just says "deliver software, try to be fast." Great, thanks for re-writing my job description. Of course, some features take "a couple of weeks", while others "a couple of months". Again, thanks for re-stating the obvious.
"Value *working software* over _comprehensive documentation_"
Result => PHP
"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
I'm okay with this one as long as the managers also `welcome the devs changing deadlines, even the night before the release date`. We're not slaves; we're more like architects. If you change the plans for the building, we're gonna have to demolish part of what we've already built and re-construct. I'm not gonna spring just because you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.
"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."
Daily? Fine. ONCE a day, sure. But this doesn't give you the right to breathe down my neck or break my concentration by calling me every couple of mintues.
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
- Not if you could've summed up that meeting in an email.
- Whereas that might be true for clarity, write that down.
"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
... is how you get a tech debt the size of the US's.
"The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Have you heard of vacations?
"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
So you're telling us "do good". Again, thank you for re-writing my job description.
It's just a bunch of fancy babble, more suitable in poetry than in the dev world. It doesn't provide any scientific evidence for any of its supposed suggestions, so I just won't use it3 -
So I got in contact with a recruiter who said they have a possible job for me. The catch is it's in c# (I am a python java dev) and that there is a assessment test for the language to test for competency. I told the recruiter that's fine but I would need a week to highlight the main differences between the two languages and at least do a couple of educational programs for my learning sake. All was fine and that was the plan.
The next day the recruiter notifies me that the test is being called off on account of the company being swarmed. So the recruiter then proposes another similar test (in c#) the recruiter will use to measure my skills and that the recruiter will send the test via email that same day. Later that day I check my email and don't see the test. So I message the recruiter and never get a response. Next day comes and I decide to give the recruiter a call; no response. I then wait until the next day and message him on linkedin that I still needed the test. Linkedin was showing he read the message, but of course didn't respond.
I told my brother about this and he said to send a message saying: "Hi [recruiters name] because of the lack of further feedback I decided to go with another opportunity. Best regards, Lane"
After I send it I get a message the next day from the recruiter saying: "Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you. We had to install a new phone system yesterday so it was a busy day."
"I'm going to send it to you today so that you can look at it over the weekend. "
I can't help but think the recruiter is full of shit, but I may be jumping to conclusion. I know they can have a busy schedule, but if you have time to look at a message on linkedin how long would it take to type a short message explaining what's going on? I would like to know any opinions or insights on this.10 -
tl;dr. web hosting && a panic attack && security threat
i wasn't sure whether my brother's domain was hosted or not (because it wasnt showing a website and he didnt know any better).
so i decided to host a react-app for it on netlify and pointed the domain's nameservers towards it (a separate security threat at bottom).
all went well and now when you punch in the domain it ..all-behold.. shows a website.
NOW, i remember my brother was using the domain's email which probably means it was hosted, right?. so im panicking because im not sure whether i just deleted all his emails or not because it's 1:15 am and he's asleep.
there is a rant in there somewhere but im in too much of a shock as to how much data i might have just accidentally deleted
.
.
another tl;dr: my domain registrar let me change someone else's settings..
the reason i didnt know his domain settings is that he didnt know his password.
i had bought a couple of domains and was gonna host them on netlify. while i was doing this a bright idea hit me.. "you should finally build a website for your brother for the domain he bought 7 years ago"..
this is where the fun begins.
i sent an email to my registrar to point all nameservers of all domains to my nameservers and just to try out i included my brother's domain into it (i dont own this domain it's not registered by my email), and the next day i get an email telling me they've successfully made all changes.
.
Now tomorrow is monday and i'm going to their office to tell them i found a security flaw and see how long i can stall before actually telling them what it was and how their live's could've been made hell.3 -
just found out a vulnerability in the website of the 3rd best high school in my country.
TL;DR: they had burried in some folders a c99 shell.
i am a begginer html/sql/php guy and really was looking into learning a bit here and there about them because i really like problem solving and found out ctfs mainly focus on this part of programming. i am a c++ programmer which does school contest like programming problems and i really enjoy them.
now back on topic.
with this urge to learn more web programming i said to myself what other method to learn better than real life sites! so i did just that. i first checked my school site. right click. inspect element. it seemed the site was made with wordpress. after looking more into the html code for the site i concluded all the images and files i could see on the site were from a folder on the server named 'wp-content/uploads'. i checked the folder. and here it got interesting. i did a get request on the site. saw the details. then i checked the site. bingo! there are 3 folders named '2017', '2018', '2019'. i said to myself: 'i am god.'
i could literally see all the announcements they have made from 2017-2019. and they were organised by month!!! my curiosity to see everything got me to the final destination.
with this adrenaline i thought about another site. in my city i have the 3rd most acclaimed high school in the country. what about checking their security?
so i typed the web address. looked around. again, right click, inspect element and looked around the source code. this time i was more lucky. this site is handmade!!! i was soooo happy because with my school's site i was restricted with what they have made with wordpress and i don't have much experience with it.
amd so i began looking what request the site made for the logos and other links. it seemed all the other links on the site were with this format: www.site.com/index.php?home. and i was very confused and still am. is this referencing some part of the site in the index.php file? is the whole site written inside the index.php file and with the question mark you just get to a part of the site? i don't really get it.
so nothing interesting inside the networking tab, just some stylesheets for the site's design i guess. i switched to the debugger tab and holy moly!! yes, it had that tree structure. very familiar. just like a project inside codeblocks or something familiar with it. and then it clicked me. there was the index.php file! and there was another folder from which i've seen nothing from the network tab. i finally got a lead!! i returned in the network tab, did a request to see the spgm folder and boooom a site appeared and i saw some files and folders from 2016. there was a spgm.js file and a spgm.php file. there was a contrib, flavors, gal and lang folders. then it once again clicked me! the lang folder was las updated this year in february. so i checked the folder and there were some files named lang with the extension named after their language and these files were last updated in 2016 so i left them alone. but there was this little snitch, this little 650K file named after the name of the school's site with the extension '.php' aaaaand it was last modified this year!!!! i was so excited! i thought i found a secret and different design of the site or something completely else! i clicked it and at first i was scared there was this black/red theme going on my screen and something was a little odd. there were no school announcements or event, nononoooo. this was still a tree structured view. at the top of the site it's written '!c99Shell v. 1.0...'
this was a big nono. i saw i could acces all kinds of folders. then i switched to the normal school website and tried to access a folder i have seen named userfiles and got a 403 forbidden error. wopsie. i then switched to the c99 shell website and tried to access the userfiles folder and my boy showed all of its contents. it was nakeeed naked. like very naked. and in the userfiles folder there were all, but i mean ALL files and folders they have on the server. there were a file with the salary of each job available in the school. some announcements. there was a list with all the students which failed classes. there were folders for contests they held. it was an absolute mess and i couldn't believe it.
i stopped and looked at the monitor. what have i done? just to learn some web programming i just leaked the server of the 3rd most famous high school in my country. image a black hat which would have seriously caused more damage. currently i am writing an email to the school to updrage their security because it is reaaaaly bad.
and the journy didn't end here. i 'hacked' the site 2 days ago and just now i thought about writing an email to the school. after i found i could access the WHOLE server i searched for the real attacker so if you want to knkw how this one went let me know in the comments.
sorry for the long post, but couldn't held it anymore13 -
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 -
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.10 -
Currently working on a web platform for a building management company for the last 6 months.
Setup web server, database and developed the whole using laravel and vue.
They are in the testing phase now, so I implemented IPSec so that they can only access it from their office.
Thing is, they don’t have a static IP, so when they had to switch over to a backup connection yesterday, I had to add their new IP in my whitelist.
Today I get and email from their manager, saying that after a discussion he had with his assistant, the web app is not in the “cloud”!!! He got that because I had to “do something” to restore access to it yesterday and because “there isn’t an icon you can double-click” on each employees’ desktop!!!
Don’t even know how to respond to that!!!5 -
Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".
hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.
Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.
so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```
I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.
Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.
To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.
Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.
Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.
After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.
Sometimes I hate my job.4 -
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 -
Sometimes we woulg get a request which involves adding something or changing something to a rather large and poorly made codebase which me and my lead have not had the time to change.
This b how shit goes:
* the lead gets a call after an email was sent with apparently only 5 secs of response time( inpatient fucks)
* lead calls me in next to his station to listen to the call
* i b listening and shit, not even taking notes and shit, looking all secret weapon and shit.
Texas as fuck.
* lead puts shit on hold and looks at me
Lead: "Allright. You know the codebase as well as I do, what you think?"
Me: pffft gimme 30 mins and Ill whip out yo solution
Lead: we positive on the estimate?
Me: as positive as the Texas Rangers sucking ass but we still love em, fuck the Astros
Lead: there is only room for one team
Me: only one
**fist bump
* goes back to the call:
Lead: yeah its gonna take 2 days at most.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we do finish them in 30 mins. The trick is in doing it extra fast so we have enough time to fuck around or do some other shit and to make it seem like we do some hard shit. After maybe 6 hours we tell them that we managed to fix it before time.
Texas....as....fuck
Btw me and the lead tall about whatever while we code the stuff, most of the time I do it since my boy has heavy eye problems and I want him to relax. He has been training me a lot in regards to knowing the codebase, before I got here it was only him for two fucking campuses and the man did an outstanding job. My boy got my ass and I got his.
Teamwork, the southern gentleman's way.
Texas.
P.d while coding it he said the one of the file sizes was too big to handle, i said "das what she said" and our female manager said "i heard that".......i could have sworn that she gave me a lil wink. Well damn.8 -
At my institution there is a sys admin that belongs to an entirely different department. They have their own systems on their own network, separated from ours. I do not care, nor do I mind at all, but this is the second time I've had to put their admin in his place.
The first instance was when we had a security firm gauge our systems for vulnerabilities etc. The one that they have was fine, but required some additional configurations on their Tomcat servers. The "sys-admin" contacted I.T (my department) in order to request assistance, the net manager was the one he contacted, and he told the dude that he is not familiar with the Tomcat environment that they have, but that I, the dev manager, would possibly give him some pointers. The net manager is my friend, and he knows how much of a dickhead I am, so he was careful in what he told him. So the dude calls me:
"Hey, I need some items fixed on my Tomcat servers, they told me you have to do it"
Me: "Who? those are your servers"
Him: "The net manager said that you would do it"
Me: "I am certain he didn't tell you that bud, no one here will take care of your servers, they are yours, I am not doing any configurations on your stuff, that is your job"
Him: "Can't you just do them?"
Me: "No, bye"
The little bitch escalated it to my department director, who told him exactly the same thing, the director did ask if I would be willing to assist, I told him no since even though his configurations were minimal, I was not going to put myself in the position to which that fucker's ineptitude would cause him to point fingers at me, director backed me up and told the fucker to deal with his own shit.
This year it came to my attention that not only do they have their owns servers, but their own SSO system. This moron contacted me, tagging VPS and such in the email to tell me that I had to configure his SSO because "they told me you had to do it". The same shit happened, but this time I put him on blast during a meeting and told him that as "sys admin" for his stuff it was his responsibility to deal with the SSO that they have, and to contact the vendor to ask for the specifications. In front of EVERYONE he asked me if I could do it for him, I fucking looooooooled and told him that he just admitted to not being able to do his job (for which he is paid handsomely) in front of the entire room of VPS. One VP asked me why I was not willing to help him, and I told the VP that it would be the equivalent of me taking his vehicle for services, it is not my vehicle, thus not my responsibility. The VP agreed and told the fucker to get on with it and do what I said: contact his vendor channels to figure it out himself since it was indeed his position.
Yet again he said that he didn't know about SSO configs and that he was "told that I would do it", everyone asked who the fuck told him that and he said that the vendor, they asked again how it was and he showed the message from the vendor telling him: "Have your SSO admin perform the following <bla bla bla bla>" they asked him who was the manager for the SSO that they had. He said that it was him. Then they asked him what logic made him believe that it should be me, he stated again "they told me it was him".
I could hear everyone's brains shortcircuiting as no one could believe someone would be this fucking dense.
I don't think he will continue to have his job for much longer. I understand not knowing something, and I would have been happy to give pointers since I do administer systems of that level, but I can't with the whole made up "they said he would do it"
Bitch who said that? just say that you want me to do it because you can't, I mean, I am still not fucking doing it, but damn. Fucking morons man.5 -
I'll try to pay back some smaller credit by one large credit...
Hence I need to contact the banks and get one (!) fucking frigging stupid piece of paper which lists the account number and the amount of money I need to pay back.
Sounds simple ...
Well.
One bank just answered my email request by sending me that piece of paper. Except they didn't have any validation of my identity.
Yes. They answered the request of 'I want to pay back the credit in full, can u send me the necessary documents?' (more formal of course) with confidential data without any more credibility than my email address.
YAY.
Another bank requests a telephone call for identity validation and sending back a signed form via postal service...
Another bank just needs a PDF sent via mail with an electric signature (yeah. They were aware of what that means - I was shocked and confused) or a "qualified signature matching previous documents" (translated from German).
The last one offers a WhatsApp number - send a GIF / JPG or video and we answer directly.
I need to reach a higher state than drunk.
It's not funny to know how confidential data gets mistreated by companies who should have the highest security.4 -
Brave Browser.
There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.
Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:
Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”
If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.
But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:
“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”
Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.
In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.
Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.
I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.
There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.
In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.
Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.15 -
Anyone ever just get seriously discouraged about peoples view on how easy/difficult it is to code?
A client has requested that they want a system built so they can create surveys and send them to people via email all in one tool. Im not a good front end designer but I know how to develop it. So they hired a designer to send me screen mockups and I will develop them. Easy enough.
This is where the bullshit starts... The designer was supposed to send me the V1 designs last Friday so I could begin building. I told them that I could have a rough version of some pages (with placeholder text and whatnot) ready for the following Friday (tomorrow). However the designer didn't send me the designs until 5 minutes before we were all meeting yesterday. We were all going over the designs in the meeting and this is how the conversation went (roughly):
Client: Wow these designs are amazing, I cant wait to see what it looks like when it functions. Are we still going to have a demo version by Friday?
Me: Well seeing as I just got the designs today, Ill have to look them over and get back to you on a new timeline.
Designer: Yah sorry about the delay, designing can be tricky sometimes.
Client: No worries, I understand. However I want to stick to the same timeline and have the demo by Friday.
Me: Well as I said, Im only getting the designs now, this is the first time I'm seeing them so I'll have to look them over and re-evaluate.
Client: Yeah but the designs are done so it will be easy for you to code it by then. It's all right there in front of you. I need to run, excited for Friday! Bye!
Designer: Bye!
Me: ...........
-- I know its partially my fault for saying I could have a demo done by Friday assuming the designer would have it done on time but COME ON. I hate when people say something is easy when they have no idea what it entails or how to even do it.1 -
I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦♀️🤦♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.
Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…
PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.
Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]
Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.
I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.
Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.
WTF
I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.
Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??
Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.
Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?
WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.
They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.
I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.4 -
Unemployment week one.
Tired of unsuccessful HR and engineering talks with people who don’t know what they want.
When you answer their questions they got pissed because they had something else in mind. Sorry I don’t read in people’s minds asshole.
Others try to be smart and give you some fancy acronyms. Yeah because that’s most important in coding - to memorize useless acronyms.
I responded with acronyms I know and they got pissed more cause my are more funny and cover all of theirs. Thanks KISS 💋
Some of them are like I am fucking smartest asshole on this video chat and you can’t have been working with all of those technologies, yeah I just typed hello world for 15 years in one language and stupid /REST shitty software like you do it in your one job in your lifetime.
Others are asking for cv, talking about this fancy great project that in fact you know how it will look like cause you’re experienced motherfucker who can pick up nuisance but still lets get hired first and then think what to do next with this shitty crap. So they respond after two weeks that client changed their mind and if you want to fill some quiz about your hiring process.
There are also ones that got impressed so much they’re talking 1 hour that you will be our next cto and then ending process with email that there were better candidates and also post same offer on job board next day 🤦♂️
I think I just skip this shitty nightmare and concentrate on some personal project until I spend all my savings.
I just need to concentrate on one thing and not get distracted with 1000s of voices shouting “pick me” in my head.
Fuuuuuuck
If you got offended fuck you unless you like it.
After working in one project in a big happy days bubble without distraction for couple of years I underestimated how fucked up people are in real world.
We’re making hell by ourselves on this planet we don’t need much help.3 -
A few months back I was talking with our web team and we determined a ticketing software would be useful for clients to submit website updates. Rather than request we buy one, because we constantly get told to stop spending, I spent my free time building it out. We tested it and decided it was ready to present to management.
Management tells us that clients aren't going to use something like this (4 fields and optional file upload). The project sits in a repo untouched for some months.
<Time passes>
Company-wide email come in announcing our brand new ticket system for clients to submit issues about our software. Then a second email comes in to me asking why the web team never thought to do something like that and went on about how useful it would be if we had something similar. I link them to the one I built and my notes from our previous meeting.
Manager who told me clients would never use this: Let's talk about this next week and see if we can get people to use it.
It's been 3 weeks and the meeting has been rescheduled 5 times.1 -
So our project decided to create a newsletter. For some reason, I was tasked with writing it, includig layout, recepient database etc.
It is the first newsletter, it is urgent and it is supposed to be send to all the people who so far participated. Means: there was never a "sign up here for a newsletter" thingy on the website. Hence, there is also no "unsubscribe" button.
One could kind of "hotfix" this by making a field, like "enter your email adress here to unsubscribe" and then I get a notification and remove the people from the list. Fine by me. Not so many ppl atm so we got time to set it up properly then.
My boss decides it is my job now to implement the stupid unsubscribe button... I am not the website admin. I have nothing to do with the goddamn website. We have ppl in another city, being paid to manage the goddamn website and it would take them just a few minutes to set the stupid button up, since they know what they are doing and I am not.
I told them from the start: I don't do websites. I have nothing to do with them, I don't want to have anything to do with them. We have people for this.
Why the F is it my job now to implement that stupid button?!
And even when I tried to look into how the other formulas which do similar things are set up: oh you don't have permissions to access that. Lovely!
FAK this shiet <.< It is not my fking job.5 -
I recently started a new job where I’m working with someone who is vegan. This is great and I have no problems with it at all. My diet also leans heavily towards vegan and I understand and sympathize with the reasons that can lead to this choice.
However, I seem to keep ending up in inadvertent conflict with my colleague in ways that surprise and baffle me. For example:
* After buying and showing him a vegan product I had just purchased (and commenting that I had done so in the hope of avoiding a more animal-product based health solution), I found myself harangued at length about how healthy non-vegan foods weren’t actually healthy, and “Would you eat a human? Have they done trials on the benefits of eating humans? No? Exactly!”
* I sent an all-office IM asking if anyone wanted a cheese sandwich I had accidentally bought (accidentally in that I thought I had bought a different filling). I received an email back from him demanding that I don’t include him on any further “offensive” emails. This was followed up by an office update telling all staff to use work communications appropriately.
I enjoy my job and I did enjoy working with this person, but now I feel quite thrown and unsure of how to react to him. I’m pretty annoyed at being accused of being offensive for my use of the words “cheese sandwich” and don’t want to bring it up as I can’t see a way of that conversation going well (I’m not planning to apologize; I don’t think I need to?!). I realize the obvious solution is just to never ever mention food (or nutrition or words that aren’t vegan) again, but I need help with how to get back to a place where I feel like I am comfortable in my work environment rather than slightly on edge in case he kicks off at me again for some insane reason.11 -
(Part 1/2?)
Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.
Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.
So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.
THE INTERNSHALA ARC:
I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.
I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.
I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.
THE WHATSAPP ARC:
I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.
The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).
So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?
Him: So, which parts CAN you do?
I thought of it as an HR thing.
Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.
Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.
I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.
Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?
Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.
At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).
Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.
And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.3 -
What's your workspace setup?
Curious because it took awhile and a lot of experimenting/thinking to get mine setup the way it is, but now I can't even think properly unless I have things setup that way after booting up in the morning.
Here goes:
Workspace 1: General stuff, personal email. social media, random research for non work related things, etc
Workspace 2: My main project local development, includes terminals, database, browser research for bugs, debugging software, error logs, etc.
Workspace 3: My main project, production workspace, consoles, browser, etc related to production server, you get the idea
Workspace 4: local dev on my side project
I found it crucial to setup workspace 2 and 3, it has helped me avoid countless stupid errors, like, for example, accidentally working on production terminal and wanting to rip my hair out wondering why the fuck _____ isn't working, then realizing, oh shit, i'm on production, not local. Huge brainspace bandwidth saver when I setup like this.
How about you?2 -
I needed to take today off to prep for a home repair. I didn't have much notice either, but I assumed my manager would be okay with some last minute PTO because of how relaxed everyone usually is around here. Guess that didn't include me.
I should have never assumed that my boss was someone I could think of as a peer. I called their boss "Boss" one time, and they said that they don't look at it that way, and that they see me as a peer. My boss nodded in agreement, but it was all formalities, and I bought right into it. Especially since both of them, even the other guys, take time off on a whim. But I'm somehow tied to a stricter standard, even though I can't beg hard enough to get so much as an email answered for legitimate reasons. They'll jump right on my ass when they feel I'm not working as hard as them, but I get silence most of the rest of the time. Bullshit. It's no wonder the conversation changes when your boss sits down at the lunch table. How depressingly typical.1 -
So I still have my very first email account, a hotmail account as a secondary, kinda spam account.
i signed up around 2000 i guess.
someone tried to get in, i got loads of mails of failed login attempts so i wanned to go and change my pw. But because of that bastard i cant login with just pw anymore, i need my phone. THAT ACCOUNT IS 20 FUCKING YEARS OLD. I never even provided a phone.
spent the last 20 minutes providing personal details to microsoft which are probably not the ones i used for signing up anyway.
you know how careful we were whem signing up for something online back them? I probably signed up as Thomas anderson from zion...
anyway, done now and bow it will take 24h for them to review it..
all of this only to reset my forgotten pw for my epic games account for with i signed up with that mail..,
holy guacamole.. I should start to trust password managers...1 -
On the MSc I was participating in, there is a teacher that has a lesson about Databases.
The MSc was not only for experience computer science students. We were informed that the first semester would be as an introduction to all.
So, Databases. No introduction at all. Just read the powerpoint and the pdf he had just translated (or not, because some were just from the internet), just refers to how they are structured briefly. He showed everything about Databases without the students that didn't know much to be involved (we didn't get to our lab for some reason) and then there was his assignment.
His assignment was written as it would be from a customer that knows shit about Databases (sorry but I had to rant). We sat down student's that knew already Databases and some of us worked as database engineers. We agreed on some steps that after read the next chapter of the assignment we reconfigured them. And so on, until we had nothing and we were back at the beginning.
Needless to say, I did not lose my Christmas holidays for him. It took me 2 days after to build a database that was not a full solution but a part (I wad noy sure, the assignment was ambiguous). I passed the lesson with the minimum passable grade.
So, I wrote a nice email to the MSc teacher that had to organize it (or something like that). I did not swear at all. I was professional and wrote what I encountered and what it should have been. The Databases teacher had always that smirk and face that he was THE boss and had no respect for his own lesson. But I didn't mention it. The organizing teacher shared the email with the databases teacher.
And the time came that we had another lesson (web development, it was awful under him) with the databases teacher. And he had the wonderful idea to read the email out loud in front if everyone. He did noy mention my name. I raised my hand and told my colleagues it was me. Then I asked him in front of them, if he was contented with the results (only a few passed the databases lesson and max grade was the smallest passable), first he avoided the question. I asked again. And he said yes. We all looked at each other and somehow knew. No one spoke and I didn't push because I didn't want to take the web lesson's hours for this. It was just hopeless.
From there on, the teachers said we were their best class ever but the most complaining one. They didn't even bother to analyze the "complaints".
So, there you go. One of the lot of those teachers.1 -
How to get everyone to return to the office:
Cripple remote access so badly that you can't get anything done due the frequent lags...
Been trying type your an email reply for the last hour but keep lagging out and losing my chain of thought...4 -
Why some (ok, a lot of) sales and buying guys are there just to transform any service experience in something bad?
In my experience, most sales guys promises anything, with absurd deadlines and it's up to you to make it work. Things never get good enough and, after all, the client doesn't like the work, you don't like and the sales guy doesn't like you could not make a perfectly task.
Buying guys are even worse when buying services. Email 30 developers in BCC: "Hi, I need this done by tomorrow morning and I would like to know how much you charge for it. I need your proposals in the next 30 minutes". He closes the deal with the fastest and cheapest proposal.
These things make absolutely no sense to me. -
Today I came across a very strange thing or a coincidence(maybe).
I was working on my predictive analytics project and I had registered on Kaggle(repository for datasets) long back and was searching on how to scrape websites, as I couldn't find any relevant dataset. So, while I was searching for ways to scrape a website, suddenly after visiting a few websites, I get notifications of a new email. And it was from Kaggle with the subject line
"How to Scrape a Tidy Dataset for Analysis"
Now I don't how to feel about it. Mixed feelings! It is either a wild coincidence, or Kaggle is tracking all the pages visited by the user. The latter makes more sense. By the way, Kaggle wasn't open in any of the tabs on my browser.1 -
I went to a job interview about 3 weeks ago. I got an email that I didn't pass, so I asked for a feedback. Their response was that I have required technical skills, but the reason I was not accepted was "your personality is incompatible with our team". I mean, WTF. How can you get my personality after one hour of me talking about code?18
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So a while back I had found a hole in a website's security, one that I has used pretty frequently. I was able to change my cookies and become any user I wanted. The only caveat was that I had to log in as a user in order to get things started. But once I was in I could basically be anyone I wanted to be just by changing a few numbers in the user ID of the cookie. They also did all of their user processing on the client side. Even password checks.
A couple weeks back I decided to go back in to see if anything had changed since then. It did! But not in the way I had thought.
So these guys decided that instead of fixing their security hole, they would have users just contact their people directly in order to get a new account.
Wow that's so much fucking overhead for basically being a lazy shit and not fixing the security holes. I mean how bad is your architecture if you can't go in and fix this?
Not only that I found that they actually stripped all of the users of their original subscriptions. So now if you want to get back on your subscription you'll have to fork over another $399. So that means going to their shitty form filling out your name, your number, email, and just hope that someone contacts you via phone call.
I'm glad I dropped this service. They clearly can't get their shit together.rant hackerman what the fuck are you doing bold and brash it's all shit more like belongs in the trash front end is shit back end is shit -
Marketing Person: [email] The feature you worked on is setting our customers’s statuses to “transactional.” We can’t send them marketing emails.
😒🙄
Me: [email] My code is not doing that. It checks to see if a contact exists in our mailing list. If it does, it adds the contact to the new list that you requested. If it doesn’t, it creates a contact and adds it to the list. Newly created contacts default to “onboarding.” For already existing contacts, I’m just adding them to the list and I’m not changing anything else. Here’s a blog post from the marketing software company that explains how a contact could get marked as “transactional.”
Later in the day, Marketing comes over to my desk and brings over the Product Manager. He asks the same question. 😡 Oh hell no. You do not create a gang up on me and hope the social pressure changes my answer.
Me: Like I wrote in my email, my code isn’t wrong and it’s not malfunctioning. It’s doing what you requested: add users who submit their email on x form to the new x list. In the marketing software, you can even check each contact and see when their status got changed to “transactional.” It wasn’t from my code.
I really hate marketing sometimes. Especially when they think they know how my code works. Excuse me, do you have access to our git repo? Can you read the code and point out the supposed problem? I didn’t think so. So don’t go accusing me of making a mistake or doing my job wrong.4 -
There is this thing we were able to take at college to get extra UCAS points.
At first I was like "fuck yeah might as well, doesn't seem too hard and its something I like so I wont be distracted"
Long story short, the website was badly designed. I got distracted. And I found out how to get admin rights over my marks (and rest of my project), and perform an xss injection.
Currently waiting for them to reply to my email asking about a bug bounty program.
Seriously guys, make sure you do proper server side checks. -
Sometimes I really feel humiliated in my lab.
We have several presentation/discussion groups in my lab that meet once a week or so where members present their progress reports. Generally people in my lab are not so enthusiastic about them. Which is okay, I also don't like doing presentations, but you know, you have to improve somehow and get feedback somehow.
So I've been in a really passive group for a while and I decide to join this other group since they seem to have good discussions, but nope fuck me.
The first time I present, the professor doesn't show up since he has some meeting, so obviously nobody cares to show up. And I'm there presenting for a guy who is half comatose. Alright, I guess that's the price for joining a new team, it's gonna get better next time.
Second time. Spent all night to prepare my presentation and been training my model for two weeks. I am actually really happy with the results of my networks. But the enjoyment of showing some good results, I shall not have.
Meeting leader doesn't show up. Two guys who should present don't show up. Professor doesn't show up. A different professor substitutes him and has no idea what I am talking about and asks stupid questions that don't really have an answer. Fuck me, I'm so angry, this shit is a waste of time. If you don't show up, care to fucking send an email or a message on slack, but guess you're too fucking retarded to even do that.
I'm so done with this. I've gotten better feedback from reddit, than what I've cumulatively gotten from my laboratory. I'm a moment away from walking up to the meeting leader and telling him that the meetings are stupid and a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, my professor is really nice and knowledgeable, but he fails to see that some people in the laboratory are shit.
What do I do? How do I deal with these people? Right now they're planning a trip! Why are you planning a trip? WHAT ARE YOU REWARDING YOURSELVES FOR? YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING IN WEEKS? omfg3 -
I work for a particular tech company doing chat based support where I troubleshoot a certain email application.
And one of the most common phrases I get is: "Hey Mister IT Guy, I am suddenly missing all of my contacts and Calendars. This super sucks! I had to rebuild my email profile to make my email work again!".
I really wish when they teach computer literacy in school they drilled "Learn How To Back Up Your Junk" more so when stuff like this happens I can get them back up and running in 10 minutes instead of telling the user they are going to have spend hours rebuilding their calendar and contacts.1 -
// Pretty long rant.
Already made some rants some months ago about coding experience in Smalltalk for a school project, but to sum it up :
Because of administrative things, Smalltalk change from option to obligatory course to everyone (we were told that "we had 3 choices out of 3" for options. Not even kidding)
So whole prom got to do a Smalltalk project, a basic shapes editor with Drag'n'Drop and keyboard shortcuts implemented.
But literally everyone didn't get a grasp of the language nor VisualWorks, the IDE. So we got projected in a "Do-it yourself, learn by yourself" project with a language that nobody understood.
Took me 1 week of browsing on Google to find books explaining more than the teacher did. Took me another week to notice that the teacher actually provided VisualWorks's manual. (No one would have noticed if I didn't tell them, and the teacher went silent on it.)
And then the coding started. My teacher thought this project would require something like 20-30 hours of coding. Took me 2 whole months and a half to do moist of the features he asked (only the Keyboard shortcuts weren't implemented, explanation below), and I was the most advanced of whole prom, so I had to answer every single question of fellows. Not complaining, but this took me a lot of time.
But why didn't you ask the teacher ?
- If I ask him every question I had in mind, I would actually harass him since I had too many of them, and I wasn't the only one.
- I actually went twice to his office to ask him question. First question, that was pretty straightforward, I forgot something, blablabla all done. Second time, that was for the keyboard. And then, things are getting even funnier. The teacher didn't have VisualWorks installed on his Mac, so he tried to install it while I was waiting. And he took too long time to actually launch it, because VisualWorks asked for him to log in, to provide an email, the download is a little long thanks to the network and the size, etc. When he finally was able to launch it, I had some classes to attend, so he couldn't answer. And since then, I had no time because last year, flooded with work, exams, classes ,etc.
All of that to have only 13 out of 20. I kinda shrugged, knowing that I wouldn't get more, and said that Smalltalk will only be a line of my resume.
Pretty long rant, sorry about that, but had to explain so you can see how bad it was to me.1 -
Holy fuck I'm tired of domain.com... I bought my domain with them about a year ago, and quickly I discovered how shit they are.
I can almost never access the console, the default view most of the time loads, although even that is incredibly slow. When the console loads, all settings regarding my domain are just loading. Every once in a blue moon I can actually access the settings and do something.
I got tired of it, and started transferring the domain to Cloudflare. That's where I messed up, and didn't know I had to verify the transfer twice, so the domain ended up expiring during the transfer process. Now domain.com has my domain completely locked down, pointing it to one of those 'expired' nameservers.
So three days ago I thought fuck it, I'll pay domain.com to renew the domain, maybe that'll get the domain transferred, or at least get my domain open again, so I can receive emails again, because in all my nerdiness I decided to set up a custom email using 'name@customdomain.com'. So I haven't been able to receive any emails for two weeks now.
Anyway, three days later the status of the domain is still 'pending renewal', and I can't for the life of me figure out how something like this isn't completely automated, and the domain isn't just working again.
So just now I decided to contact their live chat, and even they can't change the nameservers on my domain, and I have to be transferred to a specialist, who will then contact me by mail within 24-48 hours. Fuck I hate domain.com, and I'll certainly never buy from them again5 -
So a while back I was contacted by a recruiter, I wasn't interested at first but ended up interviewing and eventually took the role. Fast forward 2 months into the role I get a courtesy email asking how things are going and if I would like a call to chat.
I responded saying I didn't like the role and provided a suitable time to call. I never heard anything back until fast forward another 4 months.
Today I got a REPLY to my email where I said was not happy in the role, and what was the email about?
This guy wanted a favour as they had another candidate and wanted me to provide contact details of a manager to skip the usual HR process. -
Sooo as of January of this year, I have a new boss, this dude basically acted as my “mentor” for the last year so he’s already tried micromanaging me but bc he wasn’t my boss, I could push back.
Long story short, he is now my manager, he’s the global marketing leader and I’m the marketing director for the Americas (been doing this role for two years) yet he treats me like I’m an idiot, in his words he wants to make sure I’m in control of my team before he lets me lead fully while simultaneously telling me that I need to step up and lead.
I politely asked him to let me lead and stop attending all my team meetings, stop delegating tasks to my team directly and instead consult w me so then I can delegate, and basically to respect the fact that clearly I’ve been successfully doing the job for the last two years.
He said no, that he won’t leave my meetings until he feels I have full control of my team, continues to over involve himself in all my projects, pulling my team in a bunch of directions w new projects and ideas left and right, and burning us all out.
To add insult to injury, he sent me a very “helpful” email detailing how I need to work better and faster and how he expects me and my team at full speed, my team is made up of me, two new hires that are a month old, my marketing manager, and I’m currently hiring for another team member. (This after he led a company restructure of my previous team that resulted in me losing 4 team members in December so I’m rebuilding my team).
I’m already overwhelmed and demotivated, pretty sure he wants me to quit and he has a proven history of bullying his staff, he was actually fired from our parent company for this exact reason a few years ago, he also happens to be European so not sure how rules work over there, but he was rehired by my company. My European colleagues hate him too, but they’re too scared to speak up.
I used to love my job and now i dread it, I drink every day after work and I get anxiety everytime he emails me which is at all hours if the day. Is it worth it documenting his bullshit for HR or should I just cut my losses snd leave?
Appreciate the advice!3 -
So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.
We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!
Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).
I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.
Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.
My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.
And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"
Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?1 -
I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe
I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up4 -
I happened to purchase a multi currency card as I was preparing to travel abroad. I enquired a few non tech friends of mine about a bunch of providers/lenders and I got a consistent suggestion of how company XXX is safe and user friendly. I took a leap of faith and went with them, since I didn't have any time left to do my own research.
Met the vendor, loaded some money and all is well. At least so far.
I went to their website to create an account for checking my balance and to do a bunch of stuff online.
Nothing unusual so far.
I fill up the new user register page. At the end I get a message which says "SUCCESS" and asks me to check my email.
VOILA!
I have an email with my user id, password and security questions in CLEAR TEXT sitting in my inbox.
Good job XXX.1 -
I hate DRM. Not all of it, but most of it for sure. I ended up sending an email to support of some random DRM crap ware to tell them how much I despise them. I get nothing out of it, but they wasted my time so I might as well waste a bit of theirs with some useless email.3
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Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.
Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.
I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.
After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!
After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.
So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.
Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.2 -
I'm so happy I've just made all the 4 pull requests necessary to get a t-shirt from DigitalOcean! So, how is this anyway, will they send me an email asking for my size?2
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I've complained about this friend who I help out with a side project before and I don't know how to deal with this anymore.
He decided he wants to send out a free weekly newsletter with content that takes a lot of time to create.
He got burned out from all of the work. I tell him to only do it bi-weekly. Still doesn't listen.
He doesn't work, whereas I have a full-time job, his mom feeds him and does everything for him.
Someone on the newsletter said they didn't receive a newsletter they signed up for and now he's dumping that on me. I refuse to deal with it. I have paid a lot of my own money for the website he uses to post stuff. He knows more about the newsletter software than I do. The least he can do is deal with the people on Discord and the email newsletter issues, because I honestly don't have time. He has a solar generator at his house, so he can work through the power outages we have on a daily basis, I do not.
He keeps wanting to give out free shit to people, whereas I told him this side project needs to start making money to make it worthwhile for me. He's always making excuses that he doesn't have money, blah blah blah. We designed a cool magazine and it's pretty much finished, but now he's stalling with things he needs to do to get it published on Drivethrurpg.
He just hassled me again to check this gmail I made for him to use for the newsletter and this YouTube he wants to start. I told him, no I haven't had time.
The other day I went to his house to hang out, he gave me a taste of his home made ginger beer and I said it's great, but then he went and drank a pint of it without even offering me some, right in my face. His mom came out and asked me an hour later if I wanted tea. These people are weird. Maybe I am weird.
He also doesn't use the project management software I showed him how to use, so I don't know what's going on. And I told him this a couple of times.
Think I should tell this dude that I don't have time to work on this stuff? And how do I do it politely, yet sternly?5 -
This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.
So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).
Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.
I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.
At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.
Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):
I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently
And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)
What would be the best way forward guys?
I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):
One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)
The db.t3.small postgres database
The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting
AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification
And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.
Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??
Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?
Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome3 -
For some reason
I hate GitHub
This is something I wanted to get off my chest because all of my friends are in love with it and I love how it's got proper documentation and stuff but idk
I feel tooo
Lazy(?)
to push stuff on the git
GONNA KEEP MY CODE WITH ME IF ANYONE WANTS IT, use email
Or get a pendrive17 -
My manager had someone else manage me for my whole time at the company so far. Nearly two years now. Anything I’d come to him with, he’d direct me to this other person.
Fair enough, dude’s really good and I learn a lot from him. I see why they trust him with so much. I think he’s a genius. I’ll never be that good. Embarrassed I’m only a few years his junior. Wonder why he’s okay with being a manager for employee pay. Don’t think about it much, normal corporate BS.
Well it got way more “normal” when his ass got laid off without notice. Feel terrible. Him and 70% of my branch’s full timers. Wonder how I got so lucky. Everyone’s gone. We barely have enough people to do a standup. They all had 5+ years on their belts minimum. Only the contractors are left.
Manager emergency meets with me. Tells me all his best staff are gone and I am now the only front end guy on the team. He tells me he is not confident in the fact I am responsible for all of the old guys work and he is worried. He thinks I can’t do it cause he thinks I suck. Fuck me man.
My manager is pissing himself realizing he has lost the only people keeping HIS job for him. He has no clue my skill level. He sees my PR’s take a bit longer to merge, yet doesn’t realize I asked that friend of mine who was managing me to critique my code a bit harder, mentorship if you will, so we’d often chat about how to make the code better or different ways of approaching problems from his brain, which I appreciated. He has seen non-blocking errors come through in our build pipelines, like a quota being reached for our kube cluster (some server BS idfk, all I know is I message this Chinese man on slack when I get this error and he refreshes the pods for me) which means we can only run a build 8x in one day before we are capped. Of all people, he should be aware of this error message and what is involved with fixing it but he sees it and nope, he reaches out to me (after the other guy had logged out already, of course) stating my merged code changes broke the build and reverts it before EOD. Next day, build works fine. He has the other guy review my PR and approve, goes on assuming he helped me fix my broken code.
Additionally, he’s been off the editor for so long this fool wouldn’t even pass an intro to JavaScript course if he tried. He doesn’t know what I’m doing because HE just doesn’t know what I’m doing. Fuck me twice man.
I feel awful.
The dude who got fired has been called in for pointless meetings TO REVIEW MY CODE still. Like a few a week since he was laid off. When I ask my manager to approve my proposals, or check to verify the sanity of something (lots of new stuff, considering I’m the new manager *coughs*) he tells me he will check with him and get back to me (doesn’t) or he tells me to literally email him myself, but not to make any changes until he signs off on them.
It’s crazy cause he still gets on me about the speed of stuff. Bro we got NOTHING coming from top down because we just fired the whole damn corp and you have me emailing an ex-employee to verify PATCH LEVEL CHANGES TO OUR FUCKING CODE.
GET ME OUT5 -
So I decide to do some online test at company X for an internship.
URL bar exposes names, id number, email etc, whatever you fill when they capture your details(these morons are probably using a get route to do it). Okay fine let me give it a try... Page loads flash content! WTF!??...Fine I do the test, so easy and fun. After completing the test and hit submit the whole flash shit just goes blank!!! Now I wasted my 3 hours for nothing!!! I'm so pissed rn I wanna write them an email. Ohhh I forgot to mention the page was very http with no s. How do I even trust they'll tech me anything???7 -
Fucking hell. So, I had an interview with market research company and in said interview I got told to bring my passport to my first shift training and it was ok if it was 5 years out of date. Additional info, they were supposed to call us on Thursday to book said shift and send us an email with a information pack. They never did.
Ok, day of shift comes along. After I booked it because no one fucking bothered to call any of us. Email never arrived but whatever. I go to the place and bring my 3 years out of date polish passport... Big fucking mistake. They don't seem to like polish passport seeing as how it's only the British ones that get the out of date is okay thing. So I'm sitting there still calm because sure, company policy, they have to do it. The training guy was nice and all, offered to get me to their office to speak to them about it. I accept and off we go.
At the office, I basically get the information that it's only British passports that get it and I basically can't use anything else as proof of ID, which is funny seeing as I have a polish identity card that I can leave and enter the country on within the EU. I suppose I'm going to try looking for a job that doesn't require passports for now and if I find a good one then they can go get fucked by a bull for all I care.
In conclusion, I get to wait till I'm 18 (thankfully only a month) to apply for a new passport in the local polish consulate. Brilliant. All thanks to some cunt that decided they require fucking passports with such beautiful (note the sarcasm) rules. The fucktards.
Hoping the apocalypse comes early for these cocksuckers,
BadFox -
I just experienced a new level of wut at my job. Web Engineering has a Google group email. This morning someone at work sent us an email about canceling a work order (and he didn’t know how to cancel it)…for a plumbing issue 😑Wrong engineering department, my dude. And you can cancel your work order by going to the request system where you submitted it or the email receipt of you request, which was certainly not to this Google group email. You have the work order number, so you must have an email somewhere about your request. And how’d he get this email?? I’m seriously wondering if this is a weird phishing attempt.2
-
How long does it take for me to get replied on my email regarding the free stickers?
(Im new here, just askin)3 -
I am in a very difficult position
I work at a pharmaceutical industry that has also a start up side company, and i worked in the second till now. I have a very attractive offer from a multinational that wants to set up dev teams for innovative projects, with a raising around 400 euros (very good amount for greece).
The thing is, that as i went to announce my leaving to my boss (he is a very rich industrialist) he offered me many benefits and to hire me in his mainly business (the pharmaceutical) with similar raising, if not the same, and also my colleague, and the promise of educational budget (which i was lacking in the start up, imagine that phpstorm was with academic licence). All that cause i was complained about the sort of IT culture in the way we are working till now. Also he promised that i will get knowledge through the projects of pharmacy industry that will help me in my career in the future.
Now the thing is that i was ready to sign up the contract with the multinational company and i have to send an email with an apology instead of my vat number and my digital signature. I feel totally jerk, how can i handle this, and say it with a nice way? Should i say some lie, that a problem came up or tell that i had a proposition that i cannot refuse?8 -
In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.
One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."
It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.
So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.
That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD. -
So I sign up for this fancy pants website were developers rant about shit. They ask me bunch of data mining personal questions upfront like a marketing bitch so I go through and fill out my profile. Ok it's a social site, whatever and nobody gives a fuck about me anyway. I hit save, continue and go to click the email that injects my lies into their database. But I figure I might go back and fix some of the lies I wrote about myself just in case Google craws it and somebody I meet in the future calls me liar. So I spend 10 minutes trying to navigate the whole website to find a way to get back there to edit the lies or even perhaps find some site help relating to profiles. Of course the profile page itself does not do this profile edit stuff and bugger me if there is no help at all on how to use this website. So I did the only thing I could and wrote this rant in the hope somebody knows how the fuck I cover my tracks on devrant.com4
-
Embarcadero tracked my progress on a potential commercial project. To my employer, I know for a fact my employee email is not connected to my personal PC. How did they get that email?
I used the unlicensed pro version of 10.3 because I thought the community version would have the necessary components needed open the source and not break the project. I planned to use the software over the holidays to dissect the code to see what changes I can bring to the table before asking them to buy me the legit license. Embarcadero caught me. Even know my project directories. How did they do it I wonder?4 -
While I was having a pre-lunch toke and just finished reading an article (about sharing screenshots) and this neat sign up form expanded from the footer.
Now this UX and marketing done right - I couldn't resist and don't even know what the newsletter is about 😂😂😂2 -
TLDR
Apparently if you delete your google account as an only admin of a workplace by just clicking remove account on expired subscription screen when you are on document page you not only loose access to google workplace but also you can create new workplace google account using same domain and email immediately and it’s fresh google domain account without domain verification and with everything wiped off from your old account. So you don’t have access to anything but on the other side there is possibility to use gmail as spam hub if google fucked ip something in their dns verification and once verified and after that expired domain gets bought again it stays verified.
Well I luckily migrated my gmail to other provider 3 years ago and I lost nothing important there but lol.
You can easily lock out yourself from your domain.
I opened ticket using some questionnaire and by adding another dns txt record to my domain to claim access to workplace admin page and let’s see what they do.
If they ever respond to that ticket and how long it will take to get it resolved.
This is good test to see if google is still a people’s company or an evil corporation.
I was using workplace as long as it was free from days of google app engine and begging of cloud revolution. I remember at best times I could chat with google support employee about spam I got from domain registered on google servers and he was processing ticket for me.2 -
What email service are you using for your domains? I used zoho for a while, but those assholes keep randomly locking my accounts (an email always activates those again, but fuck knows how much emails I missed during not noticing it) - thought about going with the general hype of Tutanota around here, but it seems like it doesn't really support multiple custom domain mailboxes? Also tried just now msgsafe.io - it seems fine, but the way it handles multiple domain mailboxes is just disgusting, because it just throws them all together and you have to "filter" to get mails from only one domain.26
-
Getting ready for another day at work.
They seem to think that scrum is the perfect tool to micromanage their team.
Thanks guys for the creative ideas on how to get back on her, but I'm doing the responsible thing and I'll send them a nice email detailing why that's fucked up and what they need to change.
Adding important words like, "that behaviour is affecting team integrity" or "it demotivates people", "It is counter productive", "it diminishes team performance", "instills fear".
Maybe, or I'll stick to my work hours and wait for my contract termination notice. 🤣 -
The fuckers that made my university’s website are absolutely fuckin trash. I’m trying to make a program that gets the page and creates lists with the names of professors and some more info and i fuckin can’t because they are retarded.
How bad can you be that you cant even fuckin create a simple html table with their fuckin names in it so when i scan it i fuckin get a name of a professor and an email of a different one attached to it. FUCK OFF2 -
A follow-up to a previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2296700/...
... and how the senior dev recently took it up a notch.
To recap: Back then the senior dev in our two-man project prepared tasks for me so thoroughly they became typing monkey jobs. He described what to do and how to do it in minute detail in the JIRA tasks.
I talked to him back then how this is too detailed. I also talked to our boss, who agreed to nudge mr. senior in the right direction and to make it clear he expects teamwork.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. An existing feature will get extended greatly, needing some rework in our backend project. Senior and me had a phone call about what to do and some unclear details in the feature spec. I was already frustrated with the call because he kept saying "No, don't ask that! That actually makes sense, let's just do it as the spec says" and "Don't refactor! We didn't request a budget for that from our customer". Like wtf, really? You don't consider refactoring part of our job? You don't think actually understanding the task improves the implementation? Dude...
We agreed this is a task for one person and I'd do it. It took me the rest of the day to wrap my head around the task and the corresponding existing code. It had some warts, like weird inheritance hierarchies and control flow jumping up and down said hierarchy, but nothing too bad. I made a mental note to still refactor this, just as much as necessary to make my task easier. However... the following day, I got an email from mr. senior. "I refactored the code after all, in preparation for your task". My eyebrows raised.
Firstly, he had made the inheritance hierarchy *worse*. Classic mistake: Misusing inheritance for code reuse. More control flow jumping up and down like rabid bunnies. Pressed on that matter, he replied "it's actually not that bad". Yeah, good work! Your refactoring didn't make things worse! That's an achievement worthy of being engraved on your tombstone. And didn't he say "no refactoring"? Apparently rules are unfortunate things that happen to other people.
But secondly, he prepared classes and methods for me to implement. No kidding. Half-implemented methods with "// TODO: Feature x code goes here" and shit. Like, am I a toddler to you? Do you really think "if you don't let me do things myself I feel terribly frustrated and undervalued" is best answered with giving me LESS things to do myself? And what happened to our boss' instruction to split the task so each of us can work on his parts?
So, this was a couple of days ago. Since then, I've been sitting in my chair doing next to nothing. My brain has just... shut down. I'm reading the spec, thinking "that would require a new REST endpoint", and then nothing happens. I'm looking at the integration test stubs ("// TODO: REST call goes here") and my mind just stays blank, like a fresh unpainted canvas. I've lost all my drive.
I don't even know what to do. Should I assign the task back to him and tell him to go fuck himself? Should I write my boss I'm suddenly retarded? Could I call in sick for a year or so? I dunno... I can barely think straight. What should I do and how?5 -
I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.
So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.
To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.
So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.
I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?
So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…
His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)
(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)
Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?
Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.
Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?
Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.
So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .
Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter” -
Hey guys, I have almost developed the backend of an app like reddit. My question is about authentication. How should I authenticate my user. Is phone number necessary to add phone otp?Because I don't want to get any legal trouble if someone posts objectionable content on the platform. Most of the apps today need phone number, I dont know why except reducing spam accounts.
Or shall I verify email by otp. But its hard to track disposable emails. I cant go for only gmail too as its banned in china. Email domains of china are weird.
Can I get into legal trouble for objectionable content posted by any evil user?
I dont want to go for auth.10 -
Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...
I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...
I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.
...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.
What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?
Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.
2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)
3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)
4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...
I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.
Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.
But seriously wtf???
Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?1 -
So I've sent emails to a couple of people (some of which I found on devRant) that were offering work. Typed a small story about myself and why I'd love to take the work.
No reply whatsoever.
Like, I get it if you don't want me, completely understand that, but how hard is it to let me know that.
Like c'mon guys, don't be a dick.
Disclaimers: I got the email address right, they did not land in my spam or whatever since I did receive an email from them in an earlier part of the correspondence. I did give them (what is in my opinion) a reasonable time to respond. They also didn't die or something since they are still active here...2 -
About to start my new job (on Monday).
I went to the new office once to get the new work laptop (a fucking Mac).
They also told me be fast in setting up the work email as the client i'll be working on will send some instruction on how to use their accounts.
Even heard them since... hopefully they'll just pay me for doing basically nothing as I now have literally NOTHING to work on when I'll start.
Also, they told me something about the project I'll be working on, and to be honest, the whole project would take about 2 months to be done from scratch, but we have until November to make it work... I'm so fucking confused!2 -
Can anyone with some AWS IAM skills please shine a light on this one: I needed access to create a slack notification for a job in Code Pipeline. Simple enough, but we (devs) have next to no access to AWS so every time I try something I am stopped by the red "user X is not authorized to perform Y on resource Z.." warning message. I send an email to OPS and ask for permissions needed to do what I need (in this case: create a Slack notification for a pipeline), and I am granted that specific one. It gets me one step further, until I am stopped by a new red warning message. This has been going on for over a week, with a total of TEN new authorizations added to my user. That's TEN red warnings, TEN emails asking for access, and TEN replies saying "Ok, can you try now?". Today I finally got the god damn slack notifier set up, only to get one last red warning slapped in my face: I am not allowed to SEE the notifications configured for my pipeline. Please insert four letter word that rimes with DUCK here: [_________]!!.
I REFUSE to believe that this is how access should be granted in AWS. Can I tell my OPS person that there is somewhere they can find a list of required access rights to complete a specific operation ("Create slack notification for pipeline")? I know there are example policies for various things, but if there isn't one for what I need how should OPS go about granting me access without this totally ridiculous "try again now" approach?
Oh, and @assmaster: don't comment "nice" to this one. This is shitting me off.3 -
I recently started working on laravel. As the community says it was easy to get along with the framework and its methodologies. But then i had to do multiple login with framework in same domain.
Oh man, i spent a week to make it work. All those guards and middlewares realted to login was driving me crazy. The concept was clear, but somehow the framework was like "You! I shall make you spend a week for my satisfaction". The project demo was nearing and i was doing all kind of stuff i found. Atlast after continous tries it worked. Never in my 4+ years as a developer i had to face such an issue with login.
So here is how it works,if anyone faces the same issue:
(This case is beneficial if you're using table structures different from default laravel auth table structures)
1. Define the guards for each in auth.php
Eg:
'users' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'users',
],
'client' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'client',
],
'admin' => [
'driver' => 'session',
'provider' => 'admins',
],
2. Define providers for each guards in auth.php
'users' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
'table' => '<table name>', //Optional. You can define it in the model also
],
'admins' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
],
'client' => [
'driver' => 'eloquent',
'model' => <Model Namespace>::class,
],
Similarly you can define passwords for resetting passwords in auth.php
3. Edit login controller in app/Http/Controller/Auth folder accordingly
a. Usually this particular line of code is used for authentication
Auth::guard('<guard name>')->attempt(['email' => $request->email, 'password' => $request->password]);
b. If above mentioned method doesn't work, You can directly login using login method
EG:
$user = <model namespace>::where([
'username' => $request->username,
'password' => md5($request->password),
])->first();
Auth::guard('<guard name>')->login($user);
4. If you're using custom build table to store user details, then you should adjust the model for that particular table accordingly. NOTE: The model extends Authenticatable
EG
class <model name> extends Authenticatable
{
use Notifiable;
protected $table = "<table name>";
protected $guard = '<guard name>';
protected $fillable = [
'name' , 'username' , 'email' , 'password'
];
protected $hidden = [
'password' ,
];
//Below changes are optional, according to your need
public $timestamps = false;
const CREATED_AT = 'created_time';
const UPDATED_AT = 'updated_time';
//To get your custom id field, in this case username
public function getId()
{
return $this->username;
}
}
5. Create login views according to the user types you required
6. Update the RedirectIfAuthenticated middleware for auth redirections after login
7. Make sure to not use the default laravel Auth routes. This may cause some inconsistancy in workflow
The laravel version which i worked on and the solution is for is Laravel 6.x1 -
Okay...How the heck do I get this Twitter API? I wanted this API for a project that required elevated access. submitted the application and got rejected.
Then I changed my use case and only needed simple Access to implement Login with Twitter. used my university email, and was rejected again.
Do they even give this API to anyone?4 -
!rant
Someone posted a link to a 30-day-security-challenge here on devRant some time ago and I just thought well, why not try to migrate away from the big companies - I've been using OneDrive as my only cloudstorage since the time when it was called SkyDrive and I've been hosting my Emails at outlook (via Live Custom Domains, a service that does not even exist anymore) for about 8 years now. Since I've always been lazy and since exchange activesync is a great feature if you have multiple calendars and want to sync them and your contacts to several devices I never tried to switch but now I am half done with migrating my data to my own nextcloud installation and my emails to my own mail server - since I don't want to loose the exchange functionality I am also setting up Z-Push and oh boy, this thing is bitching around but my webmail is already nicely integrated into nextcloud, IMAP / SMTP is up, configured and secured (still have to mess around with spamassassin as this email adress is floating around the web for about 10 years now). The only things to do is to get Z-Push work with STARTTLS and the card/caldav backend running and then the basic setup should be done.
I am just wondering if someone could hand me over a guide on how to sign / encrypt emails (GPG?) -
Need advice about protecting ddos via iptables and whitelisting. Currently I launched my gameserver and am fighting against a massive attack of botnets. Problem was solved by closing all ports on my gameserver linux machine and shipping game.exe with injected c++ socket client. So basically only gamers who launch my game exe are being added to firewall iptables via the socket client that is provided in the game exe. If some ddosers still manage to get inside and ddos then my protection is good enough to handle attacks from whitelisted ips from inside. Now I have another problem. Lots of players have problems and for some reason shipped c++ client fails to connect to my socketserver. Currently my solution was to provide support in all contact channels (facebook,skype,email) and add those peoples ips to whitelist manually. My best solution would be to make a button in website which you can click and your ip is whitelisted auromatically. However if it will be so easy then botnets can whitelist themselves as well. Can you advice me how I could handle whitelisting my players through web or some other exe in a way that it cant be replicated by botnets?1