Our CTO has been told, this morning by management, that our development department is "too quiet" and that it's spoiling "the atmosphere" of the office space.

So we've ordered mechanical keyboards.

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

The best prank played in our office was an AutoHotkey script that changed the space character to actually print the word 'space' in all caps.

The next message in Hipchat from the victim was: "WhatSPACEtheSPACEfuck!SPACEMySPACEkeyboardSPACEisntSPACEworking!"

The next time this prank was pulled, ALL symbols were typed out in all caps.

Want to take your open office plan to the next level? Double the efficiency of your space by having two employees per standing desk.

Let's get rid of the developer training: Pair Programming

Let's get rid of the software testers: Test First Programming

Let's get rid of the project managers: Agile

Let's get rid of the project planners: Scrum

Let's get rid of the system admins: DevOps

Let's get rid of the security guys: DevOpsSec

Let's get rid of the hardware budget: Bring Your Own Device

Let's get rid of the servers: Cloud Computing

Let's get rid of the other scruffy guys: Outsourcing

Let's get rid of the office space: Home Office

Let's get rid of the whole fucking company: Takeover

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

FUCK YOUR OPEN SPACE OFFICE!!!!

AND FUCK YOUR HOT DESKING!!!

As a developer, is it too much to ask for a quiet section? 😭

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

*deep breath*

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

*deep breath*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

Our dear freelance web dev, you absolutely need to come to our office on the other side of the city during working hours when it's impossible to find parking space for an urgent meeting to discuss you copy/pasting to a web page a simple block of text we'll send you via email

In our office, everyone is placed so that we have a wall behind us. Initially, there was enough room behind us so that we can walk just fine.

Everything was fine till our manager didn't start making us some random visits and standing behind us just looking at our screens and making us feel unpleasant.

So one day we moved the tables so there is almost no room behind us. And we are aligned in a row with no space between the tables. Now if the manager decided to do it again he would have to struggle his way behind us.

Few days passed by and our manager finally showed he saw what we did, didn't say anything. It was clear that he wasn't happy about it. He tried to lean himself over the monitors to take a look but that was just not so as "good" as standing behind us...

A time passed and one day when we came to work we saw the tables moved forward some 15-20cm just enough to be able to move behind. Almost immediately we pulled them back as they were before.

We moved back and forward already few times and are currently playing cat and mouse with our manager.

Noone is saying anything just the tables are moving every 2-3 days or so. Let's see who is going to give up first hahaha

Learning soft skills.

I'm about as direct with coworkers and managers as I am on devRant. And I still think being painfully direct is often better than playing the heavily politicized office game of thrones.

But sometimes it's better to say:

"CTO, I think we need your skills to build bridges to other departments and manage recruitment. You're the only one who understands both technology and people, so drop your developer role and become our ambassador"

Instead of:

"Dear CTO, your code makes my eyes bleed. Your CS degree was a fucking waste of tax money, and it's quite clear that cheap college beer washed out all of your reasoning skills. We should fill the space you're taking up with a beanbag chair, because you're providing negative value to the company. How many investor cocks did you have to deep throat to get where you are?"

Now, I just pick option one, smile politely, and tell him we need to increase department budget as indemnification for having to work with a retard like him. Uh I mean... "to get developer salaries up to a competitive level so we can retain knowledge"

!!good news
!!great news
!!linux dev lappy recommendations?

So, @Root might finally have a job! Woo!
(Pending a background check, drug test, cavity search, ...)

I'm excited, and kind of giddy. It's an open-office setup, but the devs are chill, the boss is chill (reminds me a bit of myself thus far, just... nice), pay is decent too. Drive is hell, but everything else feels kinda cushy. The parent company is super-stuffy corporate and has an HR and red tape fetish, but supposedly I won't have to interact with them at all. I start as soon as all of the background check nonsense comes through. (Don't get me started on that, please.)

One of the questions that came up, however, is what type of system I wanted to use. I requested a Linux lappy, and that's sadly a bit beyond the parent company's nontechnical IT department. They asked me for links to a few specific machines on amazon for options. (MacBook Pro or equivalent)

That's where this question comes in: Which lappys make great dev machines and also have decent linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) support? The role is backend Rails development + some devops, so I don't need super-fancy graphics, though I will be attaching a 4k (hopefully IPS) display because space and pretty colors.

Recommendations welcome, as I should get back to them today!

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

I worked on a company with an open floor plan where you would get a desk assigned depending on the type of project you worked on. All the desks were modular an you would get a desk with a cube with a set of drawers, or with a locker-like cube with a single space and door. When this guy started, he was assigned a drawer set. Around the third day he went around the office asking anyone with a locker to trade cubes. He finally got one. He filled it up with liquor bottles, cans of juice and several types of glasses. He would prepare himself cocktails during the work day. Once he was enjoying a Coca-Cola and whisky mix when the HR boss came around to ask what he was up. He offered the guy a drink.

Annoyingly typical office conversation:

Person 1: "Good morning."
Person 2: "Good morning, how are you?"
Person 1: "Good. How are you?"
Person 2: "Good."
Person 1: "Good."

NO! Not good, fuckers. I hear this all day long, come up with something real or original. Talk about the massive shit you just took, or how hard you're taking the news about Diablo Immortal. It reminds me of that scene in Office Space with the repetitive call center lady, lol.

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

Working with a client...the resident """sysadmin""" hasn't actually been a sysadmin since the early 90s, the last OS he _actually_ managed was SunOS 5 or something. I can't remember what he said. He hasn't kept up AT ALL with modern technologies/terminologies. He's convinced SELinux is a security hardened kernel. We've explained to him several times that it's not but he sees Linux and thinks Linux 1.0 from the 90s. It's downright embarrassing.

Now this would all be well if I didn't have to interface with him often, but the client WILL NOT give me access to their systems. So I have to go through him to get anything done. Which is over webex. So I get to watch this guy type (and mess up) basic commands over and over (he isn't aware of tab completion of any of the bash features that are super useful). So I'm telling him what to type and the delay is always just enough for him to get too far in the command to back out, so its like SSH-over-incompetence with a 500ms ping. It's truly infuriating.

Every once in a while he'll get frustrated enough to hand me control of his webex session, which isn't as painful but once again the delay is bad enough it's still a pain.

Best part is that he looks EXACTLY like Milton from Office Space. So thats one plus to this whole situation!

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

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

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

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

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

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

Backstory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.

All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.

Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.

After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.

Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.

Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.

i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends

Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

Since 4 weeks i have during work my noise cancelling headphones on, thanks to the new open space office.
I don't even hear my phone ringing 😂

There's this one Windows PC, hiding in the darkest corner of the office, just running a network service all day. Suddenly the service is not available any longer... Opening explorer.exe to see what's up with the machine, while wiping a thick layer of dust from the screen: Zero bytes free memory on C:\ ...

Assuming that some log files have caused all the occupied space. NOPE! Instead, Windows update just installed a shitton of updates. They all failed, of course... After not being able to simply remove them, deciding to uninstall some programs and kill Windows update. Finally 800MB of free space!

Suddenly stumbling over a Visual Studio 2008 installation. Who the hell installed this on the PC? Absolute bullshit. Nevermind. Uninstall this shite.

The uninstaller takes ages to do anything, then aborts the uninstallation showing the popup "there is not enough space to uninstall". Looking into the memory indicator: 0 bytes left. DAAAAFUUUQ Microsoft??? WTFFFFFFF?!? 800MB to UNINSTALL Visual Studio? Are you for real???

Ended up force-deleting the directory: 3 Gigs free now...

In the open space, EVERYONE can hear you scream.

!rant

Finally back to coding at the new office. Better connection speed. Wider space. Own toilet.

Guess you won't see new posts from me anytime soon.
Just gonna enjoy the rest of your miseries from my chilled desk.

😎

So this happen on my previous workplace. I worked there for 4 years and quitting was the best decision I made while was there.

One manager/owner there was the most toxic, piece of shit, disrespectful cunt I have ever worked with. The type of guy that comes in and every person's productivity goes down in a heartbeat.

As he was a owner he usually came in later. This one morning it was 11-ish and a meeting with a client was happening and it was an open space.

He comes in.
He puts his laptop down.
He sits.
He screams of the top of his lungs:
- WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
- ANTS ALL OVER MY DESK!!!
- I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS.

He leaves for about 30 min.
He came back with a can of spray, and literally intoxicated the office and everybody had to stop working.

And there you go one of my last place's beautiful stories.

Manager: we require people to work in the office but we'll give you a space to get as comfy as you want.

Me: *walk into the open space office, set my mechanical keyboard, plug in my noise cancelling headphones, start coding and mumbling every now and then*

Manager: keyboard is distracting others and we don't allow headphones as we want to be able to speak to you when we feel like it.

Could all this fucking weak sick people just stay at home instead of coming to our damn open space office and be coughing their guts out ever 20 seconds for all the office to listen! damn, have some respect for the healthy people and go lie in your bed.

I love my girlfriend, but sometimes she doesn't get dev-work.
Last night, we had a fight over me sticking post-its to the wall in our home office. I find them helpful for keeping an overview of what I'm working on. She finds them ugly and decided to tear them all down without conferring with me. I got pissed. I almost always give in to her quirks and wants in every other aspect of how we live, so I feel like my desk space should at least be under my control. In my anger, I ordered her out of the room. She then proceeded to be sulking/angry with me up till and including this morning "because I overreacted".

Was I wrong? What should I have done differently?

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Why is it so uncomfortable working in an open space office!

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

I hate open space offices for following reasons
- bright environment (I cannot turn off the light just for my own)
- noises (talking, discussions, chewing)
- requests and questions
- people

But I still cannot afford to be in my own office room yet.
Now I have to wear a cap inside the office like a mad-hatter and plug my ears with earphones even without playing any music.

Dev: You’ll want to store money values such as $2001.01 as 200121 when using javascript.

Manager: Why? That’s stupid.

Dev: Javascript doesn’t behave with decimals the way you think. It’ll show up as $2001.01000001 when you least expect it

Manager: Well I’ve never had that issue before! Besides that’s only a fraction of a cent off, that won’t even matter!

Dev: … literally the plot of office space but ok

I work at a startup and our office is inside a collab-space. Last week they organized a workshop called:
"Using the blockchain to prevent loeliness".

And even worse: people were paying to attend it :(

The cleaning lady

Yeah, I should not be at work this late, but it happenes from time to time..
Anyhow, she still doesn't know where the switches for each light are, so whenever she comes, lights start to flicker on off on off... Yeah, lightshow baby!! //read this in austin powers voice
I fear for people with epilepsy.. Yeah, I get it, push and toggle switches are mixed in pannel, but we do have a schema for each of them..ofc she doesn't use it..

And every goddamn time if I work later than when she leaves, she disturbes me to ask if I will turn off the lights when I leave.. NOoOooo, I will leave them on like an asshole.. :/ I once even wrote on the whiteboard in bigg letters 'yes, I will turn of the lights when I leave' and left it there for some days... coworkers were all puzzled/amused when they saw it.. //I know, shitty attitude on my part too, but I've repeated myself a dozen times already.. + I always turn off lights she actually manages to switch on and leave them like that, even the ones not in my part of office

And when she vacuums..well.. I usually get up and go on a cigarette break to give her space so she can do her job around my desk.. but she insists that I am not in her way and I don't need to leave... Well I prefer not to be proded and poked with the hose, thank you..

So yeah, fun times... O.o especially if working late due to some production fuckups I need to fix ASAP.. :/

DISCLAIMER: I swear to god this is true. This is a completely unfabricated anecdote.

Soon we are moving to a new office space, and my department have been delegated the responsibility of moving all of the computers from the old work space to the new one. I was a little confused at first, because I'm a software developer, not a removalist.
It gets better.

We just had a meeting the other day, and my manager had advised us that we were to be moving the machines on a Saturday. I confirmed whether we were being paid overtime, simply because I had never worked a Saturday before. My manager replied (this is paraphrased but ultimately accurate) - "It's unpaid. Because you get paid a salary, you're expected to do unpaid overtime here and there. We have christmas parties and nights out, all of which come out of the companies pocket. Not all companies do this, so it's only fair you give back".

I honestly couldn't believe it. I was being asked to spend basically the majority of my day off moving computers from one site to another, for free, purely because it's "expected". Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

Long story short, I went home and started updating my resume.

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

Who invented the open space office layout? If you're as unlucky as me, you end up sitting next to the protein junkie who pops open a tin of tuna mixed with some other shit that's there just because it smells horrible almost hourly, or you end up next to the PM whose desk is gossip central and by the end of the day you know "Sheila" is sleeping with her brother in law, and "Steve" has a tiny weiner.

So everyone is complaining about working from home. Fuck it, I love it. My productivity was never higher than now.

I didn't have an office space before at home, so I created one. I spent money on it but that's good because this whole corona thing made me realize how much I don't miss:
- company politics, who said what said
- commute
- people bothering you in the middle of you doing something
- catching-up breaks with people I hardly care about asking about holiday I took last year but they "ahhh thought it was just last week! so did you eat anything nice?"
- answering forced "any plans for the weekend" questions
- participating in conversations about nothing

The worst thing is that I'm actually a very sociable person 😂 so working from home means I can go meet my friends at 1630 sharp instead of 19.

I just don't need those fake relationships at work I guess.

Im already discussing with my manager possibility to work from home most of the time and I think I'll soon start to search for something 100% remote.

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Story time!

I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.

We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.

No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...

One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.

So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.

So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.

This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:

"This space intentionally left blank."

When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.

Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.

It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...

I don't know how recruitment goes outside of the Netherlands, but here they can be very very aggressive due to the scarcity of programmers.
One was even so blunt that he called the office I was working and asked to be connected to me with some bullshit story. Now you have to understand that this was a small company, so small that it was one open space. You can imagine how I felt when he was asking me questions and offering me work while the rest of the people could actually hear me. I got mad at the guy and refused.

What are your weirdest recruiter stories? Beside LinkedIn spam...

So, we have massive desks in office and there is no much space for them to fit +2 newcomers. Occasionally, my old youtube recommendation "Tetris Original Theme" started playing out loud. :)

I work at a 6day work week company and this week it was 7. We work more than 10hours a day in a 7×27 foot co-working office space. My manager sits just 2foot away from me to my back. He is toxic as hell and nano(micro) manages the team. I stay very near to office and I feel like I am a dead person just living to work.

Is this a good reason to change the job after an year ? I feel lonely and negative. My manager sitting just few inches away from me makes me feel like a fish trying to behave outside water.

But the best part is I got to work on many things that helped me gain lot of tech expertise still he wanted control every piece of code.

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

Oh look, you aren't doing shit. You have 2 weeks worth of testing to complete and you are checking out stories on the Yahoo front page.

Useless. Completely incompetent. Idiot. Imbecile. Moron. Stupid. How dense? Let me count the ways...

Do you know anything?! You use big words to sound important and look like you know your shit. In reality, you have no clue!

How you have managed to capture this job is baffling to me. It shows there is much work to be done to filter out toxic, incompetent people like you. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with a terrible fear of sub-par employees.

Your lack of common decency for the office space is appalling. Your attitude and "can do no wrong" personality is disgusting. And the cherry on top? It is impossible for you to admit mistakes and take ownership for your actions. You can be inexperienced, stressed out, or even make a mistake once in a while. Yet, the moment you DO fuck up and act like nothing was your fault, that most of it was MY fault, or the TEST environment's fault, or the other team's fault, a lack of resources, a lack of time, ANYTHING but your own damn incompetence, you are dead to me.

You are, by far, the worst co-worker I have ever had.

Can we rant about coworking spaces?

I like the coworking office concept and I love this desk I have for myself, I like this building, the supervisor is sweet and I made new clients here...

But I hate one of my "neighbours".

We have several office rules and he constantly breaks them.

No music allowed without headphones. Nope, gotta listen to shitty radio straight from the smartphone speaker.

No loud conferences or phone talks. Nah, let's set the volume to the max. And leave the phone behind and let it ring loudly forever.

You can only occupy one desk unless you rent more. In comes his coworker who keeps occupying an extra desk for free and who's as loud as he is. And bring the kids because hey, growing up bored inside a office is good for them.

And today's newest: no eating in the office. Coworker brought her kid who set up a -dinning table- on the extra desk and began eating her lunch leftovers. It wouldn't have been so bad and I wouldn't have noticed except the office was overflowed with the stench of overheated pasta.

This is a big office. I had to open the windows. I can still feel the smell. It's nauseating.

I didn't say anything because it's not the kid's fault they didn't take her to the building's canteen space. But at the risk of making enemies where I shouldn't, I need to have a "fun" talk with someone.

You know what I love? When the person next to you in the office sits there loudly talking on the phone for an hour.

That one guy in the office that doesn't understand the meaning of personal space 😓

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

I've got my new job less than a month ago. On this Monday i've got annoyed by the unhappy faces in the office and said to them, that i'll work from home. But instead I boarded a train from Zurich to Milan. Checked in to a really nice Milan coworking space called Login. And had some google hangouts meetings all while beeing anxious that some might get suspicious that I left the country. 😅

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

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

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

Client doesn't have space for us consultants at his office anymore....guess we're going to HAVE TO work from home! Jeeeeeez......how horrible is that!? ..... 🤠

Another day, another job description

# Benefits
- Flexible work hours
: You'll be coding to midnight
- Ability to work from home some days
: But watch out for those other days..
- Our office space provides free coffee, beer and soft drinks as well as an amazing modern workspace
: Our tax expense will get you gee'd up and tipsy til you loose track of time. (Future diabetes health insurance not included).
- Growth and future progression opportunity
: Pinky promise!
- Receive valuable company equity
: Plus a set of steak knives for four easy payments
- Latest MacBook Pro
: We own this. We own the thoughts you have while looking at this. Plese think many thoughts.

My project manager just had a project review at a bar because there was no space at the office. There are literally so many people at the office that we're out of chairs. And space. In a few days three more developers are scheduled to arrive. I don't know where we will put them.

I have a dedicated office space at home with a huge desk that was given to me by my mom and stepdad as a gift with a really nice chair that my wife got for me. It has a nice long whiteboard to write whatever it is I am doing, a bookshelf with tons of coding books and guitar magazines and shit. A closet with good space and in a corner sits my guitar and amp.

Where can I be located during coding hours? In the floor, on the living room, using a box to put one of my laptops in.

Why am I like this?

To create a bank that's 99% digital (the 1% is for office space) with no BS charges and kick-ass money management tools.

All company meeting to discuss plans to move office, and they want to change all of the devs to hot-desking?!

Would be interested in your guys experiences if any of you have done it, but I feel I'd be affected a lot as I only work 3-4 days a week.

I literally stood up and left the meeting, saying I'd quit if they did it. I'm far more comfortable and productive with my setup and space. Knowing my co-workers they might think I'm saying it for drama but I think I actually would leave, despite everything else being fine (except HR!).

I really like having my desk in the corner of the office. Then I can block the entrace with my umbrella while drying it. Combine that with headphones and monitors blocking direct sight of me. So I have the ultimate do not disturb office space for efficient programming!

My humble office space.

So despite being able to do my entire job much more effectively from home, it's been demanded that I go in 2 days a week that "show my face".

Upon getting to the office there's no parking spaces, I go round the carpark again and woohoo there's a space!! Awesome..

I come back a few hours later to work the afternoon from home and find 2 cars double parked behind me..

Both owners seem to be off site currently.......... I guess this is my life now sitting in the car park waiting for people to move their cars 😂

#1 Sharing co-working space with my wife.

#2 my home office! (I transitioned from music industry work into data science over the last few years)

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

Dear recruiter,

Open space is not a perk.
If someone tells you they want remote, not bit of remote or any other indication,
Why would you ask how much remote is ok?

If someone tells you "i want open space" would you ask "how much open space? Like half office?" No, you wouldn't.
But for sure, what is not acceptable when someone tells you they want remote is answering "that's a shame" if you want to get a developer a job, work, if you want to get cash because of a developer then do that.

God I hate this loop they have us running in. It was nicer before I was self aware of it.

I have noticed I have had great success using another co-worker as a metaphorical rubber duck (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally). It improves my productivity vastly. However, I know that it probably distracts others when I am using them in that way.

That's why I want to buy a literal rubber duck and talk to it. I could do it very quietly and most of my close co-workers use noise-cancelling headphones 80% of time while sitting at their desks. My only concern is other people passing by my desk would think that I am weird. My desk is in an open space and several people pass by it every hour. (however on my floor besides developers we have HR, marketing and people from high up who might be unfamiliar with the rubber duck method).

Is it unprofessional to talk to a rubber duck at the office?

My first experience was in 1998. My grandfather had a computers and even tho he was hesitant to let me use them my mom convinced him saying that I may eventually turn into an engineer like him. I used them mostly for paint and a couple of space shooter games he later got for me. It was great. They always had computers, they even had a c64 at one point and i remember playing with that one as well.
My first computer tho, it was in 2010 while I was in the Army. Still have that lil hp in my office although it does not work anymore.
Nothing speciall really. I've had computers all my life and a mother that was passionate about them. I owe everything I am to my mom. I think that it is because of her that I became a computer scientist.

Went to steal a tool from my father's office. That was 3 hours ago..
Didn't find the tool (more labels for a label machine, I'm marking everything), still found lots more stuff, filled the space in my office that took me a week to open and now I have like days off stuff to unmount, reuse,... And didn't find the fucking labels...

Manager: "are you doing this obscure process that I laid out months ago with no plan or follow through?"

Me: "no, my other 3 managers said they didn't see any value in it, not sure how to keep everyone happy"

Manager: "that's not what we want! You need start doing this obscure process now!"

We have 20 engineers total in my company and I have 4 managers. Office Space was a documentary.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

It took me eleven months of working from home to investigate renting a coworking space. Eleven wasted months! The coworking office is TOTALLY worth every USD.

Yay finally summer started
Ye no fuck that
After being "migrated" into a newer smaller office and getting another team member we are now three people on about 5 square meters of space.

Another good thing is that we don't have an air conditioning unit in the new room and gained a few more PCs.
Oh and did I mention that we are on the sunny side of the building now.

Basically we are working in Satan's Asshole now. Good thing is that I am working on a thermometer now.
35 degrees Celsius is still alright isn't it?

Oh and our fan broke today.

I just remembered some of the "harmless" dev-related insults I've received over the years:

1) most recently, I shared a tool with an acquaintance cuz it bears the same name as something he put together a while back. Background: this guy likes to come across as having infinite programming knowledge and brags to his fb pals about being an expert in multiple languages. While trying to make sense of the cryptic docs of the package I sent him, he implies I don't know what the iframe or html5 canvas are. Claims not to elaborate what package does cuz the docs is meant for advanced desktop and mobile devs

It hurt because this is one of few people who know I built suphle, yet thinks so lowly

2) as you can tell from the first point, I share links I consider interesting with relevant contacts. I'm also quite vocal about my (mostly contrarian) takes on occurrences within the dev space that I'm familiar with. One day on the laravel board, this dude is reprimanding me and asks me to take the opinions I read on blogs and tabloids with a pinch of salt, implying I didn't form them independently but was influenced by what was written by some stranger online

It hurt because I expected him to know better. I felt I'd sufficiently proven to have actually built things that informed my school of thought

3) the oldest happened many years ago but I remember it now because the perpetrator called me out of the blue last week. I was teaching his boss, who managed an office but preferred to keep his student status hidden, to avoid being thought incompetent. This caller guy just so turned out to be learning js at the time. Fast forward some years, we all disbanded. He'd landed a dev job and was doing well. So I sent him one of those js gotchas, asking him to explain his answer

After he replied, I told him his answer was close enough but it had more to do with js passing closure arguments by reference. Dude responded that he knew that was the correct answer but wasn't aware I knew what closures meant. That stung me like hell back then. I missed his call and didn't know who owned the contact, so I searched my chats and saw that last interaction. Pain all over again

As I mentioned in previous rants
The company that I work for is very loud and noisy, making it really hard to code.

First day in new office, bigger space in the same building....PEOPLE HAVE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE NOISE AND LOUDNESS

FIRST. DAY.

Sorry guys, I have complained too they dont care.

My New medication is !AMAZING....
Yesterday went to the Doc (another 100€ sniff) and got a new update on medication...
(check my profile history for the posts last weekend if ya curious).
One of them must be opium or something... I got so high It looked like Opium (I never did heavy drugs).
Now I'm falling all the time, Can't remember much last night and... man... I use/used Cannabis as medicine for years (on and off as needed) ... Still, remember when I could get high... And the highest time was when I learned cannabis it's great to stop suicide (A friend got me so stoned I couldn't move... Even if didn't really take out the tendencies and thoughts to kill yourself, you can't do it anyway...)
But this new Pill... ONLY SHEEAAATTTT...
Only problem,,, I can't really do shit Until my body gains tolerance... and I was doing so much cool ideas in my Office...
Btw, no more Space Again... The more drawers I place, the more stuff gets here...
But I think I'll lose all my energy again for the next months, so, fuck it.

Being forced to leave the serenity of my home office where I'm happy and not riddled with depression to work from an open work space with long shared desks. I can't effing wait!

Huh... Seems like my company is going to implement flexible office/home hours even after lockdown is lifted.

Not sure whether they're trying to rip us off, because we're going to use office space less and they will pay less accordingly, or whether it is really a an improvement because allegedly many people here responded that they would like to have such a flexible option rather than being glued to the office space.

anyone else feeling it yet?

I want to rant about tech YouTubers. As one myself, I feel like I do an even exchange with my viewers.

I want your attention, I don't feel like I deserve it, so I teach you something coding related. You get something of value, I get your attention.

But that's not the case with most in this space. Idiots feel like they can spout whatever bullshit they think about.

They're all stupid with their stupid fucking titles and ideas. Let's review some.

Video Title: How much Javascript you should know to get in tech??
Anyone with > 2 braincells: WTF !!!!!

Video Title: How would I start over to learn coding if I could?
My Reaction: Nope, I wouldn't. The things that I did and didn't is exactly what my journey is and I would do it all over again.

And I get the intent, you're trying to put a roadmap for beginners but they're not going to follow exactly how you lay it out. And why are you trying to establish that there is a correct way of learning coding? Everyone learns at different paces at different times. It's a journey not a race.

Video Title: A day in the life of {COMPANY} engineer.
My Reaction: What do you want to show everyone? Your fancy office? Your perks? The job perks which 99% of other devs won't have?

Video Title: How to crack FAANG interviews.
My Reaction: Well, only the top 1% is going to get an interview anyway. You're not acknowledging the fact that the acceptance rate is < 1% in these companies. Creating a video like this creates false expectations in beginner's heads. And they only see these companies as their only shots of making careers. They dont consider startups or starting their own companies.

Video Title: Top 4 dying programming languages.
My Reaction: WTF !!! COBOL was invented in 1959 and there still is demand for it. And my blood started boiling when Tiff in Tech said PHP is a dying language. Like seriously????

Video Title: Top paying programming languages in 2023.
My Reaction: Please, come on. We know it's Java. And 99% of the viewers ain't getting that job. You're just wasting time listing out languages. By the time someone starts from scratch and gets to a position of getting a job, something else will be the new fad.

Video Title: What advice would I give myself when I was starting?
My Reaction: Really? You couldn't think about saying what advice you'd give to your viewers? Are you really that full of narcissism?

There are good techies though, it's just that I get angrier and angrier the more YouTube recommends me these stupid videos. Ah, my chest feels lighter now.

Based on the current trend of show-your-workspace pictures doing the rounds, let me ask this...

How important is your workspace to you, specifically in an office environment, i.e. type of setup, amount of desk space, open plan/cubicle/office, number of colleagues on your proximity, noise pollution, etc., to your overall productivity and performance? And have you/are you able to do anything about?

Working in a shared office space, everytime I hear somebody brag about the "AI" they have on their stack, I ask "Really? Can you show me where it sits??" just to see how confused they get thinking it might be a new tech concept.

I have a question for the women on here: how do you deal with a hands-y coworker? I realize, especially now, that there will be men who have dealt with this too.

He will touch my hair and arms, will come up behind me and put both hands on my shoulders, and generally seems to go out of his way to get into my personal space. Needless to say i am uncomfortable. He's been out of the office the last couple days, and my relief at not having him around has made me realize how much of a problem this is.

Have you confronted anyone like this in your line of work, or spoken to a manager? Asked to move desks away from the guy in question? What happened?

Was recruited to build a text-based course where I get a nice bonus if I finish the course early. Now I know how they are always able to save themselves from giving that out. There's so much fucking red tape for each literal sentence I write! I have MULTIPLE reviewers, commenting, editing, and "suggesting" EVERYTHING I write.

News flash: this course is derived from a different video-based course that has sold hundreds of copies on other platforms, so I must be doing something right.

Just let me write the whole course and we edit it in the end!!! This treadmill is going to triple or quadruple the time until publishing...

I feel like I'm trapped in the movie office space: "every day I have 5 different bosses come and tell me the same thing"

Won't be working with this platform again.

Here's a few:

What could be improved about devRant?
Best dev insults?
Your dev machine setup (from office space, hardware, to OS stack etc)?
Dream setup of the above?

Or we could go back to previous topics and do them again, since there are new members on devRant and new stories from old members. I particularly want to do wk30 (Best prank) again

rant && !rant

so my company just relocated to another part of the city.

it took about 2-3 months of searching for a space till the management found a suitable place. then about one more month for settling on the details (price, when we move, etc). then another month of just waiting for the space to be ready ...
the actual move took 1 day ... just one day ...

so the new place
- is better placed (for me at least)
- has lots of nice pubs / restaurants around for lunch or just relaxing after work
- has great views from every office
- lots of extra space for everyone
- ok people (so far) working at the other companies in the same space
- everyone seems so much more relaxed and easygoing and happy at the new place

But:
- the ac is still not working (32 degrees Celsius outside, and our office is facing the sun almost all day)
- for the first days we were lacking blinds at the windows
- office was full of little stinky bugs and they still keep showing up when we open up the windows

So, overall pretty great ... so (rant part??) WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO MOVE HERE ??? (both before it was decided to move, about 4 years at the old place, and after)

also, relating to the topic of the week ... nothing code related was learned, much was gained, and a life lesson was obtained: if you don't like something, just change it as soon as you can

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

One thing I have realised these days is that I don't like the work from home setup.

Maybe it's the because of the bad working environment.

I actually appreciate office space more now. Once, out of office, it was easier to zone out of work mode and I didn't feel this much tired when working in office.

Funny thing I like to do sometimes that I learned from the movie called Office Space:

Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

A company I once worked for actually had an IT management reporting process called TPS reports. Completely non-ironically. I did ask if they were giving homage to “Office Space” and they were like, “Wut?”

And, yes, the report was obnoxious and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Having open space office is like having Slack with only one main channel

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

Actually, the office. Because it's a space exclusively for working.

I did home office for quite a while and still do so from time to time but i get distracted and/or lazy too easily to really get something done at home.

In the office, I have to be focused and so I am for 8+ hrs.

Unpopular opinion: 9to5 is great.

Reasons why you like open-space office model rather than more privacy such as a cubicle?

Noise!!!
I guess that is bound to happen when working in an open space.
People at my team love playing music from the computer speakers and talk loud. I moved to another corner of the office where people are not playing music aloud and talking less passionately :)
I bought noise canceling headphone, but i figured i don't like to put them on for a long time.

Spend last two hours trying to get a language pack for Microsoft Office. Two fuckin' hours with just an error saying "Please check your internet connection and see if you have space on disk"

Yes motherfucker, I fuckin have internet connection and I have 1 fuckin terabyte free on my fucking disk.

The only fuckin solution on Office's forum is to uninstall and reinstall the whole office software. Just to add one fuckin language pack.

I'm going crazy... Everyday I hate Microsoft products more and more and fuckin more.

Interviewing for a job at a small start up on Monday . Any advice?
The app --
Currently only an iOS app. Android in the making. 2500 users. Company is moving to first office space January. Minneapolis MN based.
Me--
Never worked at a startup. JavaScript node express firebase angular postgresql mongdb and stack overflow....
Tips advice anything. Thanks dev ranters

1. Creativity - you can create anything from typing words and a little electricity - office programs, new medicines, predicting cancer from images, robots, planes, satellites, rockets that put people to the Moon or robots to Mars - all use machines programmed with code.

2. Challenge - some of the projects and algorithms are so complicated that full understanding of them is great challenge.

3. Freedom - you only need a laptop and internet and a bit of electricity and you can code from anywhere on Earth or if you’re Astronaut you can even code from space.

Last week I hired a friend of friend to work on my projects. Hes a young and friendly guy. However he never worked in actual office and it shows. During the meeting he brings his phone and in the middle of explaining he pulls out his phone to respond someone back. Basically lacks professionalism and has this young person cockiness where he thinks he is competent to handle everything while in reality last week he did 2-3 hours worth of work. I want to set up some boundaries but I dont want to seen as a harsh dictator. On the other hand Im paying him over the top even though he doesnt have skills, but the least I want to is a decent attitude and effort. How u would advice me to approach this and teach him to get his shit together? Im already becoming resentful and next week if he keeps treating his work like a school project I will let him go.

Im really trying to setup a nice environment for him to work at, I rented a nice office in a hub space and also bought entirely new laptop plus monitor setup for him to work. I even took him for drinks and lunches but for some reason I start to feel that hes taking that shit for granted and Im being too good.

Hes not proactive, it seems that he will do bare minimum that I give him.

Seen in twitter
"What if developers dont work in an #OpenSpace office? What if the n of bugs start shrinking & apps get better? NOP b/c ur boss likes parties"

Couldnt agree more

Bout to go office space up in here.

New office stories during the emotional turmoil...

Story 1: The creepy fuck

So being unaware of the fact that I was connected with this guy on LinkedIn already.

Ron walks upto my desk and greets me on my first day on floor. Weird, but whatever.

I politely interact, because gotta make friends and create my following to get shit done.

The next day, randomly comes asking for a laptop sticker and I am like WTF! He is like sticker was an excuse, I just wanted to say Hi!

👀

Day 3: same random creep shit. Talks about personal topics and invades personal space uninvited.

Day 4: Keeps starring at me while I ignore and judges me evidently with stupid suggestions on how to exist without being asked for.

Fuck this guy.

Story 2: The classic case of Dunning Kruger effect

So I get introduced to my tech team today and everyone start piling on me to guide them on decision making. The CTO creates a Slack thread with me and Co-founder asking me to get things moving on priority.

The co-founder shut him out right away. Fucking hilarious.

But, a retard starts schooling me on how to use Slack. Lmfao.

Me being polite, said I'll follow.. dude starts bragging on how he wrote company policy to get everyone on Slack yada yada..

To be honest, the Slack experience is beyond broken based on what these idiot has setup.

He literally opened my Slack and responded to the CTO thread.

That's where I got pissed. I upfront told him that hey! Calm your tiddies down. I know how to use Slack. I have used it since it was in the beta.

I have been in much much mucy bigger orgs and places more well structured than what you have here.

I told him on his face what the flaws where and how I felt a downgrade from where I am coming from.

The look on his face was priceless and he started sweating. Lol

Never again he'll school anyone.

I mean I understand if you are humble and genuinely guiding a new hire. But being cocky unnecessarily and shoving things down my throat without yourself knowing shit or know about the other person is purely asshole move.

Anyway, I am still upset about the scam. Fuck this world.

!tech (sorta)

I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.

Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.

The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.

i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.

how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?

(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)

I have an upcoming team meeting whereby we are going to ask the team on how they think we (as in the department) are doing? This can cover anything really from the way deliver code, interact or even just the wider context such as the office space we occupy.

I don’t want the session to be a free for all moan, so what techniques have other developers employed to elicit feedback?

In the past I’ve done a big piece of paper with sections:

What we do well
What we can improve
What we are poor at

We then asked people to write post it’s and attach them to the paper. These were gathered into broad themes and we then voted on as to which people felt most strongly about.

Just looking for suggestion of how I could make the session more successful. Thanks.

Working at home has made it to where a task that used to take me a couple hours takes a couple of days, should I get a co-work office space?

Fuck the bureacracy.

It's so difficult being an solo entrepreneur due to outdated bureacracy.

I just wanted to have a current/ business bank account to separate txns related to the business from my personal account and GST ID to officially register the business and also avoid headaches with taxes in the future.

However, If you want business bank account in the name of business, you have to have an official registration for the business and GST is the easiest and affordable way for sole proprietorship. Since my work is basically online and can be done remote, it doesn't make sense to waste money renting or buying an office space, getting electricity coonection or pay other related expenses which is necessary to have to show as proof of existence.

So I went ahead and purchased a virtual office plan and applied for GST with required documents. However, the bureacrat rejected the application. The informed about it to the biz where I purchased this virtual office and they had a meeting with the bureacrat and they were told virtual office address can't be allowed.

They told had no such issues in last few years and now on they are gonna have to stop providing virtual office to register GST. That was one of the main reason people went with virtual office.

Now I won't be able to open a business bank account.

I won't be able to signup for payment gateway networks. They ask for GST ID.

I won't be able to complete Paypal business registration.

I may have to expose my personal address on invoices or otherwise lie on it.

I will have to use my savings account for any expense related to it.

Also by end of this fiscal year, I probably gonna have to deal with tax issues.

!rant

Imagine your company would spend 100$ more per employee to rent a bigger, nicer office. Imagine how much additional space you'd have there. Maybe individual offices for everybody, or at least not more than two or three employees per office? Telephone booths for long calls, or a library to work in absolute silence, to do research, or to study something new there.

How would that affect your productivity and overall happiness? How much better you'd feel there? How much more relaxed would you be? How much less sick days would you have, and how much money would your company save resp. make more due to higher productivity?

Or would you rather have a salary raise of 100$?

I work in a small office (about five people) and probably once or twice a week, we will do a group order of delivery/take-out for lunch. I’m the most junior at the company, and often I end up asked to place the lunch order, so I put it on my personal card and have everyone pay me back. All of my other colleagues are quick to ask how much they owe and reimburse me, but on the occasions where my CEO joins the lunch order, he has never paid for his food or even offered to do so. I honestly don’t think it crosses his mind to wonder who paid for the meal, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s often because my other colleagues simply pay for him. (I have another sneaking suspicion it’s because he’s a white man who has had a great deal of wealth his entire life.)

After the meal there’s always a conversation, initiated by my colleagues, in which everyone ask me how much they owe. We are in an open office space with our CEO, but he seems to be entirely oblivious to these conversations. I would love to be able to simply Venmo charge him, but alas he has made it clear that he is “anti-Venmo” (what?).

I’m feeling very bitter that he is in a position where he doesn’t have to think about the cost of a $14 salad, and frustrated that my other (wealthier) colleagues are all willing to eat the cost to avoid asking him to pay. He knows how much I make, but how do I gracefully make it clear that he should be expected to reimburse me like everyone else (and ideally, should do so without being prompted)?

I recently moved to a house where my gf and me each have our separate office space. However, i’m sitting with my back to the door so whenever i’m in the zone with noise cancelling on and my gf walks in i don’t hear her. Resulting in me having a couple of almost heart attacks lately.

I have ideas about mirrors or sensors but since i’m working of three screens i din’t think it will do. The second option is ofcourse to move the desk to the other side of the room so that i’m facing the door more. But there are no power plugs.

My gf basically locks her door by sitting in front of it. Also she doesnt have a noise cancelling head set.

For me the best way to get unstuck is to go for a walk outside the office and think in peace. I work for a small company and we all share a working space so the distractions are endless... Either someone's talking loudly on the phone, or they're asking me questions (and the headphones, for some reason, do not work as a do not disturb sign for my coworkers) so at times it's impossible to concentrate...
When I'm working at home on my own projects, usually on the weekends, I go for a brief swim at the beach. It works wonders....

I'm anti-social, but sitting alone in my home office day after day is starting to get to me.

Thinking of renting a desk at a co-working space.

21 hours, i worked most with sane concentration.

I remember when i was fresh in programing, felt for the first time that i have challenge to solve and it was a chain reaction i kept doing tasks 1 by 1 and volla 21 hours are passed.

I came office at 10 am and left 7 am other day.

After Finnish my work i felt so relive like i have concurred the world lol.

It was a feeling like i have all the time in the world and this is what i am passionate about so all i have to dive in this field.

During this session when i gained the momentum of work i could see that the production become double triple as long as you get sync with your brain. Felt like you are in some other time space where you spend more time but in reality its less same as we dream.

i need some advice on how to deal with office culture. i am a covid graduate and this is my first wfo job. it is technically hybrid but quickly turning into full time office, and there are several examples of scenarios, where i am not only feeling just frustrated, but hurt and retaliation.

my whole team is in a different city except 4 of us : pm, sr ios dev, me(android dev) and a sr android dev. in our office, there are 50 more people , but i rarely need to contact anyone except my team from another city or these 3 folks. also, we 4 are new joinees like just joined in last 2 months.

so let's discuss the problems.

1. there have been very shitty decisions that are leading to loss of everyone just because a few are unlucky. here's an example. on may 1, international labor day, we 4 had a leave showing. but it was not showing for other people. maybe because ourbleave calender was aligned to other city or maybe coz we are new, idk. but someone told the boss of manager, and he mailed to us that there is no leave :/ wtf

2. another news: our is shifting from we work to another co-working space. it is being heard that office will be now 3/5 days instead of 2/5 . when we joined, it was showing 3/5 days in our hr portal, but hr assured that it is 2/5 days. and we would still go 2/5 days only. but like that holiday scenario, people are buzzing and talking, and they might end up getting our 2/5 culture tonget fucked too. this is very stupid, since i am wasting 4 hrs everyday travelling.

3. let's talk about the snakes in the 4 ppl group. the ios dev and manager are sweet looking girl snakes. ios girl is the meek snake and pm is the wicked snake. once i discussed with ios girl about how we need to rush every morning at 8 am to reach office as our standup is at 10. i told her that i would raise this matter in standup and when i did, she was just mum as fuck. didn't even voted a fucking yes when the boss said "ok let's have a vote on it" . i mean man what the fuck are your scared of? the boss won't kill you bitch for clocking 30 mins late

4. the other snake is pm. i am pretty sure she was one of the people for which that leave was not showing and she informed the boss's boss. day before that i told her jokingly that once i leave the office, I won't be opening my laptop and since today it was decided that tomorrow is the holiday, I am unreachable and therefore enjoying the vacay due to lack of latest info.
the bitch fucking whatsapped me to say that she got a call from boss that tomorrow's a working day. it would have been the perfect fucking leave.
I am pretty sure a lot of people are hating me for leaving so early too. i oeave at 5pm , as i have to be at gym by 7. also 1 minute past 5 and i would be travelling in a jam packed metro, so yeah, no thanks. but this bitch is definitely telling my boss about this.

5 finally the biggest snake is this *cough-cough* "sr" android guy. dude's code is so shittu and hacky, i can sense that he didn't tried to understand the class and just added a function at any place he felt fit. he also is a schemy bitch, as he has somehow convinced noss to let him wotk just 1/5 days in wfo.

but i didn't cared about him much until now. yesterday i sent a link regarding latest Android dev update in the official channel as a fun read, and his reply was "probably should have seen theeynote yesterday" bitch it wasn't even mentioned in that keynote! i just checked its summary after his message, but then it was too late to retaliate.

and now that i see, he always tries to be smug and cool. not that i care, roast me all you want in front of your crush, I won't mind, but if you're trying to show people that am not an able dev, then buckle up bitch, either you or me are counting last breaths.

POLL:
What kind of office do u prefer working at?
1. Big open space (with tables and no separations)
2. Open space with cubicles
3. Medium room (3-5 ppl)

And did ur preference change due to covid?

In a quiet, closed space unhindered by distractions.

For me (and I'd imagine, many others here), constant conversations in the background, people walking by, etc absolutely kill my focus and keep me from getting work done. Working from home helps a bit, but my neighbors provide plenty of their own distractions.

Honestly, I'll take a broom closet with a laptop, headphones and an Ethernet jack over any other open office design.

class CircularBuffer
{
public:
CircularBuffer();

void insert(int circularArgument);
};

Déjà vu? Have we discussed this before? I think the old horse we beat is still laying on the floor.

I really really wanted this to be funnier that it is. It is not. This feels like the moment in Office Space when they tell the old guy that his invention is the worst idea anyone has ever had.

I am super frustrated and don't have the energy to translate into a general language so here goeas some hinglish venting:

bc bosses ne leni deni kr rkhi hai... itna badhiya relaxed hoke chutti se wapis aaya tha, 2 din me mood ka bhosada kr diya apni harkato se.
yes, bosses , saala systummm chal rha h boss pe boss pe boss ka.
sardi me saare velle huye pade hai to harr aadhe ghnte me meeting le rhe h.

almost saari team ne aukaat dikhai hui hai , koi 5 din ki chutti pe to koi 7 din ki chutti pe, to jo mil rha h bs usi ko pele jaa rhe hai ye ppt ke chode.

mereko ek feature banane ko diya hua h... saala har cheez pehle idhr udhr delegate krke 15 din ke kaam ko 45 din ka bana diya, ab release deadline pass hai to meeting pe meeting rakh rhe h . bhosadiwaalo , meeting rakhne se tumhare baap ka code tumhari maa likhegi?

upr se thand bc.... itti thand me kon tumhare tatte chaatne office jaa rha h? jo jaa rha h usi ko bulao mereko ghr pe rajai me kaam krne do. saala gaand sookh ke aadu ho gyi h thand se, nd inhe fir bhi metro se 2 ghnte lgane ke baad banda office me chahiye . team me bs 7 lund h(technically 5 lund and 2 !lund) nd unke se 5 bahane maar ke ghr pe baithe huye h... ek langoorni manager aa jati h apne boss ke boss ka hilane... nd expect krti hai mai bhi aake saathme hilau. mereko nahi hilana yaar :'(

4 gnte to travel me waste krwa do, parking space maango to bolenge ki tumhara band level kam h, office me inka wifi vpn ke saath apni maa chudata h 2kbps ki speed se . emulator gaand marvate hai, nd fir bhi inhe banda chahiye office me nd feature ready chahiye 2 din me.

agar khud gaand me ungal nahi dete , to inki policies gaand me ungli krti h... saala 9 bje app le saare dev server band... oh maiiyavo din me 5 ghnte meeting rkhne ke baad tumhe lgta h ki koi kaam hua hoga.. nd bande ko khane hugne mootne me bhi 1-2 ghnte chale jaate h ghr pe... ek to tumhara time waste ko compensate krna chah rha hu apni marzi se raat me kaam krke, but tumhari gaand me usse bhi keede hai... to rote raho bc. meri jhaat tumhe degi festure banake Christmas se pehle.. bhupp

saala kachha utaar ke khol ke baith jaata hu, aake saare bosses ekek krke meri maar lo

Not much riskiest though,
So on my office laptop I've duel boot Fedora as primary OS and windows another.

So for some reasons I needed extra space on windows so I had to un-allocate some space from /home as it had assigned too much disk(more than 100GB I think)

So I unmounted /home moved all the /home/myuser to /opt using sudo then did sudo rm -rf to /home/myuser and un-allocated some space

after I restarted laptop I get to know that I fucked up little xD
Took me while to fix that shit, I literally created one more user and fixed it as at the time of booting it was trying to get few configs from /home/myuser and even had permission issues.